For decades in India's job market, the phrase "send me your resume" has been as ubiquitous as the classic Bollywood line "picture abhi baaki hai." It's the universal first step, whether you're seeking a referral or applying directly. But this scene, much like cinema itself, is undergoing a dramatic rewrite. The directors of the modern labour market are demanding a different script.
The Fraying Promise of a Single Page
The resume, or CV, has long been a compact, orderly document that promised employers a swift way to assess a candidate. That one or two-page summary was meant to explain who you are, your career journey, and why you deserve an opportunity. However, in a job landscape now defined by digital platforms, online portfolios, and permanent digital footprints, this promise is quietly unravelling.
The resume is far from extinct—it is still uploaded, parsed by systems, and filed away. Yet its supreme authority in hiring decisions is being challenged. Increasingly, the real evaluation happens on screens that display actual work, not just bullet-pointed claims about it. The critical question is no longer if the resume will vanish, but whether it has been demoted to a mere administrative checkbox, while the genuine assessment occurs off the page.
A Shift That Began Long Before We Noticed
This transformation started long before remote work became commonplace and personal branding turned essential. Early signals were visible over a decade ago. A national survey conducted in 2011 by Elance, then a major online employment platform, captured a significant generational shift. The study, which polled more than 350 freelancers born after 1981, found that over half of Millennials believed digital profiles were more effective than traditional resumes for securing work.
Almost all respondents primarily used online platforms to find jobs, with a notable share leveraging social media directly. What was revealing wasn't just the preference for digital tools, but the changing philosophy of work. For this generation, careers were increasingly built around projects, not just permanent positions. Freelancing and independent work were not fallback options but a core career strategy, with more than 80% of respondents seeing it as central to their professional vision. In this new reality, the static, backward-looking resume began to feel profoundly mismatched.
A Stubborn Format in a Dynamic World
While the nature of work and the workplace has evolved massively, the resume has stubbornly resisted change since the mid-20th century. It clings to the same old format: chronological job listings, responsibility bullet points, and keyword-stuffed sections. It's no surprise that comparing a parent's resume to one today shows minimal structural difference.
This persistence has created a systemic issue. As noted in a recent Forbes article, resumes often fail candidates not due to a lack of skill, but because the format rewards those adept at framing their experience in the "right" language. Automated Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) worsen this, filtering applications based on keywords rather than genuine competence. Consequently, the hiring process often confuses polished resume-writing with professional merit, allowing those who master the conventions to advance while others are silently filtered out.
When Proof Trumps Promise: The Rise of Public Evidence
Today, professionals are creating a wealth of evidence that a traditional resume cannot contain. Designers share portfolios that reveal their creative process, not just final products. Engineers contribute to public code repositories like GitHub, showcasing their problem-solving in real-time. Writers, researchers, and product thinkers build public archives through articles, talks, and online discussions. Even leadership, once considered intangible, now leaves a digital trail via podcasts, conference speeches, and long-form content.
The Elance survey foresaw this by framing digital profiles as living records. Work completed online was automatically documented, linked to tangible outcomes, and accompanied by client feedback. In effect, reputation became cumulative, searchable, and transparent. For employers, this offers something a resume never could: the ability to see work in its full context.
A Fairer System or Just New Biases?
Moving beyond the resume, however, does not automatically guarantee a fairer hiring ecosystem. Digital visibility is unevenly distributed. Not all roles produce public, shareable artefacts. Not all professionals have the encouragement, resources, or platform literacy to document their work openly. Factors like cultural background, internet access, and familiarity with digital tools now influence who gets seen and who remains invisible.
The Forbes analysis warns that newer evaluation methods—like video resumes or social media screening—may introduce fresh biases related to accent, presentation style, confidence, and even algorithmic reach, even as they address older limitations. In this sense, the resume hasn't vanished. Instead, it now operates within a parallel economy of signals—portfolios, endorsements, social profiles, and digital presence—that comes with its own hierarchies and filters.
Where the Traditional Resume Still Holds Ground
For freshers and early-career professionals without a substantial digital footprint, the resume remains a crucial entry point. In highly regulated sectors, government jobs, and compliance-driven industries, standardized documentation is unlikely to disappear soon due to established protocols.
Nevertheless, the balance of power has decisively shifted. Resumes increasingly function as administrative anchors—documents that get a candidate into the system. What happens next is increasingly determined by work samples, online reputation, professional referrals, and verifiable evidence that exists far beyond the confines of a PDF.
Beyond the Page: The New Professional Reality
The resume was designed for a world of stable, local, and largely opaque careers. That world is gone. Modern professional paths are fragmented, iterative, and increasingly public. Proof of work matters more than promised potential. Demonstrated contribution carries more weight than a neat chronology.
The resume may survive as a formality, but its claim to encapsulate a professional's worth is fading fast. In its place is something more chaotic yet more authentic: a visible trail of work, open for anyone to examine. This evolution poses a challenging final question for employers and institutions alike: If the evidence of a candidate's capability is already out in the open, why do we still pretend it can be neatly summarized on a single page?
