Why people shouldn't be reduced to keywords.

A resume is basically compression.

You take several years of someone's work, education, projects and experience and attempt to squeeze everything into one or two pages.

That compression is necessary.

It is also where most of the context disappears.

Imagine someone spends six months building a product.

They research the problem.

Talk to users.

Design the interface.

Build the backend.

Deploy it.

Fix production issues.

Make mistakes.

Change direction.

Eventually the product works.

How does that experience appear on a resume?

Usually as one bullet point.

"Built an AI-powered platform using Next.js and TypeScript."

Technically accurate.

Practically incomplete.

The resume contains the output.

It does not contain the context.

This is one of the reasons keyword-based systems are so limiting.

They operate on the compressed format and pretend the compression didn't happen.

If a job description says "product analytics," they search for "product analytics."

But perhaps someone has spent two years analyzing user behavior, building dashboards and deciding which product features to prioritize without ever using that exact phrase.

The capability exists.

The keyword doesn't.

Context is what connects the two.

This becomes even more obvious when looking at projects.

Two people can both say they know Python.

One has watched tutorials for six months.

The other has built a data pipeline, deployed a service and maintained it for a year.

The keyword is identical.

The underlying capability isn't.

This is why I think resumes should be treated as an entry point, not a final representation of a person.

The resume tells you where to look.

The actual evidence tells you what you found.

That evidence can come from projects, repositories, writing, previous work, products, case studies or any other artifact that demonstrates capability.

The interesting thing about AI is that it can help interpret these different forms of evidence.

It can connect a project description with the technologies used in the repository.

It can understand that "built an automated sales dashboard" might demonstrate analytics, business understanding and reporting ability even if the resume never contains the exact phrase "business intelligence."

That doesn't mean AI should decide who gets hired.

It means AI can help preserve context that gets destroyed by the traditional hiring pipeline.

People are more complicated than the formats we use to describe them.

The mistake is not using structured data.

The mistake is assuming that the structure contains everything important.