Resumes are built for scanning. Education, job titles, years of experience. That’s where most readers begin, and where most decisions get made. Research shows recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds scanning a resume before deciding whether to move forward. And if in those few seconds all they see are familiar pedigrees and linear experience arcs, many never make it to the good stuff. The stories of imagination, resilience, or purpose buried below. Potential and impact hurriedly tossed away. Lost forever.
It feels efficient. But it narrows the view. Starting at the top locks hiring into pedigree—schools, logos, linear career paths. What it misses are the signals that often matter more: curiosity, initiative, and purpose.
Those signals sit lower down. Hobbies, passions, volunteer work, side projects. The part that usually gets a quick glance, if at all.
Why Look From the Bottom Up
When you begin with the so-called “extra” section, you see the person before the credential. The analyst who runs a climate podcast. The manager who coaches a youth team. The engineer who built furniture for local schools.
Those details reveal initiative, curiosity, and mentoring instincts. Once you’ve noticed them, the rest of the resume reads differently. Titles and tenures become context rather than the whole story.
Patagonia leaned into this idea. Recruiters there were known to read resumes from the bottom up. Founder Yvon Chouinard wanted people who surfed, climbed, or cared deeply about the environment. Passion mattered more than polish. Skills could be taught.
That practice shaped more than hiring. It gave Patagonia a culture customers trusted, because employees weren’t just selling gear—they were living it.
Patagonia isn’t alone. Evidence supports the inversion. When orchestra auditions were held behind a screen, women advanced at much higher rates. Once pedigree cues disappeared, performance came through. Studies have also suggested that side projects and volunteer work predict employability more strongly than GPA. Those details usually sit at the bottom.
The Babbling Resumes
There’s another distortion: the babble effect. In groups, people who talk the most are often assumed to have the most expertise. Loud voices get mistaken for judgment.
Resumes work the same way. Some are polished to perfection—buzzwords stacked, accomplishments inflated, every line engineered to sound impressive. They read loud. But loud doesn’t mean capable.
Scratch the surface and you sometimes find little depth. Meanwhile, quieter resumes—without the gloss or the over-designed format—can hold the strongest signals of potential, hidden further down. A resume stuffed with claims of “transformational leadership” or “strategic synergy” without any proof is the written version of someone dominating a meeting without adding substance.
Implications for Leadership Identification
The same problem plays out inside organizations. Potential doesn’t always show up in the loudest or most visible people. It shows up in those who take on hard problems without being asked, who build influence sideways, who grow skills outside their role.
Yet talent reviews often default to experience, tenure, and visibility. That favors the known and the noisy. Imagine if succession planning began with anonymized profiles stripped of names and departments. The first question wouldn’t be “How long have they been here?” but “Where have they shown curiosity, resilience, or influence?”
Proximity bias makes the problem worse. People closest to executives—on high-profile projects or in the same office—get rated higher. Their profiles rise to the top of the pile. Meanwhile, remote workers, frontline managers, and overlooked functions remain invisible.
Reading resumes and talent profiles “bottom up” is one way to break that bias. Start where people reveal what they’ve chosen to do, not just what they’ve been assigned.
Where Potential Hides
For all the talk about what matters in a resume, the first hurdle is brutal: most never get to the next stage.
- A typical corporate job opening receives around 250 applications, with only 4–6 candidates advancing to interviews.
- Based on that volume, only about 2% of applicants reach the interview stage.
- Roughly 75% of resumes are filtered out by applicant tracking systems before any human review.
- More than half of candidates (54%) do not tailor their resumes to specific job descriptions.
- Candidates include only about 51% of the relevant keywords or skills listed in job descriptions.
- About 76% of resumes are dismissed for unprofessional details such as outdated or casual email addresses.
- Between 55% and 70% of Americans admit to lying on a resume at least once.
The numbers are unforgiving. To stand out, candidates need to tailor, keep resumes error-free, and use keywords that align with the role. And when everyone is chasing polish, authenticity becomes even more important.
Advice for Jobseekers
This shift isn’t only for recruiters. It’s also for those writing or rewriting their own resumes. Too many candidates bury the most relevant skills, strengths, and passions at the very end.
Here are a few ways to reframe:
- Elevate Skills. Place a skills section closer to the top, not after experience. The market is moving toward skills-based hiring, and what you can do matters more than the logos you’ve worked under.
- Make strengths clear. Don’t just list tasks. Give a sense of what you naturally do best—whether it’s solving problems, mentoring, or building systems. Help the reader see the kind of contributor or leader you are.
- Show the human. Volunteer work, projects, and interests are not filler. They’re proof of initiative and purpose. Treat them as part of your story.
- Be cautious with AI polish. Tools can spin impressive language, but recruiters notice when the substance is missing. A resume overloaded with lofty phrases but no evidence is a red flag. Use AI for structure if you want, but make sure the voice and the value are yours.
A resume is not just a chronology. It’s a narrative of contribution and potential.
Five Practical Shifts for Organizations
- Flip the order. Ask recruiters and talent committees to start at the bottom, then move up.
- Blind the pedigree. Strip schools, logos, and department names from first-pass reviews.
- Add real-work signals. Use short assignments, simulations, or project-based assessments to see collaboration and problem-solving in action.
- Score what matters. If curiosity or adaptability are part of your leadership model, build rubrics for them. Otherwise the default will always be years and titles.
- Audit outcomes. Dropping degree requirements isn’t enough. Track whether hires and promotions actually look different.
Resumes will always have a top and a bottom. The choice for leaders is whether to reward what’s easiest to scan or to search for what’s hardest to fake. One builds pedigree. The other builds potential.