I was laid off once in 2018!

A few years ago, I landed a new job at a FinTech company, working on Amazon’s payment platform. One month in, I found out the company was relocating all its product and tech teams to India and Mexico to cut costs. They were shutting down the San Francisco office. And my last day would be in four months.

I didn’t know how to feel. On one hand, I’d quickly realized I hated working in Fintech due to many restrictions and too much red tape. On the other hand, job hunting is brutal, and I wasn’t looking forward to jumping back into that world that soon.

That’s when someone gave me the “insider tip” everyone seemed to know:

“Don’t bother applying unless you use the exact keywords from the job description in your resume. Otherwise, their AI system will filter you out before a human even sees it.”

The CV isn’t about you, but it’s about machine reading you.

It sounded ridiculous, but that was the process. Companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon were getting over 10,000 applications a day. No way a recruiter could read them all. The algorithm was the gatekeeper. And if you didn’t speak its language, you didn’t exist.

Today, AI isn’t just in the hands of recruiters, but it’s in everyone’s hands. Job seekers are using AI to tailor resumes in minutes. Some even hide extra keywords in white text so humans can’t see them, but the software can.

Now it’s not just unfair to candidates, but it’s a mess for everyone. Recruiters are frustrated. Candidates still don’t know if they’re being evaluated fairly. And somewhere in the middle, the best person for the job often gets lost.

Which makes me think: maybe the problem isn’t using AI at all. Maybe it’s the CV.

The CV is a technology from the industrial age trying to survive in the age of AI.

The CV was built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Back when people stayed in the same company for years, even decades, and your title was enough to tell what you could do.

But work hasn’t stood still. Over time, machines took over most of the heavy lifting. Later, parts of white-collar jobs got outsourced or broken into smaller gigs. And now AI is doing things we used to think only humans could do, such as drafting contracts, writing code, or creating designs.

Work is becoming more fluid, more project-based. In a few years, we might not even talk about “jobs” at all. And if that’s where we’re headed, then a keyword-stuffed PDF isn’t going to cut it anymore.

In the future, the unit of work won’t be the “job” but it will be the “skill.”

That’s why we need something better, something like a Skills Passport. A living, verified record of what we can actually do. It updates whenever we finish a project or learn something new. It travels with us. And it’s a lot harder to fake than a bullet point on a CV.

No keyword games. No invisible text hacks. Just real proof that connects the right people to the right project.

The CV belongs to the career ladder, the old idea of climbing step-by-step within a single company. The Skills Passport is for the career cloud, where work floats between projects, companies, and industries, and our skills are our ticket in.

That day can’t come soon enough.

If you’re navigating this shift in your organization or just curious about what’s next, I’d love to connect. I’m always interested in exchanging ideas, learning from others, and helping leaders think through the road ahead.

🤝 And if you find this article helpful, feel free to share it with your network.