EP #089: Resumes Are Dying and Your LinkedIn Presence Is Replacing Them

Business Insider published a piece recently about hiring managers abandoning resumes. AI-generated applications have flooded the market so thoroughly that recruiters can no longer tell which candidates are real. One recruiting CEO compared AI-edited resumes to a restaurant where the menu looked beautiful but nobody was actually cooking the food.

Companies are responding to this flood by changing how they evaluate people entirely. Some are extending paid work trials for up to a month, and others have dropped resume requirements from job postings altogether. 

That move toward trials and skills demonstrations is showing up in the data, too. A new NACE survey found that 70% of employers now use skills-based hiring, prioritizing demonstrated abilities over credentials and experience listed on paper.

And recruiters are increasingly sourcing candidates by searching LinkedIn profiles, reviewing their content, and evaluating their online presence directly.

After two years of watching this trend accelerate across every industry we work in, I can say confidently that the resume is being replaced by reputation.

And reputation lives on LinkedIn.

This Trend Extends Far Beyond Hiring

The BI article focuses on job seekers, but the same dynamic applies to every executive reading this. Your prospects, your investors, your board members, and your potential partners are all doing the same thing hiring managers are doing. They're searching your name, scrolling your LinkedIn, and forming opinions before they ever get on a call with you.

A CEO with 15 years of industry expertise and a dormant LinkedIn profile is the professional equivalent of a brilliant candidate whose resume gets lost in an ATS. The expertise is real, but nobody can verify it because there's no public evidence.

I work with investor-backed CEOs, and this happens in their world constantly. An acquirer researches a CEO before a meeting, a potential VP of Engineering Googles the founder before accepting an interview, and a PE operating partner checks whether the CEO they're about to back has any public presence at all.

Every one of those people is evaluating the public evidence of how a CEO thinks and communicates, the same way hiring managers now evaluate candidates through LinkedIn instead of resumes.

Your Audience Is Already Doing This to You

One career coach quoted in the article calls the move "quiet hiring," where companies skip job postings and instead find talent through LinkedIn outreach and social presence. She argues that posting about your industry and your skill sets on LinkedIn feeds the database so recruiters can find you.

The same principle applies at the executive level, just with higher stakes. Your customers are quietly evaluating whether you're the right partner while your investors assess whether you can represent the company publicly and your recruits decide whether your leadership is worth joining.

Every one of those evaluations now happens on LinkedIn before it happens in a meeting room. And if your profile is empty, the evaluation ends before it starts.

The AI Slop Problem Works in Your Favor

The article highlights a genuine problem with modern hiring. AI has made every resume sound identical, which has made resumes useless as a differentiator. The same thing has happened on LinkedIn. Scroll through your feed and count how many posts sound like they were written by the same algorithm, because most of them were.

That saturation actually creates an advantage for executives who show up with original content. When every other post in someone's feed reads like a ChatGPT template, a post grounded in genuine experience and specific expertise stands out immediately. The bar for differentiation has never been lower because the volume of generic content has never been higher.

The platforms themselves are catching on and one of the data points from the article really stuck with me. LinkedIn is now partnering with AI tools to verify skills listed on profiles by assessing how people actually use them. The platform is moving toward evidence-based evaluation of demonstrated capability, which means static profiles with a list of job titles will carry even less weight going forward.

Your LinkedIn Is Your New Resume

If hiring managers have stopped reading resumes because AI made them all look the same, ask yourself this. When was the last time you looked at a prospect's LinkedIn and actually learned something about how they think?

If the answer is "rarely," your customers, investors, and recruits are having the same experience when they look at your profile. And every week you leave that question unanswered is a week where someone else's content fills the space your expertise should occupy.

The resume is dead because it became a document anyone could fake. Your LinkedIn presence is harder to fabricate because genuine expertise shared consistently, over months and years, is something AI still cannot replicate.

That advantage only exists for executives willing to use it.

— Justin

Justin M. Nassiri | Founder & CEO
M: 650.353.1138 | E: [email protected]
250 Fillmore St Suite 150, Denver, CO 80206
www.ExecutivePresence.io

Executive Presence specializes in helping top-tier executives boost their visibility, activate their network, and position themselves as thought leaders via our premium, fully-managed LinkedIn service.

Our unique process involves ex-McKinsey, BCG, and Bain consultants conducting monthly hour-long interviews with our clients, and turning them into impactful daily LinkedIn posts to establish their unique voice and authority. On average, our clients see a 500% bump in engagement in their first 30 days with us. Data is continuously analyzed to improve engagement and identify impactful messaging that you can use for conferences, podcasts, and internal communications.