Distinguish Between What People Show and Who They Are
No one is ever more perfect than when writing their resume.
More than once in my professional life I found myself involved in hiring someone who seemed like the Platonic Ideal of a candidate for the role. The right jobs at the right companies and a clean run of gigs with plausible explanations for each move. Even personally engaging with comfortable limits in our multiple interactions. Hired. Quite often in these situations, it did not take long to see that the person who had come in for interviews had very little to do with the person now on the team. Nothing on the resume was false, but the resume was not the person. It was the argument the person had learned to make about themselves, and I had evaluated the argument.
This happens to all of us, and we all do it, too.
People present their best selves when they’re being evaluated. The resume shows the promotions and leaves out the mistakes that produced the learning. The dating profile leads with the hobbies but doesn’t get into the shameful feelings from the Netflix binges (never mind the pint of Ben & Jerry’s). None of this is lying. It is selection, curation. We all learned early which parts of ourselves different situations could handle, and we got good at adjusting accordingly. The curation is fine, but we seldom remember it is being done all around us and by us, including the version of yourself you’ve been presenting to most of the people in your life for years.
We reward the curation when we hire the polished resume, when we respond to the optimized profile or post. The gap between who people show and who they are persists partly because it works, and it works partly because we keep paying for it.
The most reliable data about who someone actually is tends to arrive in exactly the moments people try to skip past: how they behave when something goes wrong, how they treat people who have nothing to offer them, what they’re like on a delayed flight, when the waitstaff is slow, or when they think nobody important is watching. These are not revelations but small signals, and accumulated they’re more accurate than any presentation.
There’s a temptation to conclude from all this that radical transparency is the answer. But that’s its own kind of performance, if not outright manipulation. Think of the person who announces their flaws before you can find them. The one who performs self-awareness as a preemptive strike, naming their weaknesses with such practiced precision that you end up reassuring them. Transparency deployed in that way is really just control with better optics. The confession becomes the armor.
What’s left, then, is a practice of staying curious about the gap between presentation and person, in both directions. Asking which parts of yourself have been off the resume, and whether that’s protecting something worth protecting or just protecting you from being known. The answer changes. Most people who do this work long enough find they’ve been carrying both, that some things are legitimately private, some things just hidden.
It is the actual relationship, be it the working partnership, the friendship, the romance, that is what gets built on the foundation of what shows up after the presentation ends. Whether that’s who you are, or who you’ve been performing for so long the difference has nearly closed, is a question worth exploring and revisiting from time to time.
