ACT II: THE MACHINE — How the system works (or doesn't)
If I understand correctly... all of humanity is still debating whether the egg or the chicken came first. In the world of causal analysis, that's often where things end up.
This post won't be the exception.
Through various circumstances, I've had the opportunity to participate in different selection processes—naturally as an applicant and also as part of the selection team.
The selection model of the vast majority of companies, if not all of them, begins with filtering CVs. This beautiful document is supposed to describe—following certain standards—acquired knowledge, skills, experience, among other characteristics of the person and their personality.
What I can't explain is who was responsible for turning this requirement into a kind of flagrant documented lie.
I don't know whether to judge people's eagerness to sell themselves or the selectors who have to "read" countless amounts of these documents and filter out those they believe are most suitable... which can be translated as those who called the most attention.
If someone is looking for a person capable of washing, it's undeniable that the person who documents with more emphasis their washing experiences, their training, and their skills in the quantum washing of inorganic matter (?) is going to call more attention or seem more suitable for washing—therefore it's inevitable to interview them.
Because of this, a kind of trap is created where the selector filters—almost consciously, the one who lies the most, the one who adds the most colour... leaving aside perhaps the one who limited themselves to simply describing their reality.
So...
- Who lies?
- Who forces the lying?
- Who interviews all 70 applicants?
- Are you obligated to do one thing or the other?
- Who tips the scales, and in which direction?
The Taleb Connection
The CV itself is the pure form of what Taleb calls the narrative fallacy:
"The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007), Ch. 6
The CV imposes a story shape on a career — linear progression, accumulated credentials, growing responsibility — that almost no real career follows. Real competence is built through messy, non-linear contact with work. The CV cannot represent that, so it doesn't try. It optimises for storyability, and the candidate who can write the cleanest story wins.
The honest applicant — the one who described their actual reality — was filtered out before the interview because their document didn't call attention. The system asks for a fiction; the candidates oblige; the recruiter selects from the fictions. Nobody in that chain is paid to prefer the messier true sequence over the clean arrow.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.