Signal and noise in hiring
Most of what a résumé tells you is noise. The task is to find the signal.
A résumé is a lossy compression of a career — a few lines standing in for years of decisions, most of the important detail thrown away. Reading one well means knowing what was discarded.
Pedigree is the loudest line on the page and often the least informative. A recognizable name tells you where someone was, not what they did there, not whether the result was theirs, and not whether it would repeat somewhere the tailwinds are gone.
The real signal is in the work: what a person actually built, decided, and owned — and what happened when it was hard. Finding it takes more than pattern-matching on keywords. It takes knowing the domain well enough to ask the one question that separates the author of a result from a passenger to it.
That, in the end, is the whole job. We are in the business of separating signal from noise — in markets by reputation, and in people by practice.