Not just outcomes

I’ve counseled several people lately on the need to emphasize outcomes over activities or skills in their resumes or portfolios. It’s good advice, and I’m hardly the only one to give it, nor do I have any plans to stop giving it. As someone who has more often than not played the role of hiring manager, it can be very useful to know, say, that someone not only led a product team but led them through a launch with double digit returns. That said, I’m also keenly aware of the limitations of this tactic: for starters, it privileges quantifiable outcomes, when qualitative ones are often even more impactful. And it advantages people who are comfortable taking broad credit for a team’s work, and disadvantages those who are not—categories that generally break down along lines of privilege. Most troublingly, it drives towards a narrative where outcomes are highly visible, but costs and consequences are not. A metric about improved conversion or increased revenue doesn’t reveal anything about the three team members who quit after being bullied, or the person who showed up to work with a fever, or the fact that the one parent on the team was sidelined. If we’re really trying to build humane teams (and I know a lot of people really are trying their absolute damndest to do that), we’ve got to look not only at outcomes but the conditions that created them.