The Resume Is the New Spreadsheet
You know that moment when you realize you’ve been solving the wrong problem?
For me, it was spreadsheets. I spent years watching early-stage founders, and a number of finance people — all smart, capable people — try to manage their financial future in a tool built for static data entry. They’d build a beautiful cash flow model on a Sunday night, and by Wednesday it was already subtly lying to them. Not because the math was wrong, but because the world had moved and the spreadsheet hadn’t.
That’s why we built MyRunwayHealth. Not because spreadsheets are bad — they’re incredible, actually — but because using one to manage a living, breathing cash position is like using a paper map to navigate through a construction zone during rush hour traffic. The tool wasn’t built for the job.
I’ve been thinking about this idea lately — the gap between “the tool everyone uses” and “the tool that actually works” — because I recently met someone who’s fighting the exact same battle in a completely different arena.
Meet Neima
“After a decade in corporate finance, I got very good at quantifying/predicting the downstream financial results of decisions. Simultaneously, I was so sick of applying for jobs and having my resume shredded by the screener, I felt like there had to be a better way—so I built it.”
Neima Beizai is the founder of Your Opportunity Co., and he has a theory about resumes that I think anyone who’s ever hired someone — or been hired — will immediately recognize.
Here it is: resumes have become the spreadsheets of hiring.
Think about it. Resumes were designed decades ago to give employers a quick snapshot of a candidate. Name, experience, education, skills. It worked fine when hiring was local, applicant pools were manageable, and people stayed in the same career track for twenty years.
That world is gone. And the resume didn’t evolve with it.
The Arms Race Nobody’s Winning
What’s happening right now in hiring is almost comically dysfunctional. Candidates are using AI to write resumes optimized for keyword filters. Companies are using AI to screen those AI-written resumes. It’s an optimization loop with no human in it — two algorithms trying to out-game each other while the actual person behind the application becomes increasingly invisible.
Jamie Ceglarz, who runs Guild Talent, the recruiting arm of the Operators Guild, posted recently about a Head of Finance search that got 1,000 applicants on the first day — they had to take the posting down. His take: technology → more volume → more noise → more need for signal. That’s not a recruiter complaining about competition. That’s someone watching the system buckle under its own weight.
“AI-on-AI violence is absurd to the highest degree. I’ve had so many conversations with talent teams where someone got to interview who was clearly using AI during the interview, or even worse, they were hired only for the organization to discover they couldn’t deliver. All the while, AI interview tools are being used to police applicants and try to catch them to filter them out, resulting in increased frustration and drop off, meaning there is clearly talent and money being left on the table. No one is winning, everyone in suffering.”
And the old problems haven’t gone away — they’ve gotten worse. Embellished credentials. Keyword stuffing. The quiet reality that some of the best people for a role are terrible at writing about themselves on paper. The resume was already a lousy way to capture what makes someone good at a job. Now it’s a lousy summary written by a chatbot, filtered by another chatbot, and reviewed by a hiring manager who has 90 seconds and a headache.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same pattern we see in finance every day — a legacy tool being pushed way past its design limits, with everyone just kind of accepting that “this is how it works” because they’ve never seen an alternative.
What If You Changed the Dimension?
Here’s where Neima’s approach gets interesting, and where I think it connects to something bigger.
Instead of trying to build a better resume filter, Your Opportunity Co. changed the evaluation dimension entirely. They said: what if, instead of reading about what someone claims they can do, you actually watched them demonstrate it?
YOC empowers you to build customizable, role-specific Smart Assessments. When a candidate applies, they get an optional link to complete an assessment tailored to that specific role. Not a generic personality quiz — a real evaluation of the thinking, problem-solving, and skills the job actually requires.
When they complete it, the hiring manager doesn’t get a stack of resumes to sift through. They get a shortlist of qualified candidates, each with a detailed profile: strengths, areas for development, onboarding suggestions, interview focus areas, and the reasoning behind every recommendation.
“In practice, we’re seeing teams save time and improve pipeline quality through reducing decision fatigue from having a clear read on candidates upfront. We have also seen expansion in the candidate pool while simultaneously filtering it down. One story really stands out—a team was hiring for a role that required a high degree of empathy. An individual was highly recommended by our system however their resume didn’t tell the story they would be able to do the role, which means traditionally they’d be filtered out. When the recruiter looked at the Smart Assessment, they instantly knew the candidate was a fit and called them in for an interview.”
The part I love most is that the assessment is optional. That’s not a bug — it’s a feature. A candidate choosing to opt in is itself a signal. It says: I’m willing to show you what I can do, not just tell you about it. That self-selection alone changes the quality of the pool.
The Pattern
I keep coming back to this parallel because I think it reveals something worth naming.
In finance, we had a tool (the spreadsheet) that was “good enough” for decades, until the speed and complexity of modern business broke it. The answer wasn’t a better spreadsheet — it was a fundamentally different approach to keeping business owners connected to their financial reality.
In hiring, they have a tool (the resume) that was “good enough” for decades, until AI and the modern job market broke it. The answer isn’t a better resume filter — it’s a fundamentally different approach to understanding whether a candidate can actually do the job.
Both problems share the same root: we got so used to the legacy tool that we forgot to ask whether it was still the right one.
“During my corporate finance career, I rose to the rank of Head of FP&A and saw up close how much a static tool like a spreadsheet could create disasters I didn’t even expect. When a tool is designed to be heavily reliant on user input, it also requires the user to have the informational awareness to keep it up to date. Rob said earlier that you make a gorgeous spreadsheet Sunday night and by Wednesday it’s all wrong— I felt that at my core, the literal story of my past life. Legacy tools, while useful, were made for a world that no longer exists yet are expected to still be used for things they are not designed for. Informational awareness can now happen automatically and constantly, which is where MyRunwayhealth comes in. I love that they’re fighting the good fight to make forecasting more dynamic and informationally aware. This is game changing since I can check assumptions rather than chase them down, which is its own kind of special torment. It allows me to stay focused on the validation and decision-making element of the forecast, rather than the maintenance of it.”
What This Means for You
If you’re running a small business or a startup, you’re probably dealing with both of these problems right now. You’re managing your cash flow in a tool that can’t keep up. And the next time you need to hire someone, you’re going to drown in AI-generated resumes that all sound the same.
The good news is you don’t have to accept either one as inevitable.
For the finance side, that’s what we’re building at MyRunwayHealth — an always-current view of your cash position, runway, and financial health that doesn’t depend on you manually updating a spreadsheet every week.
For the hiring side, go talk to Neima. Seriously. What Your Opportunity Co. is building is the kind of thing that makes you wonder why everyone isn’t doing it this way already.
“I care deeply about increasing access to opportunity. By replacing the resume screen, we level the playing field, humanize hiring all while making opportunity more accessible.”
The best tools don’t ask you to work harder. They change the game so the hard work actually matters.
Have you dealt with either of these problems — the stale spreadsheet or the resume black hole? I’d love to hear which one keeps you up at night.
— Rob
Rob Owen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alidade Systems, the company behind MyRunwayHealth — the AI-native financial intelligence platform for small businesses, startups, and non-profits. He writes the Manual Mode newsletter every week.
Neima Beizai is the Founder and CEO of Your Opportunity Co. — a hiring intelligence platform that replaces the resume screen to help organizations connect with qualified candidates through customizable, role-specific Smart Assessments.