Being interesting is now a competitive advantage. That should worry us.

For decades, the standard two-page CV did one thing reasonably well: it flattened everyone into the same grey mould. It was boring, dry, and often inadequate. It reduced years of nuanced problem-solving to bullet points under company names.

The push toward richer, more expressive professional profiles was supposed to fix this. The idea was simple. Let people show who they are, how they think, and what they care about. Move beyond static credentials.

That shift solved one problem, but created a harsher one. When hiring moves from evaluating credentials to evaluating personality, being interesting becomes a job requirement. That should make anyone in recruitment or talent development deeply uncomfortable.

The performance tax on quiet competence

When a hiring process values rich self-expression, it introduces an unspoken filter: candidates must now be skilled communicators, amateur essayists, and confident public figures just to get an interview.

Consider two senior software engineers.

The first writes clean, maintainable code for eight hours a day. At five in the evening, they close their laptop to cook dinner, care for an elderly parent, or read a book in quiet isolation. They have no personal website. They do not write threads on social platforms. Their public profile contains three dates, a job title, and a list of programming languages.

The second writes adequate code, but spends their evenings writing essays about engineering culture, building public side projects, and recording short videos about architecture decisions.

On paper, both have five years of experience. In a system that rewards rich, engaging personal profiles, the second candidate wins every time. They appear curious, passionate, and visible. The first candidate simply looks absent.

Yet the ability to produce interesting collateral around your work is not the same as doing the work itself. We are rapidly conflating narrative talent with technical capability.

Who actually has time to be fascinating?

Interestingness is not evenly distributed, but time is even less so. The demand for a dynamic professional presence assumes a specific lifestyle:

• Free evenings and weekends with no caretaking duties.
• The psychological safety to be publicly visible without fear of harassment.
• Cultural comfort with self-promotion and assertive speech.
• English fluency tailored to Western corporate sensibilities.

A single parent working forty hours a week does not have the bandwidth to build an open-source tool on a Sunday afternoon. A candidate from a culture that values modesty over self-aggrandisement will struggle with prompts to tell their "personal journey".

By treating personality and extracurricular output as signals of merit, we do not democratise hiring. We create a tax on privacy and domestic responsibility.

Charisma as an unregulated hiring metric

Psychologists have understood for decades that interviewers are terrible at separating charisma from competence. When an interviewer says a candidate has "great energy" or "a fascinating background", they are usually describing someone who mirrors their own cultural references and communication style.

Rich profiles give bias more surface area to grip.

A plain CV is cold, but its flatness offers some protection. It forces a reviewer to look at tenure, responsibilities, and outcomes. The moment you introduce long-form personal statements, aesthetic portfolios, and lifestyle cues, you invite subjective judgment.

Is the candidate actually better at product management, or do they simply write with a dry, self-deprecating wit that appeals to the hiring manager? If we are honest, most hiring teams cannot reliably tell the difference under time pressure.

What fair profile depth would look like

If we accept that the two-page PDF is obsolete, but agree that turning candidates into content creators is toxic, where does that leave us?

A fairer model of professional presentation requires strict boundaries. If platforms and employers want depth, it must be depth of evidence, not depth of personality.

First, depth must be modular. A candidate should be able to share a technical case study or an operational breakdown without having to share their life philosophy or a headshot. The work must be separable from the persona.

Second, hiring teams must evaluate structured outputs rather than unstructured charm. If you ask for a portfolio, define what you are measuring: decision-making rationale, constraint handling, or execution speed. Do not evaluate aesthetic taste unless the role is for a designer.

Third, privacy must be a valid professional choice. A candidate who presents only verified past impact and references should never be penalised for omitting personal commentary.

At ByondCV, we built a platform designed around modular depth precisely because the traditional CV fails to convey real competence. But building tools that allow candidates to show more context carries a moral responsibility: context must illuminate craft, not demand performance.

Competence over entertainment

The workplace does not need everyone to be an engaging storyteller, an author, or an online presence. It needs people who do their jobs carefully, treat their colleagues with respect, and solve problems without making noise.

If the future of work belongs only to those who know how to market themselves as fascinating characters, we will build organisations full of articulate promoters while the people who actually maintain the infrastructure quietly walk away.

Being interesting is a fine quality in a dinner guest. In a job candidate, it should remain entirely optional.