In 1787, Grigory Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Russian Empress Catherine the Great and her foreign guests as she toured the lands he governed. The structures would be disassembled after she passed and reassembled farther along her route to be seen again.

A Potemkin village, the term has stuck for two centuries, is anything built to make a situation appear better than it actually is. A facade designed to be seen from a distance, by someone moving past at speed, who has no reason to stop and look behind it.

The hiring process runs on the same logic.

The resume is polished, sequential, and designed to create an impression in the thirty seconds a screener spends moving past it. The interview is the staged village, a performance on both sides, and each party showing the other what they expect to see.

Neither shows what’s actually behind it.

The system wasn’t designed to see behind it. It was designed to move efficiently past a lot of candidates and make a defensible decision.

Potemkin would recognize it immediately.