Most organizations are born because someone sees a problem worth solving. The original idea attracts customers, produces revenue, and proves that a market exists. If an idea is good enough to grow, it is often good enough to thrive. Yet growth introduces a new variable: people. The founder can no longer carry every promise, make every decision, or protect every standard. The business must now reproduce its purpose through others. That is where success becomes fragile. Organizations usually do not fail because every strategic idea was wrong. More often, they struggle because the wrong people are placed in work they do not understand, do not want, or cannot sustain. A strong plan in the hands of a mismatched team becomes an expensive disappointment. A merely good plan in the hands of aligned people can become extraordinary. This book names a common cause of that mismatch: chasing resumes. Chasing resumes means hiring a collection of bullet points instead of discovering the person behind them. It is the practice of finding fragments of what a role requires—years of experience, a degree, a familiar employer, a software credential—and assuming those fragments add up to fit. Sometimes they do. Too often they do not. The alternative is not to ignore competence. Skill matters. Experience matters. Evidence matters. But none of them works alone. Sustainable performance grows where ability, desire, values, environment, and mission meet. The central argument of Chasing Resumes is simple: organizations win when they stop treating people as inventories of past tasks and start identifying the human beings most capable of carrying the mission forward.
