How to Live a Résumé 101

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My Sustainable Encounter with Paras G Vats

by Albert Schiller

3 Lessons on hiring Authentic DEIB Representatives

Your DEI(B) hiring process is ineffective. You are reading the wrong résumé, asking the wrong questions, and measuring the wrong frameworks. You look for a candidate with five years of experience in one specific role, believing time equals expertise. This is the alien logic of the corporate world, a system with no metric for the most valuable qualification: surviving. Strategist Paras Vats offers a radical counter-proposal. During an interview for a DEI role, he was asked about his work experience. His answer reframed the Recruiter’s understanding of expertise. His 29 years of survival, navigating a hostile world as a trans man, resonated louder than any formal qualification or corporate tenure. Paras is the 29-Year Résumé. He is a new framework for evaluating human capital. Here are three lessons to help you learn how to read it.

Lesson 1: Metrics Are Misleading

The first lesson is to accept that your metrics are lying to you. A standard résumé measures time spent performing a function. It cannot measure the depth of understanding gained from a lifetime of lived reality. You can hire a professional who has studied a community for years, but their knowledge will remain secondhand, an abstraction learned from aggregate data and reports devoid of lived experience. Are you hiring a teacher of theory or a professional with a visceral understanding? Paras’s expertise in inclusion is not limited to theory. He has "lived that life". His knowledge is born in unapologetic survival. Your first step as a leader is to acknowledge the gap between professional proximity and personal experience. Your time in a role is a data point. A lifetime of navigating a broken system is a qualification without a pause button, vacation, or overtime payment.

Lesson 2: Making It

Lesson two is to learn how to read a person’s curriculum. A 29-Year Résumé does not list vast job titles. It lists battles fought and systems met. What is the coursework? For Paras, it included navigating a patriarchal society that wished he had never been born, "fighting for your basic rights as well", and facing down death threats from relatives who were supposed to love him. These are not unfortunate life events. Other people in similar situations, like Paras, don’t make it. His survival testifies to advanced resilience, strategic thinking, and self-advocacy certifications. Working with diversity, equity, and inclusion can sometimes mean stopping to look for qualifications on paper and starting to look for the qualifications that are part of a person's life. Ask yourself: What hostile systems has this person had to hack just to exist for 29 years? What expertise have they earned on battlefields we didn’t even notice? This redefinition of value challenges the foundation of measuring human capital. It posits that certifications and datapoints might not be enough to make it in the real world.

Lesson 3: Hiring the Solution

The final lesson is a call to action. A survivor’s expertise in creating safe and inclusive spaces is not learned in a 90-minute corporate seminar. It is an iterative process built day in and day out through survival. Paras did not need to know the theory of how to create a safe space. He had no alternative but to build one for himself when his own family did not provide one. When you hire someone with this experience level, you are not just filling an empty role. You are hiring a person, an expert in resilience, and the most authentic voice for the community you claim to serve. Ask yourself: Are you looking for someone who implements your incomplete policies or someone who understands what the solution feels like? It is time to surpass the alien logic of the black and white corporate world and recognize that a life spent living is a life spent advocating.

So what can we take from his approach?

Questions for Audience

1. If "surviving" is the most valuable qualification for human-centric leadership roles, how can organizations create a hiring process that ethically and effectively identifies this expertise without tokenizing or exploiting an individual's trauma?

2. In a corporate world that runs on quantifiable data, what is the first practical step a leader can take to begin integrating the unquantifiable value of the "29-Year Résumé" into their team-building strategy?