The Sieve: I Judged People by Their Résumés Until My Own Daughter Became a Reject

Zhou Mingyuan was forty-two and in his seventh year as HR director. He had a set of criteria for screening people, and he believed they never failed him.

The fluorescent tube in the interview room was broken. The other one buzzed. Three résumés lay in front of him. To his left were two stacks: one “pass,” one “fail.” The pass stack was weighted down by a 985 master’s degree. On top of the fail stack was a vocational-college résumé with “e-commerce warehouse supervisor” in the work-experience column. He glanced at it and turned it over. He never looked closely at vocational-college résumés. It wasted time. He called it efficiency.

“Next,” he said without looking up.

The door opened. A young man in a plaid shirt sat down and handed over his résumé. Zhou Mingyuan’s eyes hit the line “XX Vocational and Technical College,” and his fingers were already preparing to push the paper to the right. But the young man spoke first: “Director Zhou, I know my education isn’t good. Give me three minutes. I’ll tell you one number.”

Zhou Mingyuan looked up. The young man was Li Chuang. He had worked in a warehouse before. He said that during Double Eleven last year, their warehouse was flooded with orders, the system crashed, and he had pulled together a temporary sorting table in Excel that held things together for six hours. After listening, Zhou Mingyuan put the résumé on the left stack. He needed someone who could handle a warehouse emergency. That was the only reason. Vocational college or not, the kid was made for grunt work.

Three months later, Li Chuang had pushed the warehouse’s mis-shipment rate from 0.3 percent down to 0.08 percent. Zhou Mingyuan mentioned it once at a meeting and did not praise him further. His criteria had not changed: Li Chuang was useful. He was not promotable. Promotable people looked like Zhang Jiashu.

Zhang Jiashu had come in through campus recruitment: a 985 bachelor’s, an overseas master’s, a résumé as polished as a model apartment. Zhou Mingyuan had interviewed him personally. They talked for forty minutes, from supply-chain models to industry trends. Zhang Jiashu answered smoothly and, on his way out, pushed his chair back into place. Zhou Mingyuan thought then: This is what talent looks like. He gave Zhang Jiashu a salary two grades above the standard for the position and promised the boss that this one could be a director in three years.

Zhang Jiashu was clever. His weekly reports were elegant, his PowerPoints clean, and in meetings he always caught the boss’s thread. Zhou Mingyuan became more and more convinced that his eye was accurate. He even gave an internal sharing session on his “method for judging people.” The core was one sentence: look at the degree, look at the school, look at the first degree. People nodded below. Someone recorded it.

The turn came on a very ordinary Tuesday. Finance forwarded an expense claim from Zhang Jiashu. The amount was a little over three thousand. The category said “client entertainment.” But the attached invoice was from an esports hotel. The young woman in finance was not sure whether to send it back and asked Zhou Mingyuan. His first reaction was that Zhang Jiashu must have filled it out wrong, so he called him in and asked. Zhang Jiashu glanced at it and said, “Oh, that day after dinner with the client they wanted to play games, so I booked a room, and the invoice was issued by the hotel. Director Zhou, should I change it to travel?”

Zhou Mingyuan paused. The answer came too smoothly, as if he had rehearsed it. He said nothing and sent Zhang Jiashu back. Then he pulled every expense claim Zhang Jiashu had submitted since joining and went through them one by one. By the seventh, he realized his back was sweating. On three invoices, the merchant names did not match the expense categories. The amounts were small, a few hundred to a thousand, mixed in with normal receipts so they were hard to spot. The method was practiced.

He did not explode immediately. He found an excuse and had someone verify the internship on Zhang Jiashu’s résumé. The feedback came back: the company’s HR said, “No such person.” Zhou Mingyuan sat at his desk and read the résumé again. In the photo, Zhang Jiashu wore a suit and smiled appropriately. He remembered that after the interview he had written in his notes: “Articulate, logical, key candidate for development.” He deleted the note.

He did not fire Zhang Jiashu. He called him in for a talk, closed the door, and they spoke for forty minutes. Zhang Jiashu admitted the internship had been padded and said the expense issue was “a temporary lapse.” Zhou Mingyuan asked why. Zhang Jiashu said, “Director Zhou, all my classmates are in big tech. My salary looks high, but after tax there isn’t much left. I just wanted the numbers to look better.” Zhou Mingyuan listened and said, “Don’t let it happen again,” then let him go. He did not know why he did not fire him. Partly it was trouble; partly it was pride.

That night he went home. His daughter, Zhou Xiaoyu, was eating instant noodles in the living room. The results of her recent high-school mock exam had just come out. She was forty points below the undergraduate line. Zhou Mingyuan sat down. He had meant to say, “It’s all right, there’s still time,” but what came out was: “What exactly is going on with your math?” Zhou Xiaoyu put down her chopsticks and said, “Dad, do you think I’m going to be one of those résumés in the ‘fail’ stack?” Zhou Mingyuan did not answer. Zhou Xiaoyu stood up and went back to her room. She did not slam the door, but she closed it cleanly.

Zhou Mingyuan sat on the sofa. The smell of instant noodles had not dissipated. He remembered that his own college entrance exam had not gone well either. He had attended an ordinary undergraduate school and later done an in-service master’s. He had never felt his own education was shameful, but when he screened others, his hand never softened.

Li Chuang came to him half a month later. He said he wanted to transfer out of the warehouse and into supply-chain data analysis. Zhou Mingyuan’s first reaction was that his education was not enough, but he did not say it. He asked, “What can you do?” Li Chuang opened his phone and showed him an inventory-forecasting model he had built himself in Python. The interface was rough, but the logic was clear, and it used two years of real warehouse data. Li Chuang said, “I learned at night school. Eight months.” Zhou Mingyuan looked at the crooked line charts on the screen and suddenly remembered that the Excel sorting table Li Chuang had mentioned in the interview had been checked afterward. It was real, and it had been nearly twice as fast as the system’s own solution.

He approved Li Chuang for a three-month trial transfer. The boss asked why. He said, “This one has grit.” The boss did not ask again.

Zhang Jiashu later resigned and went to another company. When he left, he said, “Thank you for taking care of me, Director Zhou.” Zhou Mingyuan nodded and said little. He later heard that Zhang Jiashu was doing well at the new company: sweet-tongued, good at working people. Zhou Mingyuan made no comment.

At the year-end inventory, Li Chuang’s trial evaluation passed and he was made permanent. Zhou Mingyuan signed the approval and, while he was at it, changed the screening conditions in the recruitment system. The default checkmark for “full-time bachelor’s degree or above” was removed. A colleague next to him saw it and asked, “Director Zhou, aren’t you afraid the résumé volume will explode?” Zhou Mingyuan said, “We’ll see.”

He did not explain to anyone why. He also never gave the “method for judging people” talk again.

That night he went home. Zhou Xiaoyu was scrolling on her phone in the living room. She looked up at him and said, “Dad, I signed up for a vocational-college e-commerce program. They have a school-enterprise cooperation project. Sophomores can go to a company for practical training.” Zhou Mingyuan paused while taking off his shoes and said, “All right. You decide.” Zhou Xiaoyu said, “You’re not going to yell at me?” Zhou Mingyuan said, “Would yelling get you into an undergraduate program?” Zhou Xiaoyu laughed and went back to her phone.

Zhou Mingyuan went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. When the water boiled, he stood in front of the stove and watched the white steam come out of the spout. He thought of Li Chuang’s inventory model, Zhang Jiashu’s esports-hotel invoice, the line in his notes, “key candidate for development,” and his daughter’s words: “Do you think I’m going to be one of those résumés in the ‘fail’ stack?”

The kettle clicked off. He turned off the gas.

The next day at work, he received an email from Li Chuang. The subject was “Inventory Model 2.0.” The body was one line: “Director Zhou, I raised the accuracy by six points. Take a look when you have time.” The attachment was an Excel file. He opened it. On the first page was a small line of text: “This time I didn’t use Python. I wrote it in VBA, in case your computer can’t open it.”

Zhou Mingyuan saved the attachment to his desktop in a folder called “To Look At.” He also had a folder on his desktop called “Key.” It contained only one file: Zhang Jiashu’s handover form. He looked at it for two seconds and dragged “Key” into the recycle bin.

He did not empty the recycle bin. But he never opened it again.