Job hunting is a lot like hunting for a race bib

A UTMB bib and a job interview have more in common than you'd think.

Just a few years ago, all it took to line up at a legendary race was performance. You ran qualifiers, posted a time, and the starting line opened up to you. Simple, almost brutal: performance decided everything.

Today, that's no longer true. To have a shot at a bib for the most coveted races, you need to accumulate points over several seasons, enter a lottery, build a coherent racing history, and sometimes even show evidence of volunteer work or community involvement. Performance alone isn't enough anymore. You need a profile.

Selection isn't just about sport anymore — it's become marketing

That's exactly what happened with job hunting, and no one seems particularly surprised by it. For a long time, we believed a good resume and solid skills were enough to open a door. That's no longer the case.

Today, a candidate has to:

• stand out amid a volume of applications that no one — human or software — can really absorb anymore;
• meet invisible criteria that are never written into the job posting;
• build a coherent history, a trajectory that "tells" something;
• and above all, know how to tell their own story — the famous personal storytelling.

The algorithm often gets blamed — the infamous ATS supposedly "rejecting" resumes before a human ever sees them. A 2026 study of recruiters seriously challenges that assumption: 92% of them say their tool doesn't automatically reject an application based on its formatting or content (Enhancv, 2026). The real bottleneck is volume: some job postings attract between 400 and more than 2,000 applications within days. It's not a machine coldly eliminating you. It's an overwhelmed human who has to decide fast, with the same reflexes as a race organizer facing far too many bib requests.

In both cases, pure merit is no longer enough. You have to be visible, coherent, and know how to present yourself as a story people want to follow, rather than a simple list of skills.

Performance used to open the door. Today, it's the story that opens it.

What this changes, in practice

I'm not saying this is unfair. I'm saying it's a fact, and it's better to understand it than to suffer through it. A race organizer builds a selection system to manage scarcity and tell a community story. A company does the same thing: it's no longer just looking for a skill, it's looking for a profile that fits a narrative, a culture, an image it wants to project.

And the time this takes is anything but trivial: in the first quarter of 2024, a jobseeker in France remained registered for an average of 323 days before finding a position (HelloWork, France Travail data). More than ten months during which the story you carry matters just as much as the skills you list.

That's exactly where I stand today: between two trails. Between a trade I've mastered, communications, and an industry that fascinates me, the outdoors. I don't have a bib to show. But I have a perspective, a way of reading what's really happening behind the miles, and that's exactly what I've come here to document.