Nicholas Biron

Talent acquisition often looks backward, though it doesn’t have to – and it shouldn’t.
Today, most employers evaluate job candidates through traditional means They review resumes to identify candidates whose experience matches the job description; then, they conduct interviews—often several of them led by different people—to determine whether a candidate will align with the team’s culture and approach. Sometimes, they’ll test the candidate to confirm their nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Finally, the hiring manager reviews all the notes, references, and transcripts to determine who will best fill the open role.

In these scenarios, predicting a candidate’s future performance is, to a large degree, speculative since the employer can only use the candidate’s history and reputation to forecast their potential value. At best, they make an educated guess.

In essence, resumes distill a moment in time. They document a candidate’s career path and highlight their most notable achievements. They don’t, however, provide a sense of the whole person, which means they offer few clues about how the candidate approaches their work, builds relationships, or fits into the workplace culture. Because resumes are evaluated primarily by people or people-designed technology, they introduce a natural point of bias in the talent acquisition process.

Finally, assessing resumes at scale can be challenging, especially when time is short.
One financial services company wanted to understand the potential of its college hires. As one of the largest banks in North America, the firm employs 100,000 people. With numbers like that, talking to every applicant is impossible, and identifying the most promising candidates is difficult to do accurately and consistently. At the same time, the company had specific DEI quotas to meet.

“We needed an approach that addressed questions that are critical to our vision,” said a Talent Acquisition (TA) executive at the bank. “How do we maintain a humanistic approach, knowing that our volumes are high and it’s impossible to talk to every applicant? How do we identify the best candidates to focus on in a scalable and trustable manner? Amid all this, how do we ensure a laser focus on DEI and fair and objective decision-making?”