Embracing a New Era of Talent Assessment
BY Todd Nelson June 07, 2023Leonardo da Vinci gets credit for inventing, among other things, the parachute, the armored car and the resume. Some 500-plus years later, employers still use the resume to assess job seekers’ potential.That’s a problem, accelerated today with resume-scanning algorithms that can introduce biases and exclude many aspiring job candidates.“Resumes don’t predict a damn thing,” Scott Dettman, chief executive officer of Avenica, said during a presentation in May at a From Day One conference in Minneapolis.Dettman should know. He helped prove that resumes have no predictive value while working at ManpowerGroup. A massive study there, done with Google and Cognizant, concluded that resumes cannot forecast how a job applicant will perform. Or even whether someone will get hired.Using resumes to assess job candidates, therefore, amounts to an act of “collective insanity,” Dettman said. “People are so much more than a resume.”Besides resumes, Dettman contended, another obstacle to job seekers is human nature. Under the diffusion of innovation theory, which looks at how an idea or product spreads over time, only 15.5% of people are innovators or early adopters, including hiring managers.“When we think about early career or entry-level people from different backgrounds or experiences, we are looking at basically 15.5% of hiring managers who are likely to bet on somebody who doesn’t have a proven track record of experience, a proven track record of doing a certain thing,” Dettman said.Dettman defined potential as latent characteristics or “hidden superpowers” that, if developed, will lead to later success. Inherent within that definition is the idea that potential needs some kind of catalyst to kick start it. That’s less likely if the hiring manager is a laggard one rather than an innovator or early adopter.“To achieve our potential, we need to have opportunity,” Dettman said. “But that opportunity is going to be greatly diffused based on who we get a chance to talk to.”At Avenica, Dettman is leading efforts to find a better way to help job seekers unlock their potential. In his view, that means moving from resumes and an employer-centered, demand-side search for talent to an inclusive, supply-side focused method where candidates demonstrate their potential and develop skills as they advance in their careers.Avenica, an entry-level career matchmaking company based in Minneapolis, gets 300 to 500 applications a day, Dettman said. Candidates have the opportunity to progress through levels on the company’s platform.Scott Dettman, the CEO of Avenica, led the thought leadership spotlight (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)This self-directed process doesn’t filter out job seekers based on experience or where they went to college. Rather, it enables candidates to show that they can follow directions, be responsive, do what they say they’re going to do, pay attention and communicate effectively.“For the vast majority of entry-level jobs in corporate America, those key kinds of attributes are the pillars of success,” Dettman said. “If you can do those things, you’re going to learn how to do all the other stuff through the process of exposure and experience.”The platform’s levels include various “micro-experiences,” such as watching a video about a company and writing an email that summarizes key points, Dettman said. Candidates who prove “their level of grit, their level of tenacity and also their level of proficiency” get invited to schedule a meeting. That meeting is “more like therapy than it is like an interview,” Dettman said. Job seekers may get asked, for example, about challenges they’ve faced, what they do for fun, what friends say about them or what their guilty pleasure is. “We get to know these individuals, we get to hear their story, then we get to help them craft that narrative in a way that they may not even be comfortable with yet,” Dettman said.Candidates explain what makes them unique and describe the “superpowers” that underscore their potential. That puts them in charge of whether they get access to an opportunity.Using its approach, Avenica has launched more than 2,000 careers in recent years, Dettman said. Candidates stay with their employees for three times longer, with many getting promoted. Some 62% of candidates were Black, Indigenous and people of color.“The secret behind every great company is great people,” Dettman said. “Today, too many great people are being missed, are being ignored or are just flat out rejected because of words on a resume. We can do better.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Avenica, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Todd Nelson is a Minnesota-based journalist who writes for newspapers in the Twin Cities.
Can We Eradicate Unintentional Bias and Discrimination? Well, We Can Begin
BY Todd Nelson June 02, 2023Human judgment—and the prejudices and unconscious biases that it can give rise to—will always be with us.That’s why Jessica Nordell’s critically acclaimed book The End of Bias comes with the subtitle, “A Beginning.”One approach that can help reduce discrimination, Nordell found during her research, is to use objective criteria in making decisions about health care assessments and corporate promotions, among other examples.“It’s not so much about changing hearts and minds as it is about changing the decision-making environment, changing the structure within which people make a decision, so that their own biases are less likely to play a role,” said Nordell, an award-winning author and science writer.In assessing the results of anti-bias and anti-discrimination interventions, Nordell focuses on examining data and looking for measurable change, she said during a session at From Day One’s conference in May in Minneapolis, where she is based.“I tell stories about people and organizations and cultures that have actually changed in measurable ways and then try to explain and explore what allowed them to do that,” Nordell told moderator Stephanie Sisco, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where her research focuses on how social issues appear at work and influence the learning and development of professionals of color. Nordell cited a group of trauma surgeons at Johns Hopkins University as an example of the difference that objective criteria can make. After the surgeons began using a computerized checklist instead of their clinical judgment to assess patients for blood clots, those patients began getting appropriate treatment at much higher rates. The gender disparity for women, who previously were almost 50% more likely to miss out on blood clot prevention, disappeared, even though the doctors had not set out to decrease the bias.Businesses have seen positive results from similar efforts. “One approach that decreases discrimination against women and underrepresented minorities in corporate environments in terms of their ability to be promoted into management is using consistent, objective, transparent criteria for making decisions,” Nordell said.Author Nordell signed copies of The End of Bias for From Day One attendees in Minneapolis (Photos by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Where many psychologists see two kinds of bias, prejudice based on deeply held beliefs and unconscious bias, Nordell believes another form also exists: unexamined bias.“That better captures the fact that there’s a kind of unknowable combination of conscious and unconscious things happening,” Nordell said. “If we’re holding beliefs that we haven’t examined and we’re acting on those,” that requires “deep, personal introspection and deep grappling with our belief system, with our values.”Nordell told Sisco that she had written about bias and discrimination for years as a journalist but became impatient reporting on those issues and trying to persuade readers to care. She wanted to know what to do about bias and discrimination and wanted to read a book that offered “a thorough examination of what change’s people’s behavior, what changes organizations and what changes cultures to become more fair.”When she couldn’t find that book, Nordell decided to write it. She spent five years on The End of Bias, which she thought would be an 18-month project.While we may never reach the end that the title suggests, Nordell believes “that we can get a lot closer and we can do a lot better.”“We can relate to each other in much more humane ways than we have,” Nordell continued. “And that’s really my goal with the book, to, wherever we are, move us more in that right direction.”Todd Nelson is a Minnesota-based journalist who writes for newspapers in the Twin Cities.