The death of the resume has long been predicted. It is widely acknowledged that they are ineffective and prone to promoting bias, but alternative approaches have yet to achieve universal adoption. However, with many employers moving towards skills and competency-based hiring and technology continuing to drive rapid change in recruiting, are the days of the resume finally numbered?
My guest this week is Maya Huber, Co-Founder and CEO of the competencies-based sourcing platform TaTiO. Maya has a PHD in Job Analysis and some fascinating insights into practical ways of moving on from the resume and making hiring more efficient, inclusive and effective.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The ineffectiveness of resumes
• The danger of assessing just on words and stories
• Skills-based hiring versus competency-based hiring
• Testing performance in its context
• Reducing the administrative burden for recruiters
• Job simulation
• Job analysis
• The hiring outcomes of competency-based assessment
• What should companies expect from the future of work?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 485 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The death of the resume has long been predicted. It’s widely acknowledged that they’re ineffective and prone to promoting bias. But alternative approaches have yet to achieve universal adoption. However, with many employers moving towards skills and competency based hiring and technology continuing to drive rapid change in recruiting, are the days of the resume finally numbered? My guest this week is Maja Huber, co founder and CEO of the competencies based sourcing platform TaTiO. Maya has a PhD in job analysis and some fascinating insights into practical ways of moving on from the resume and making hiring more efficient, inclusive and effective.
Matt Alder [00:01:13]:
Hi Maya and welcome to the podcast.
Maya Huber [00:01:16]:
Hi, I’m excited to be here. How are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:19]:
I’m very well, thank you and it is a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Maya Huber [00:01:26]:
Sure. So my name is Maya Huber. I’m the CEO and co founder of TaTiO. TATIO is a sourcing technology. We connect companies and job seekers based on competencies alone.
Matt Alder [00:01:39]:
And tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get to do what you do? Now?
Maya Huber [00:01:46]:
This is a great story. Actually we are two women co founders. My colleague name is More and we come from HR. So we spent 15 years on practice and also research. I hold a PhD in that space, my expert thesis, the future of work and job analysis. So we spent 15 years providing service to companies and to job seekers, some career consulting and outsourcing placement companies. Actually we’ve got really frustrated by the fact that after so many years still the only way for a person to apply to a job is resumes or application form. And of course on the other side for companies to evaluate candidates only based on words.
Matt Alder [00:02:33]:
Yeah, I mean that I find particularly frustrating when we’ve got all this sort of technology and new thinking and innovation. Why is that so ineffective? Talk us through your take around it.
Maya Huber [00:02:47]:
Sure. So first of all, I guess everybody knows that it’s not effective by the fact that people represent themselves with words. You cannot really rely or 100% rely on those stories because stories not necessarily mean something. And I think I’m a good example. And there are other people like me that as I said, I have 15 years of experience in working with companies. I was a manager, I was a PhD. But when I tried to get into the ITech industry. No one considered my resumes to be qualified and no one understood why I am considering to be or applying to be head of product or a product manager. So what my resume could not tell is the fact that through the years I created and developed a lot of solutions, a lot of product in my space. So the fact that people tell their stories, words, when you look at their credentials, the logos of what they done, basically it’s bias. So that’s the reason it’s not effective. I think what was more interesting for me to discover, it’s not just about the ineffectiveness of resumes and the fact that companies commonly go through hundreds of applications and resume to interview four people into IR1. This is Glassdoor data, by the way. But commonly those four people they interview not necessarily are the people that will stay. So there’s turnover, et cetera. But it’s not only that resumes miss a lot of people that are relevant for the work and do not apply. And it’s people like me who will never apply based on their resume because I knew that no one will hire me. But also people that do not know what the work the job require necessarily, no. So they do not know how to adjust their resume in order for them to prove their skills.
Matt Alder [00:05:02]:
So how can we improve, I suppose both effectiveness and fairness? What’s the alternative? Because resumes have obviously been with us for a really long time. People have been talking about them being ineffective for as long as I can remember. What’s the alternative to this?
Maya Huber [00:05:23]:
So for me, I think it’s about time that we will be able to identify the right employees and for the employees to make a better decision making about where to apply based on competencies. There’s a huge discussion the past decade, I guess about skill based hiring. I think competencies is taking it to the next level because when you ask people about their skills, it’s still first of all, most of those tools are questionnaire, but you ask people to tell you about those skills. You do not test their skills. Competencies is testing a performance within its context. So for me, competencies based hiring where candidates can and again at the first step of hiring, not of course also during the hiring process, but for the first step. First application form should be based on competencies to create an opportunity for people to first put their skills up front and then to be judged by their stories. So we need to do a reverse engineering on the process. And by doing that, you’re right, it’s about creating a more objective and transparent and equal opportunity for people to apply but also the burden of recruiters to interview so many people to sort so many candidates will be reduced because they will interview only relevant candidates.
Matt Alder [00:06:59]:
So how does that work in practice? Because I think that it’d probably be quite hard to find anyone who disagrees with that. How does it work in practice? How can employers actually recruit like this?
Maya Huber [00:07:15]:
So what we are trying to do is to have job seekers or candidates have them engage into job experiences. Literally smart simulation tests that simulate the core task of the job and analyze the candidate performance prior to their application. What the technology enable us to do is to simulate any job and to keep it general but yet predictable. So a company do not require to adjust the simulation to their needs. The only thing they need to do is to review our candidates that went through the simulation already. So what I was excited about is the fact that there’s a lot of database around the world, Europe and US and Asia, about the required competencies or the required main core task for each job out there. There are researchers that done that comes from the government. So what we’re doing is taking this data that for now just sit there and use this data with our technology to use this unique database as an opportunity to evaluate candidates as well.
Matt Alder [00:08:37]:
Tell us a bit more about the job simulation part of that. How does that work? Could you give us an example?
Maya Huber [00:08:44]:
Sure. So our simulation are really straight. First of all, we say before our simulation that we operate mainly in evergreen volume hiring position. Now this is our go to market for the upcoming two years. The reason we are doing that is because there’s a bigger pain on those industries, sorry to find qualified candidates because of the shortage in the workforce. So I will give you an example. First of all, as I tried to say before, we try to keep it as straightforward as possible and we test the job, the main task of a job within its context. So let’s say, let’s take sales, okay. As a junior sales representative on TATIO simulation, we’ll enter a database of qualified leads. Like a sales rep, you will need to qualify those leads and then you will have sales pitch and you will need to close three deals within 20 minutes while talking to prospective clients. If you are a picker in a warehouse, the simulation is 5 minutes, 7 minutes on your mobile and what the connect dates require to do. You have a warehouse environment and you need to collect items, write them into boxes and to solve problems that occur, we analyze the candidate’s performance online. So There is a 150 data points we collect from from everything he was doing on the Platform we push on a bottom, the speed, the accuracy, what he was saying, the tone he was using every data that we can collect. And we also make sure that the candidate is alone, no one helps him. And we provide first of all with the candidates, we provide them with a report that describe their competencies and share some data about strength and weaknesses about their performance. They can do it again, they can practice. But this is first of all data that they can use smartly to have a better understanding. Rather they’re qualified for a job or not. If they do, if they cross the bar with a specific grade and they are they find to be a good match to a company general requirements in terms of location, salary, working hours, etc. It will consider to be a qualified candidate for a specific company. And at the company CRM he will appear as new candidate. They can interview.
Matt Alder [00:11:27]:
What the outcome from employers in terms of, you know, employers who hire based on competency based assessment. What kind of outcomes can they expect?
Maya Huber [00:11:37]:
So the immediate response we get is that our candidates are more engaged. The fact that they went through a process simulation before applying, that means that those people are more committed and more engaging to work. So you know, it’s, it’s more, it requires more than just clicking on your resume or filling your data on an application form. So they are more engaged. We see faster time to hire at least 50% commonly what we see they reduce the, the amount of steps that requires in order for them to hire. So from we have a company that from six steps from application to hire, they came up with just two. So imagine the effort, the time and what I love about it is recruiters sharing that they have more time interviewing people, but interviewing relevant people, not people who are not relevant. So there are deep, their deep interviews. And that’s the reason the hiring stay and keep for a longer period of time. So we have a 20% better retention rate as well. And there’s another fact that we hear that we companies say that they see a more diverse workforce coming from us.
Matt Alder [00:12:59]:
So there’s a big disruption there in terms of how recruiting has worked in the past. You know, many employers, many hiring managers still very, very, very used to or expecting to use resumes to hire. What kind of mindset shift do employers need to go to to adopt this way of working?
Maya Huber [00:13:22]:
Oh wow. First of all, you’re absolutely right. This is what we meet. So from one hand we hear recruiters and talent codes and managers, you know, that they had enough that there’s a need for a different paradigm, a different, a different Tool and a different solution. But also as you said, they know sometimes it’s the devil you know that you prefer working with him. So in terms of the mind shift, I can tell you first of all practically, companies need to understand that the candidates are more qualified. So they could not treat them like candidates that come from a job board. They need to engage with them faster. They need to provide a more engaging hiring process for them. Our candidates look at it as a private and technology staffing company where the candidates went through a lot and they know more about the job once applying. So the relationships changed a bit. So this is one so working more effectively and second is to put competencies up front and not ask people about their credential. It’s a tough thing. So we see companies that they start with competencies but then they ask for resume. We have also processes of recruiters that totally understand the process of competencies, but then the hiring managers ask for resumes. But you know, for me, as every change that was out there in our last decades, that technology brought what we constantly hear is a great, there is a need because there is a big pain right now after Covid and the market for the market changed so much that from that motivation companies understand that they need to engage in a different state of mind.
Matt Alder [00:15:25]:
As a final question, you mentioned there the post Covid change and the disruption in the marketplace.
Matt Alder [00:15:30]:
You also said right at the beginning.
Matt Alder [00:15:31]:
Of the conversation that you’d done a PhD in job analysis and the future of work. So tell us about the future of work. What should companies expect and how should they be preparing?
Maya Huber [00:15:44]:
First of all, things that I Learned during my PhD that my professor mentioned about in the articles talked about 10 years from now are happening today after Covid. So Covid actually just made rapid changes from the job seeker aspect and how they approach work and from the company side, I think there’s couple of things that are constantly we see them already. First, that it’s a job seeker word, it’s a candidate world. So companies are struggling for candidates attention. And I think companies and the decade now will need to be more aware of how to engage candidates in the process and how to make sure that the engaging process starts from application, not only when a person is already on board the company. So this is one the second thing we see is that our candidates are more aware about from one hand they’re more aware about the workforce and opportunities. So they change. There’s more openness to change careers, to change jobs, but at the same time they also aware of what’s happening in the market and the buyer in chief. So if you know if the in the past candidates or employees were in this you know their zone, not really know what happened in the market having their own thoughts and after perspective of they will stay forever in a job and nothing will be changed change now the change is the more stable thing about the workforce. Things will be changing the time. And one last thing about again we see more and more companies talking about competencies based hiring rather than skills. This is also a new shift and I guess and I heard you talk about it a lot well being hybrid work. Those subjects are still on and will be here for a couple of years.
Matt Alder [00:18:01]:
More Maya, thank you very much for talking to me.
Maya Huber [00:18:05]:
Thank you so much. It was great. I appreciate you having me.
Matt Alder [00:18:09]:
My thanks to Maya. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
