Pre-hire assessments in recruiting are moving up the funnel, and Matt Alder thinks the resume is on its way out. The host of the Recruiting Future podcast tells Jonathan Duarte on GoHire Talks why TA leaders should fix the process before buying AI, and how to tell real assessment science apart from vendor noise.
Matt has been podcasting about recruiting for around 12 years, and he admits he ignored assessment for the first five of them. That changed. In this conversation he explains what flipped his view, where AI interviewing goes wrong, and why the questions TA leaders ask before they buy matter more than the tools they pick.
In this episode:
- Pre-hire assessments in recruiting: what Matt Alder wants TA leaders to know
- Two speeds of change: the technology and your company
- AI interviewing covers a dozen different things
- Why assessments are moving up the funnel
- High volume hiring assessments in call centers and frontline roles
- Have resumes had their day?
- Team assessments and the all-star quarterback problem
- Recruiting process redesign with AI starts in TA
- Bias, validation and compliance
- FAQ
- Full interview transcript
Pre-Hire Assessments in Recruiting: What Matt Alder Wants TA Leaders to Know
Matt Alder runs Recruiting Future, one of the longest-running podcasts in talent acquisition. Jonathan first met him about three years ago at HR Tech in Las Vegas, where Matt was recording interviews in a bar. Jonathan still calls that one of the best ways to find out what is really going on in HR tech.
His core message for TA leaders is short. Stay current on what the technology can actually do. Question your process before you automate it. And treat assessment science as science, because it is the closest thing recruiting has to predicting how someone will perform in a job.
Why this moment feels like 1999 again
Jonathan asked Matt whether any other period in recruiting felt this strange. Matt went straight to the dot-com boom of 1999 and 2000, when job boards were born and the industry was having many of the same conversations it is having now.
The difference is pace. Conversations that once took a couple of years now take a couple of months, according to Matt. Jonathan, who launched the GoJobs job board in 1996, sees the same pattern. He told a room of vendors recently that it felt like 1996 all over again.
Both of them have felt the speed firsthand. Matt gave a breakfast presentation, and the very next day something launched that would have made his talk land even better. Jonathan says a blog post can be out of date by the time he publishes it.
Two Speeds of Change: The Technology and Your Company
Matt splits the problem in two. There is the speed at which the technology changes, and there is the speed at which companies adopt it and change themselves. Those are very different things, and the gap between what is possible and what people are actually doing keeps growing.
His first piece of advice is to keep yourself current on what is possible, even when it is beyond what your company can implement today. Read the case studies. Look at what the cutting edge of a category looks like now, because it looked very different six months ago. That picture tells you the direction of travel.
Bolting AI onto a broken process
His second piece of advice is the one most teams skip. Look hard at the recruiting process itself, and ask whether the new capability means you could run it differently.
So many organizations are just bolting this technology onto processes they've already got, which doesn't fix the process, it just makes it go quicker, which may not be a good thing if it's not a good process.
Matt Alder, Host, Recruiting Future
Speeding up a bad process gets you bad results faster. Matt's test question is simple: if we could implement what is now possible, how would we do recruiting? He admits there is a lot behind that question. But asking it puts a TA team in the right head space for a market that is complicated, fast and noisy.
Teams working through this can borrow the structure in GoHire's Recruiting AI Adoption Playbook, which starts with process and ownership before any tool decision.
AI Interviewing Covers a Dozen Different Things
"AI interviewing" gets talked about as one category. Matt pushes back on that. Inside the label sit lots of different tools and activities, and what a leading AI interview looks like today is very different from what it looked like half a year ago.
Jonathan has seen the bad end of the market. He described a VP of TA who went through an AI interviewer and could not believe how poor it was. He also saw a salesperson answer an AI interviewer with nonsense, and the AI interviewer answered with the same nonsense back. Someone bought that product.
His comparison: you can still buy Windows 3.1 if you don't know anything newer exists. Buyers who skip the research end up with the bottom of the barrel, so talk to people who have compared several vendors before you pick one. GoHire's episode with Jeff Pole on avoiding bad recruiting AI vendors goes deeper on that buying process.
Start with the problem you are solving
Matt's answer to a crowded category is to define the problem first. Do you want more signal from the candidates you are already talking to? Are you drowning in applications? Or did your ATS provider just launch a feature you would quite like to try?
Each of those is a different problem, and different versions of AI interviewing solve different ones. Jonathan added the other half: once you know the problem, you can benchmark whether the tool is working.
The candidate trust problem
Matt sees candidate trust as one of the biggest challenges in this space. Bad AI interview experiences are out there. If a candidate has never been through a good one, the natural reaction is "I don't want to talk to a machine about this."
He wants the industry to get much better at its own positive PR. Done well, AI interviewing can improve candidate experience and find applicants who are perfect for the job and might otherwise have been screened out. He expects a lot of shakeout before that story lands.
He also made a point that gets lost in the debate about superintelligence. If AI did not evolve any further than where it is now, it could still change hiring dramatically with the technology available today.
Jonathan agrees, and he has history here. He built GoBe, one of the first conversational job-search chatbots, on Facebook Messenger nearly ten years ago. The hypothesis was only whether candidates would use messaging in a job search. Two Facebook posts later it had spread to 103 countries in 30 days.
Why Pre-Hire Assessments in Recruiting Are Moving Up the Funnel
Matt calls his shift on assessment an epiphany. For years he saw it as something stuck further down the recruiting process, used by some employers but not most, with barriers around cost and expertise. Then he started talking to academics and assessment providers about the science behind it.
This is peer-reviewed science. It's the closest thing that we have to being able to predict how someone is gonna perform in a job.
Matt Alder, Host, Recruiting Future
It struck him as crazy that this existed and most people in recruiting weren't using it. The research backs the point. A 2022 meta-analysis by Paul Sackett and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology put structured interviews at a validity of .42, job knowledge tests at .40, empirically keyed biodata at .38 and work sample tests at .33. Those are some of the strongest predictors of job performance the field has measured.
Three forces that converged
Over the last two or three years, Matt says, three things came together and pushed assessment into the spotlight.
- The technology got better with AI, which makes assessment more accessible and cheaper to run.
- Many employers now get more applications than they can handle. Some of that comes from candidates using AI, and a lot of it comes from economic conditions around the world.
- Questions about skills keep piling up. What skills do people need, how is AI changing jobs, and how do you know a hire will be right for a changing world of work?
The volume problem is real even while hiring stays hard. SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends research found 69% of organizations still struggle to fill full-time roles, and 41% report candidates ghosting them during the interview process. More applications do not mean more qualified candidates.
So Matt sees organizations moving assessment up the recruiting funnel. In some high-volume cases, everyone takes the assessment simply because they can, and it adds extra signal to the process. He has seen the full range, including properly scientific assessments, work sampling, and AI-driven role plays that are much more sophisticated than a quiz. He thinks it solves many of the problems around volume and applications that all look the same.
Check the Science Behind Pre-Hire Assessments in Recruiting
Matt's caveat is firm. There is proper science behind assessment, and buyers need to protect it.
If you're looking at providers, you have to make sure that they're using a scientifically valid method.
Matt Alder, Host, Recruiting Future
He warns that some startups are tempted to build their own crazy AI method of selecting people. Asking the right questions about validation is the buyer's job. His view is that assessment's time has come, and it will only grow in importance from here.
Give your recruiters better conversations, faster
GoHire runs the first 90 minutes after someone applies. You write the pre-screening questions and set the criteria. GoHire asks them by text, records every answer, and offers interview times to candidates who match what you set. Your recruiters see every candidate and make every decision.
High Volume Hiring Assessments in Call Centers and Frontline Roles
When Jonathan talks to clients about assessments, he usually hears the same answer. "We use it for management." Ask what else, and there is silence.
Matt says that habit comes from history. Assessment used to be time-intensive and expensive, so it was saved for senior roles, and there is still a legacy of that in how companies deploy it. That is changing. He recently had a guest on his podcast who runs high volume hiring assessments in call center recruitment, giving candidates a soft skills assessment right at the beginning, before anything else, and using it to inform the rest of the process.
Seeing assessment in volume recruitment is new, according to Matt. It would never have happened before the moment the industry is in now.
What if you just had an assessment?
Jonathan sketched a frontline application with no resume at all. A candidate applies and answers a few pre-screening questions. Do you live close by? Do you have the right to work in the country? Are you 18, if the job requires it? Then they take the assessment.
Matt's answer was "why not?" He hears the argument that resumes are needed for basic compliance data, but that information can be collected separately. It does not need to be tied up with everything else. The right design still depends on the role, the people you want and the skills you need.
This is the shape of a modern high-volume flow. Speed matters at the top of the funnel, which is why GoHire focuses on the 90-minute high-volume hiring window after someone applies. High volume hiring assessments slot in after those first knockout questions, and a recruiter still decides who moves forward. Matt adds that better assessment data also informs the work human recruiters do, including the conversations they have and the interviews they run.
Have Resumes Had Their Day?
Jonathan was blunt about resume matching. He compares AI matching on resumes to 52-card pickup. Throw the deck on the floor, and everyone who picks it up comes back with a different sorting order. Some get all the red cards first. Some get whatever comes up. That, he says, is what many buyers are paying for.
Matt's diagnosis: the technology got more sophisticated, but the data underneath stayed the same: resumes, cover letters and LinkedIn profiles. You can match them quicker, but that tells you nothing more about how someone will perform. It is a classic example of a process that needs to change.
I think the resumes have had their day now, because it seems ridiculously reductive that you have two or three pages on someone, when actually we have tools that can cope with so much more content and make sense of it.
Matt Alder, Host, Recruiting Future
Jonathan connected the dots. The job description does not do the job we hoped it would. The resume does not do its job either. And matching one against the other is set up to fail. If assessments are scientifically proven, he thinks companies that put more money into assessments over resumes might have a winner, and that could be the story of the next five years. Matt agrees it is the logical direction of travel. How long it takes is the hard part to predict.
The blank sheet of paper test
Matt offered a thought experiment. Start with a blank piece of paper. Write down the people you want and the skills you need. Then ask how you would measure and test those skills.
If you'd never seen a resume, you'd never come up with that as the answer.
Matt Alder, Host, Recruiting Future
Nobody would design "two or three pages of typed text" followed by an interview where the candidate talks you through it. Matt admits breaking from that is hard, because recruiting has been the same for 200 years in a lot of respects. He also thinks we are in very different times now.
Leonardo da Vinci's "first resume"
Matt often hears that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first resume, so earlier this year he looked it up. What da Vinci actually sent, when he was quite young, was a letter offering to take part in someone's war effort, listing the inventions he could bring. Right at the end came the Italian equivalent of "Oh yeah, and I'm a bit of a painter."
Matt's read is that da Vinci tailored his application to the job, putting the painting at the bottom. Jonathan called it a cover letter and resume in one, and joked about running it through an AI matching tool to see if it made the shortlist.
Jonathan's bigger point is that the resume became a medieval stand-in for a referral. When nobody can vouch that you have done the job before, we created a document, decided it was the truth, and trained people to read between the lines at mass scale. He estimates it is still about 50% right or wrong.
Matt explains why it lasted: constraints. Human recruiters can only read so much, so information had to fit a format. "Remove the constraints and what happens?" he asked. That, for him, is the key question.
Team Assessments and the All-Star Quarterback Problem
Jonathan has seen a vendor doing team assessments, and he plans to run his whole team through one. When he brings someone on, even as an advisor, he already knows their abilities. What he wants to know is whether they will fit with the team and what the team is missing.
For a startup or any small team, that fit is the hard part, and a resume says almost nothing about it. Matt pointed to sport. He has had several guests from the sporting world on his podcast, and they think in teams. If you already have an all-star quarterback, you are not going to sign another one.
Recruiting Process Redesign With AI Starts in TA
Asked what else should be on a TA leader's mind, Matt went to capacity. The tools TA teams are adopting do things much quicker, and "taking the admin tasks away" has become a common refrain. The question is what happens with the time and resources that get freed up.
When Matt asks, few leaders can say "with this freed-up time, we're doing this, which creates more value for the business." More often the answer is a backlog, or something that would be nice to do. Thinking through how to drive real business value with that time is critical right now, and some teams are doing it while others are not.
Jonathan reframed it. Everyone is talking about how AI is changing jobs across the business, which is an HR conversation. But the department seeing the biggest AI change right now is probably recruiting itself.
The business department in your company that probably has the biggest AI change right now is probably recruiting.
Jonathan Duarte, Founder and CEO, GoHire
If TA has not done the strategic work on its own roles and processes, Jonathan asks, why is it advising anyone else? Recruiting process redesign with AI should be the first place an HR team looks, because recruiting is the tip of the sword. GoHire's guide to recruiting AI change management covers how teams restructure roles around new tools.
Matt agreed and went further. He recently spoke with someone who leads AI transformation inside the HR department of a large corporate, and the conclusion was that HR as a whole is about to become a lot more technical. Recruiting is at the front of that, partly because candidates are applying in such large numbers that many employers adopt AI as the only way through.
His last point widens the lens. If AI is changing how businesses work and how they are structured, then the question of who you hire, and what skills they need, changes too. He thinks many organizations are not thinking about it yet.
Bias, Validation and Compliance for AI Assessments
Matt's warning about "crazy AI methods" is also a legal one. Pre-hire assessments in recruiting are selection procedures, and US employers have been held to validation standards for them since 1978.
The EEOC's Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures treat a selection rate for any race, sex or ethnic group that is less than four-fifths of the highest group's rate as general evidence of adverse impact. A vendor that cannot show validation and adverse impact data has not done the science Matt is talking about.
AI tools add another layer. New York City's Local Law 144 bars employers from using an automated employment decision tool unless it has had a bias audit within the past year, a summary of the results is public, and candidates get notice 10 business days before the tool is used. Enforcement began July 5, 2023.
GoHire's position is simple. Software never makes the hiring decision. Your team writes the questions, sets the thresholds and sees every candidate, including the ones who did not match. Nobody is rejected by software. GoHire's own study on AI interviews and bias looks at where the risk shows up, and our recruiting AI guide explains how human-in-the-loop design works in practice.
Pre-Hire Assessments in Recruiting: FAQ
What are pre-hire assessments in recruiting?
Pre-hire assessments in recruiting are structured tests of the skills, knowledge or behaviors a job needs, given to candidates before an offer. They include scientific assessments, work samples, soft skills tests and AI-driven role plays. Matt Alder calls them the closest thing recruiting has to predicting job performance.
Why are assessments moving earlier in the hiring process?
Matt Alder points to three forces: AI has made assessment cheaper and more accessible, employers are getting more applications than they can handle, and questions about which skills matter keep growing. In some high-volume cases, every applicant now takes the assessment because the technology makes it possible.
Do high volume hiring assessments work for frontline roles?
Yes. Matt described a call center employer that gives every candidate a soft skills assessment right at the start and uses the results to inform the rest of hiring. Assessment was once reserved for management because it was slow and expensive, and that limit no longer applies.
Should companies stop using resumes?
Matt Alder believes resumes have had their day because two or three pages are a reductive view of a person. Compliance details like right to work can be collected through short pre-screening questions, so the resume no longer has to carry everything. The right design depends on the role and the skills you need.
How do I vet an AI assessment or AI interviewing vendor?
Start with the problem you need solved, then ask the vendor for its validation evidence and adverse impact data. Matt warns that some startups build their own unproven AI methods. Under the EEOC Uniform Guidelines and NYC Local Law 144, the employer is accountable for the tools it uses.
Where can I hear more from Matt Alder?
Find Matt Alder on LinkedIn or at recruitingfuture.com, home of the Recruiting Future podcast. More conversations like this one are on the GoHire Talks podcast page.
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Pre-Hire Assessments in Recruiting: The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript with Matt Alder
Jonathan Duarte: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome everyone. We have a great guest today, and you've probably heard of him more than you have heard of me even. Matt Alder from Recruiting Future, probably one of the oldest podcasters in the space 12 years or so. And we were fortunate enough to meet probably about three years ago at HR Tech Conference in Vegas while you were doing interviews in a bar, which I thought was one of the most fa- fantastic ways to meet people who are really talking about HR tech,
You go on the floor and you talk to people, and then you really get the real what's going on when you get all those conversations about, it usually starts about 7:00, is where you really learn about HR tech. ... And that was actually, I was talking to Matt in the, the green room- ... and I started this podcast for that same reason.
I've been fortunate enough to go to a lot of conferences over the time. And the reason I do this show is to bring some of the best people who've been through years of recruiting the cycles, the good cycles, [00:01:00] the bad cycles, the crazy stuff that we're seeing today, and they can bring a lot of insight.
So welcome, Matt. I can't wait to talk about all, all the most recent l- layers of craziness that's going on in recruiting tech.
Welcome, Matt Alder
Matt Alder: Thanks very much for having me. It's always great to be on someone else's podcast and not be the person answering the questions. And yeah it's a very crazy time at the moment, definitely.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. So as of right now, Is there another time... 'cause you've been doing this long enough Any other time that you recognize that was probably one of the weirdest times in recruiting?
Is this the dot-com boom again?
Matt Alder: The one with the biggest parallel would be around the dot com boom, '99, 2000.
Yeah 'Cause you had the dot com boom, the birth of the job boards. It was all going on and there was a lot of similar conversations to the kind of conversations that we're having now. I think what's different this time is the whole AI thing is just moving a million times quicker. Those kind of conversations that might have taken a couple of years it's now taking a couple [00:02:00] of months.
I think that's the nearest parallel I can think to it.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, it's interesting because I had started GoJobs, a job board, in '96, and I was saying to the team at Tavis if you've ever seen some of the interviewing, they haven't really gone into interviewing.
They just released Griffin, a full streaming video platform that is just unbelievable. It is like next level. And I met with the team, I'd say six months ago at a little private dinner because I was interested in learning about the tech, and I'm like, "This could just leap forward interviews," like- to another level. It's gonna be a article on my LinkedIn. It'll probably be out tomorrow. But it is- Check it out.
I was t- saying to the team and there was a bunch of other vendors there using it for different tools, and I'm like we're back to 1996 again."
Yeah ... it is, it's changing so quickly. If I write a blog post, I'm like, by the [00:03:00] time I get it done, I'm like, I got inbox stuff that was like, "Wait I just published." ? It's like-
Matt Alder: Yeah. Exactly. I did a presentation at breakfast a couple of weeks ago, and literally the next day something launched or happened and I was like...
Which was great, 'cause it played along with what I'd said, but I was like, "Oh, if I had that in my presentation yesterday, it would've made so much more sense." But it's just, that's the speed at which things are happening at the moment. It's
Jonathan Duarte: pretty
Matt Alder: crazy.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And and in that light, while things are changing so quickly, what's been- Some of the things that TA leaders need to know the water is shifting. The tides are moving so quick.
How should a TA leader be thinking about this in this time of so much change What should they be thinking about in their tech stack and just in the processes today?
What TA leaders should focus on now
Matt Alder: I think it's a really good question. And I think there's two bits to it because you've got the speed of change at which the technology is happening- and then the [00:04:00] speed of adoption and the speed at which companies change, and they're very different things. So there's that- mismatch between, what's possible and what people are actually doing. I think there's a couple of things. I think in terms of really understanding what's going on out there, there's so much noise and just confusion and competing narratives and it's just a very noisy...
I think the important thing though is to keep up, keep yourself up to date with what is actually possible. So looking at some of the case studies that are coming out, even if they are beyond the capability of where your company what you can implement at the moment, but just understanding what's possible with some of these tools, what you know, what the kind of innovations are.
So for example, AI interviewing. People talk about AI interviewing all the time. It's not really a category 'cause within it there are loads of different things and activities going on, and I think it's just important to really understand what the art of the possible looks like.
Because that's the thing that's shifting, and what AI [00:05:00] interviewing might look like at the cutting edge today is very different from what it looked like six months ago. So- ... I think it's just understanding that because that really helps the direction of travel, you know where you're heading. And then I think the other thing is, and I think this is really important, is looking at the recruiting process.
So understanding actually with this new technology, with this new capability, does that mean that we can actually do this in a different way? Because I think that- ... so many organizations are just bolting this technology onto processes they've already got- which doesn't fix the process, it just makes it go quicker, which may not be a good thing if it's not a good process.
So I think it's thinking about- Yeah ... what is possible and actually how could we do recruiting if we could implement that? And I think asking that sounds like a simple question, obviously there's a lot to it , is just a great way of getting the right head space around this because it is complicated, it is moving very quickly, and there's lots of noise out there.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And what of the... I like how you break down like the interviewing. It, the [00:06:00] AI interviewing, there's so many blog posts I've seen. I've seen some really just crazy stuff where a VP of TA went through an interviewing, a AI interviewer, and it was- I can't believe how terrible it was. Because, there's...
it's this huge category, and it's technology Yeah You could still buy Windows 3.1 if you didn't know that there was- Yeah ... something else out there. Exactly. Or you could be buying the bottom of the barrel because you didn't do the right research. And I know it's just ter- terribly difficult right now, so you need to be, you know- Find people who, who've talked to the different vendors, not just-
pick one.
AI interviewing: start with the problem
Matt Alder: I was just gonna say, and also you need to understand what problem you're solving. Why do I want this? Is it because I wanna get more signal from the candidates that we're talking to? Is it because- ... I'm drowning in applications and need to screen something out?
Is it because my ATS provider has just launched it as a service, as a product, and I'd quite fancy trying- You just plugged it
Jonathan Duarte: in.
Matt Alder: So do you know [00:07:00] what I mean? I think actually just really trying to understand what problem or challenge you're trying to solve is also the best place to start because there are, versions of this that do all kinds of different things.
So I think that's an important thing to think about.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, I think that's... that's the rule anyways, right? What problem are you trying to solve first. Don't chase tech and trying to find a problem for it to solve. Instead, don't do it the wrong way. And then you can actually benchmark if it's working or not too.
'Cause- Yeah ... some of these things I saw, like I even saw a salesperson from Salesforce responding back to an AI interviewer in just garbly gook, wording, and then the AI interviewer responded back with the same garbly gook. Yeah ... it just... And then I'm like, "Oh my God." Like-
Matt Alder: Yeah ... how could,
Jonathan Duarte: how-
Matt Alder: And I think
Jonathan Duarte: Someone bought this then.
Yeah. Somebody bought this.
Matt Alder: And this is the problem, because everyone feels that they suddenly should be in this category. You've got-
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah ...
Matt Alder: some terrible products. And also I think one of the biggest challenges around this is candidate trust. Because there are bad [00:08:00] experiences out there.
There are without having... if you've never looked at a really good AI interviewing experience, then- you're likely to think, "I don't wanna talk to a machine about this." And I think that the industry needs to get a lot better at its own positive PR about what some of the great sort of uses of this are and how it can improve the candidate experience.
It can get people find people who've applied who are perfect for the job who might have been screened out. All of those kind of things. So I think there's a lot of sort of shakeout and PR and all kinds of things still to happen in this space
Jonathan Duarte: yeah. And I think it's definitely... I think most people would say this, is that it is the future because the speed, the amount of info it can get- Yeah ... but there's a big gap still in many areas.
Matt Alder: Yeah, I agree.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.
Matt Alder: I agree. I think what I'd also say is that there's obviously got huge amounts of- publicity and discussion about is AI gonna kill us all by 2030? It's just and sometimes I think it just really fixates on those kind of [00:09:00] top models and where does the progress sit and are we gonna get to artificial general super intelligence or whatever anyone
wants to call it. Actually, if it didn't evolve any further than where it is now, it can still revolutionize hiring based on the technology- that is available- today.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.
Matt Alder: So I think that's also important. If this whole revolution stopped tomorrow where it was, it's still revolutionary for what we do.
Jonathan Duarte: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I'm a big believer. Most people don't know this, but I built the first conversational AI in recruiting 10 years ago It's actually next month will be the 10th year. The first conversational chatbot on Messenger. We put it out and the idea was our hypothesis was would candidates use messaging as a way to communicate in a job search?
Yeah. That was all we were testing.
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: We, I did two Facebook posts and it went viral to 103 countries in 30 days.
Matt Alder: [00:10:00] Wow ...
Jonathan Duarte: I think we found something.
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: This is the tech. So you know, it was like can we do this, that, and the other, right? So I think we're... Like yeah, if it stopped today huge benefits still coming.
If you tie them together and everyone, you still have to do- a little work to pull them together. Yeah. Which you have to do anyways, but-
Matt Alder: Yeah ...
Jonathan Duarte: and let's talk about one of the other things. I know your venture early on and your hypothesis is there's gotta be a better way too.
There's gotta be a how can we use this tech in a way to make recruitment better? Which was- Yeah ... my hypothesis back in 1996. Yeah ... there's gotta be a better- way, right? What, what... and you wrote a report recently on assessments. Tell me a little bit about assessments.
What have you learned over the years, and where do you see it going? What have you learned lately that's, where do you think that direction's going as well?
Why assessments are having their moment
Matt Alder: It's really interesting actually, 'cause probably for the first sort of five years I was podcasting I ignored assessment.
I didn't really look at it. And I think it's [00:11:00] because it was something that's stuck further down the recruitment process. Not all employers we're using it. There's barriers to entry around cost and expertise and all that sort of stuff. Then I had a bit of a epiphany about the whole thing talking to sort of various academics and assessment providers just about the science that sits behind it.
And actually, this is peer-reviewed science. It's the closest thing that we have to being able to predict how someone is gonna perform in a job, but it just seemed crazy to me that actually this was here And it wasn't being used by people, by most people in recruiting.
So that always seemed a bit kind of crazy, so I started exploring that. But then really what's happened over the last sort of two or three years is There's three, three things have converged. So obviously the technology's got better with AI and everything.
We're living through this period where very many employers have got a bigger volume of applications that they can handle. Some of that's because candidates are using AI. A lot of that is just because of the [00:12:00] economic conditions around the world. And also then we've got all these sort of question marks about skills.
What skills do people need? How is AI changing jobs? When I hire people, how do I know whether they're gonna be right in a changing kind of world of work? And it really Assessment, I think, is coming to the fore now because the technology's making it more accessible. It's...
I'm seeing a lot of organizations moving it up that recruiting funnel. In, some high volume hiring cases, it's like everyone does the assessment because they can. And it gives that kind of extra signal, that extra information for the recruiting process.
And yeah, it's really interesting. I've seen everything from proper scientifically based assessments to work sampling, using AI to give people really sophisticated kind of role plays around it. So I think it's really interesting. It's something that I think is gonna only get bigger.
I think it solves a lot of the problems that we're seeing around volume and, applications looking similar. I think there's a caveat around it that there is proper science behind this, [00:13:00] and I think that if you're looking at providers, you have to make sure that they're using a scientifically valid method because I think there is the temptation for some startups out there to create their own crazy AI method of selecting people, there's science behind this asking the right questions is really important.
So yeah, I think it's something that's only gonna grow in importance because it's time has really come in terms of where we're sitting at the moment.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, I think I've been talking to Charles Handler about this, yeah ... who's one of the leaders- He was on my show, yeah
in this space. And we met up probably 20 years ago or so and I never really understood what he was doing. And he's a incredibly smart guy around this space, and we were talking at HR Tech last year, and I'm like there's gotta be a way... Like, why aren't people doing this on frontline workers for every role?"
I have never had- Yeah ... an assessment, not that I've... i've been an entrepreneur, so it's not like I assess myself to see what my strengths and weaknesses are. I pretty much know them. I deal with them every day, right? So- Yeah ... [00:14:00] but I, I think I'm gonna do a series. I've got Charles gonna come on the podcast too.
But I just think... i'm just stunned as I get closer and learn this. I think I'm in the same boat of you, as you. I've seen all this tech come and go. The AI matching I mentioned to resumes now is 50 c- 52 card pickup with, Yeah ... a deck of cards. You throw it out and two p- anyone who picks up the deck, they're coming back with a different sorting order.
Some get all the red cards first. Yeah. Some just whatever order random comes up. That's pretty much what you're paying for. I don't know what you're paying for. I think that- Yeah, no,
Matt Alder: Yeah, so the technology's more sophisticated, but the data it's going off hasn't changed.
It's still resumes and whatever else. Cover letters- or LinkedIn profiles. And yeah, you can match that quicker, but it doesn't tell you anything else about how that person's gonna perform, and I think that's the... that's a classic example of actually, the process needs to change.
I think the resumes have had their day now, because it seems ridiculously reductive that you have two or three [00:15:00] pages on someone, when actually we have tools that can cope with so much more content and make sense of it. So yeah, it's interesting.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And I think maybe that's where we're going, and that's why I love doing these podcasts, because it can start putting the pinpoints together for me, like how are these all gonna equate? Yeah. And if we know that the job description doesn't do the role that we hoped it would, we know that the resume's not doing the role, and those two are getting, trying to be matched, which we know is gonna fail.
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: If we can scientifically prove that assessments would work, why are people, just because it's just not out there, I would gather. But if people were to investigate assessments over resumes, and put more money in there to find that pipeline, that process work for them- my guess is they might have a winner.
So maybe that's what we're gonna see- the next five years, because-
Matt Alder: Yeah ...
Jonathan Duarte: the matching never really proved out.
Matt Alder: Yeah. I completely [00:16:00] agree. And I've seen, some companies doing, almost doing that, just really getting that kind of... and also from a, a human recruiter perspective it better informs the work that the human recruiters do and the conversations they have and the interviews they do.
So yeah, I think to me it just seems like a logical direction of travel. How long it takes is always the difficult thing to predict.
Jonathan Duarte: Oh, yeah. Especially, we could talk about some of the things that took 15 years, and you're like w- why?"
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah,
Matt Alder: exactly.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. There, there's a whole bunch of dead bodies over on the side there on that one. People's careers were ruined because they chose the thing at the time that was actually right, but couldn't get supported- to do it, right?
Matt Alder: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Jonathan Duarte: I hear about those all the time. So what's, in assessments, and I know when I've been talking to some clients about it, everyone's like we use it for management." And I'm like, "Okay." And then what else? Just, void.
So where have you seen it being picked up? Obviously in Frontline, I think you talked a little bit about that.
Assessments in call centers and volume hiring
Matt Alder: Yeah. I saw, so I've [00:17:00] had someone on the, the podcast who was using it in call center recruitment. Yep. So they were doing almost like a soft skills assessment right at the beginning- Yeah ... before anything else, and then using that- Yeah ... to inform, to, to, to do it. I think that, I think it gets used just in management because of where it's come from, because it used to be time intensive and expensive- and not something that you could apply to everything, and I think that there's still a legacy of that in how people deploy this. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's that just speaks to how it used to be. But- Yep ... it's interesting to see people using it in in, in volume recru- recruitment, which you'd never have, would never have happened before the time that we're in now
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, it's almost interesting 'cause you th- I g- I, ag- again, that's why I do this podcast, talk to smarter people than me about that, which is what if we didn't have the resume?
What if you just had an assessment?
Matt Alder: Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Duarte: You apply for a job- Yeah ... and, it asks you pre-screening questions. Do you live close by? Do you have the right to work in the [00:18:00] country? Are you 18- Yeah ... if you have to be 18? Then here's your assessment.
Matt Alder: Yeah. And I think why not? And I think there are certain things that it always comes back to this I I hear this kind of argument. It's like we need resumes because it's basic compliance data," and all that kind of stuff. But it's just you can get that information.
It doesn't have to be tied up with everything else. So yeah, to me, that makes perfect sense. And again, it depends on the role and the job and who is it you want to recruit and what skills do you need and why. And then I think if you start with that, and then think actually, what's the best way to..."
I think if you start with a blank bit of paper and said, these are the people we want. These are the skills we want. These are the people we wanna recruit," and then you said how can we measure and test these skills?" If you'd never seen a resume, you'd never come up with that as the answer.
Jonathan Duarte: Oh, yeah. That's-
Matt Alder: Which is like- Our TA- "What we need is we need two or three pages typed text, and then we'll be fine. And then we'll have an interview where they can talk us through it." And it's just no one would come up with that, so I think that's the- Yeah ... and that's the kind of mindset that people need to be in.
I think it's very difficult because recruiting has been the same for hun- [00:19:00] 200 years in lots of respects. It's breaking through from all of that, but I think, we're in very different times now.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. That's... Wow. I love that analogy too, 'cause I almost think it's almost like here's some medieval process-
that we're still doing, right? Like some old dating ritual or something. Yeah. And it's like-
Leonardo da Vinci's first resume
Matt Alder: It's funny because people often quote I heard this quote so often. It's like Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first resume. And earlier in the year, I was like- I'm gonna look this up.
So I looked into it, and what he did is he sent a letter to someone when he was quite young, and it was like he wanted to take part in their war effort. And it was just this letter detailing the kind of inventions that he could bring and what he did. And the really funny thing about it is it talks about all that, and then right at the end it says kind of the Italian equivalent of, "Oh yeah, and I'm a bit of a painter."
"A- and actually I'm probably quite good." And I was like, so he's written this letter, and he's actually tailored his resume to the job because he's not, he's put the bit about being a painter on the bottom. So- Yeah ... so it's quite it's quite interesting. It's not really a resume, but it's it's, It's his
Jonathan Duarte: cover letter and resume
yeah.
Matt Alder: Yeah. [00:20:00] It's a cover letter basically. But
Jonathan Duarte: yeah, it's quite funny.
Matt Alder: God. Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: Oh my. That would be really funny to take that and put it together through an AI matching tool and see if they got in the shortlist right away, right?
Matt Alder: Yeah, exactly.
So no, it is really funny.
Jonathan Duarte: Wow. It's mind-blowing. I think that's a interesting thought about the resume as some medieval solution in the- absence of a referral, right?
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Exactly. That's pretty much what resumes become is-
Matt Alder: Yeah
Jonathan Duarte: with no one can tell you that you've done the job before and that you're capable, then we created something in order to do that, and then we decided that manifestation was truth to some extent. And so we had to figure out, okay, read between the lines of that and do that at mass scale.
And hopefully- we train people to do that well. And- it's still 50% right or wrong.
Matt Alder: [00:21:00] Yeah. And it's because of the constraints. There, there's like human recruiters can only read a certain amount of stuff, and we have to get it in some kind of format.
So yeah. Remove the constraints and what happens? I think that's the key thing.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. I've seen some tech that I'll interview this company in one of the other podcasts on this topic, they're doing team assessments-
Matt Alder: Yes ...
Jonathan Duarte: such that-
Matt Alder: I've seen that ...
Jonathan Duarte: yes. Really interesting.
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: And I'm gonna have my whole team on it just run through it 'cause I want to see, if we bring on even at an advisor and say, "I'm gonna... I wanna see. I know your abilities, but I wanna see- ... if you're gonna fit with the team." Like what are we missing?
'Cause that's- Yeah ... I think especially in a startup or any small team, it's having that team structure, are they gonna work together? And- Exactly. Yeah ... if an assessment can prove that out, that almost- Yeah ... can tell you- Totally different than the resume. It's you're looking for some other talent, right? And a skill set y- or, [00:22:00] personality fit if you will, that is different from simply what you're gonna find on a resume.
Matt Alder: Yeah. And I think also, I think there's so much to learn from the world of sports as well because I've had quite a few people from the sporting world on the podcast talking about- how they do stuff. Because they build teams, if they've got an all-star quarterback, they're not gonna sign another one.
Yeah ... so I think that's the thing. It's just like building teams and how do you do that. So I think there's some really interesting parallels there as well, definitely.
Jonathan Duarte: Wow, very cool. So we talked about assessments, talked about resumes some of the AI stuff. What else do you think's- On the mind of TA leaders now, in today's tech that people should be looking out for?
What to do with freed-up time
Matt Alder: Related to this is the whole thing about skills, how we measure skills- and all those sort of things. I think one of the things to think about is that, the tools that are there that people are bringing on do things a lot quicker.
They create this sort of capacity. We're taking all the admin tasks away appears to be a common [00:23:00] refrain when talking about AI. And I think from a TA perspective, really thinking about what happens with the time and the resource that's freed up is really critical.
Because not many people when I ask them, can really tell me actually, with this freed-up time, we're doing this, which is gonna create more value for the business." Yeah. It's more like we're gonna do this 'cause we've got a backlog of that," or, "We thought it would be nice to do this." So I think they're actually thinking about what you can do differently to drive that value for your business with TA is a, is a critical thing at the moment.
And, you know- ... some, some teams are doing it, some teams are not doing it, and I think that it's just a really important thing to be considering.
Jonathan Duarte: I wanna reframe what you just said in a way, 'cause I think about it a little bit differently, but it sparks something in my mind, which is there's a lot of talk about job roles changing, which is an HR function- Yeah
right?
Matt Alder: Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: But our audience, a lot of people are, they're AI HR and [00:24:00] talent acquisition. And in talent acquisition, we have a big change happening. It's happening right now, and everyone's talking about how AI's changing the business. The business department in your company that probably has the biggest AI change right now is probably recruiting.
Yeah. And if you haven't done the strategic work on recruiting, why are you talking about anyone else in the company? Yeah. They're the team under the HR team that is probably seeing the most change from AI. Yeah. And if you're not structuring figuring out those roles and the processes, that should be the first place you look
Matt Alder: Yeah.
I agree, and I think HR in general is... i've had some really interesting conversations. I was talking yesterday to someone who leads AI transformation within- ... an HR department of a large corporate.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.
Matt Alder: And it's like, actually, HR as a whole is about to become a lot more technical because-
of, all of this everything that's going on. So yeah, there's a big transformation out there, and you're right, [00:25:00] recruiting is at the, cutting edge of this at the moment. And also a lot of it is being dictated to by the candidates because the candidates are applying in such large numbers.
A lot of employers are adopting AI because that's their only way of solving , the problem to get through that. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting point.
Jonathan Duarte: But I think- Yeah, that- Yeah ... it's that knee-jerk reaction, which is- Yeah ... fine-
Matt Alder: Yeah
Jonathan Duarte: Because you have, now you have a bigger problem you need to solve, but if you can step back a second, like the transform- Yeah ... that's why, future of work and AI transformation teams are probably saying, "Yeah, one of the biggest processes is the recruiting." And it's- Yeah ... just we're the tip of the sword, if you will.
Step one.
Matt Alder: Yeah, and there's a bigger bit around it about in terms of who you hire because if AI is changing the way that businesses work, and it's changing structures and all this sort of stuff, then who are we hiring and what skills do they have? And I think that's another big consideration and big topic that many organizations are not thinking about.
Jonathan Duarte: All right, this has- Definitely, yeah. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much Matt. Pleasure. Great insights. [00:26:00] Really, and this is why I love doing this, just to get so many ducks in a row in my own head about, hey, this is a pretty interesting way to talk about this and figure it out.
So thanks again. What I'll do is I'll put all your contact info in the show notes. And if anyone wants to reach out to you, what's probably the easiest way for them to find you?
Matt Alder: You can find me on LinkedIn or go to the podcast website, which is recruitingfuture.com.
Jonathan Duarte: Yep. Probably the easiest one, if you type in recruiting podcast, you're probably right there at the top, huh?
Matt Alder: Yeah, very much.
Jonathan Duarte: All right.
Matt Alder: Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: Great, and great to have my first Scottish guest on. So great to cross the pond with you.
Matt Alder: Fantastic. Great to talk to you. Thank you.
Jonathan Duarte: All right. Thanks.
Speaker: Thanks for spending your time here with GoHire Talks and listening to our guests. My intention has always been to create incredible content to help you in your career in recruiting, marketing, business, and leadership. We appreciate all of the insights and feedback you [00:27:00] provide. If you've got guests you'd like us to have on the show, please let us know.
Again, thank you for all your support
