Secondly, skill verification is a form of leaky abstraction and may not be what hiring managers want. It’s most often not about finding the most skilled candidate but rather the most compatible candidate. This can commonly mean finding the least sucky person from a pool of sucky people.
Hiring managers can game that by setting requirements criteria for a job. If you want extremely skilled people then get down to the metal and find candidates that like to work without tools or abstractions. If you super versatile candidates find people with experience in a bazillion different tools. If you just want a body to fill a seat that is quick to hire/fire select for the latest trendy framework.
The best way to determine the right candidate is to ignore the nonsense on their resume and just talk to people. Dig in and see what they really want and then challenge it with questions only they can answer. Most people are bodies just wanting to be hired without bringing anything special to the table so that’s what most employers target for. The real challenge here is finding people that are highly skilled in a market where exceptional skills outside the bell curve are not commonly rewarded, because these people will not self identify as awesome when looking for work in compatibility driven system. The people that most typically do identify as awesome tend to not be as awesome as they believe.
I talked to hiring managers and most of them say skills is good but what we want is a personality because skills can be taught and personality cannot be. Personality I have experienced that, very skilled teammate exceptional, but personality was not a fit, so the management was not happy.
"The best way to determine the right candidate is to ignore the nonsense on their resume and just talk to people.", that is true and this I have tried with when I was playing the role of hiring manager trying to find a team member to work with me in the company I worked for. I imagine the peer-to-peer verification framework like this talk to people and ask them personalized questions, this is how exceptional talent will be flushed out I think.
Given that, if you were to imagine a tool that helps surface those 'quietly exceptional' people—the ones who are highly skilled but won't self-identify—what would that tool look like? Does it even need to be a tool to begin with?
I like your idea of verifiable skills but I don’t think the proposal is solid. We need a trusted third-party as a validator so everyone is happy. Otherwise, we bring bias and corruption into this.
The problem is currently solved by professional certification — yes it could be gamed but it provides an official confirmation from a reputable source rather than someone’s word that you’re good.
Please keep iterating! We need better tools!
For example to prove someone is an senior engineer from google I can ask for a pay slip and references and yes certifications, so we would become that rusted partner. Still working on the proposal and iterations, I wanna talk to much engineers, hiring manages as possible since this is going to be for everyone, to navigate this wild job market.
We definitely need better tools, at the moment it is wild that it takes 1000 of applications to just get an answer from any company, this not right at all
- You say "engineering" verification, I checked and it's all computer science, monkey coding, full stack whatever, not only is that NOT engineering, it wasn't before generative AI, and it's definitely not now. This is programming. Programming is writing, and with AI it's more of storytelling rather than engineering.
- How would this platform measure real engineering skills? Critical thinking, problem solving, etc.? What about Electrical Engineering? Civil Engineering? Robotics design? Etc.
- I didn't open an account, but on the first page it asks for LinkedIn.. really? I don't trust most of what I read there. GitHub? Not only does it bring us back to software-related topics, but what if I don't use GitHub?
I think the best way to verify someone's skills in the engineering world is a portfolio that shows their projects and what was accomplished during them. A resume will never be enough, and interviews should be limited to personal interactions and assessing how the potential candidate communicates. Where needed, maybe an assignment to complete and return after a few days -one that mimics the potential project or role they will be working on- because asking questions during an interview is not enough to measure their skills at all.