From state governments to the private sector, many companies are eliminating requirements that candidates for some of their jobs need a college degree. Instead, these organizations are trying to figure out what a person’s skills and potential are, not just whether they have a diploma.

This is not an effort to downgrade or diminish the importance of a college degree, an MBA, a master’s degree, or other credential. It is simply a growing recognition that people can build their skills through traditional schooling, or they can build it by other means such as on-the-job training, apprenticeships, the military, online, self-driven courses, boot camps, work for non-profits and other volunteer work (such as serving on boards), and so on.

‍

Moving Beyond the Resume

Resumes have traditionally done a poor job at capturing people’s skills. Most of us have talents we don’t spell out in a resume, though they have great value to employers. A teacher may be fantastic at explaining complex concepts simply, which is a skill that can be valuable in many corporate positions such as training, customer service, and sales. But that teacher may not have described that skill on their resume, as it may be second nature to them. A military veteran may have had a title in the military that means very little to a hiring manager or corporation. AI can be used to uncover how the skills that person developed in the military are similar to skills needed by a private-sector company, non-profit, or government employer.

Artificial-intelligence based interviews give job seekers a chance to be hired based on their skills and potential — in ways that are often lost by people reading a resume. These AI technologies have great potential for people with untraditional backgrounds, who should not be screened out because they could not afford college or because they did not work for a “brand-name” employer. The interviewers ask people about their skills, rather than the myriad of unrelated-to-work questions job candidates have for years experienced in job interviews.

AI interviews can help capture the “soft skills” often missed by a simple glance at a resume. Companies have for years talked about the importance of soft skills — we prefer alternative names like “durable skills” and/or “power skills” that emphasize how important they are — but defaulted to rejecting people based on the limited information that’s on resumes. AI interviews provide a powerful opportunity to move great talent on to the next round of interviews, likely with a human, because of their talents such as adaptability, innovation, kindness, empathy, creativity, grit, leadership, teamwork, ethics, and more.

‍

Skills and the Avatar

Using an avatar interview to find the candidates who fit best for your job out of hundreds or thousands who have sent in an application is an especially strong way of hiring based on skills and competencies (more on that in this guide).

A lot of other AI technologies aimed at hiring based on skills, not degrees, focus too much on “hard skills.” They may be able to identify that a candidate familiar with one type of technology would be good at using a second technology. However, they don’t always do a great job of measuring skills like adaptability that are increasingly valuable to many organizations. 

Avatars can “rule in” and not rule out people who human screeners may have ruled out in an initial human-to-human interview. Candidates consistently told us the avatar made the experience feel more human, helped reduce their nerves, and gave them someone to engage with — without the pressure of a real person. One job seeker told us after an avatar interview: “I felt like I could open up more. I wasn't as nervous as I would be with an actual human.” And, said another:  “The avatar made me feel more at ease than humans, I guess, because I knew it wasn't real but it also was very engaging.”

Avatars have been programmed to ask people about their skills and potential. They don’t discard people for superficial reasons such as their handshakes, eye contact, silly coffee tests, secret water tests, and so on.   As one job seeker told us after their interview: “The avatar did not focus on my body language or make me feel uncomfortable.”

Avatars ask people about their skills without any of the limitations of humans. For example, humans have a “halo effect” where they are more impressed or less impressed with some people’s skills because of their initial impression of them. Humans can be biased toward primacy or recency, favoring their first interviewees or their last few. Humans get tired at the end of the day, or in the morning, and can miss out on great talent with great skills.

‍

Avatars Are Just One Component of Skills-Based Hiring

Avatars alone won’t make companies hire based on people’s skills and potential. You may have a manager who’s convinced they need to hire someone who went to Stanford or worked at Google. In that case, a cultural change is necessary to hire based on skills, not just pedigree.

A resume alone is not enough to make this change happen. 

Avatars can help uncover skills that people cannot, because candidates may be more comfortable with an AI interview during an initial round and because human biases and other behaviors (like fatigue) can cause interviewers to miss great people.

Once people have been ruled in, not out, because of their skills, it’s usually up to a human being to handle the next round of interviews. They can then learn more about the candidate’s soft and hard skills, not where the job candidate placed their empty coffee mug.

‍

Let us know if you’d like to learn more about using avatars to hire based on skills.