How to Design Hiring Challenges You Can Trust

Bridging the Trust Gap: Connecting Proof to Hiring

Artificial intelligence has made it easy for candidates to create something that looks impressive. Anyone can generate a polished presentation, detailed analysis, or sophisticated data visualization. But as AI becomes more capable, the question isn't who can make something that looks good, it's who can prove they actually understand it.

For years, employers have relied on resumes, transcripts, and interviews to assess capability. But as I wrote in "Trust is the Platform," we're facing a trust gap: 90 to 95% of actual student work never reaches employers, recruiters spend 7.4 seconds scanning resumes, and 70% of candidates admit to lying on applications. The system isn't working because it was never designed to show proof; rather, it was designed to show claims.

At Work Ready Partners, our goal is to support a verification infrastructure that closes this gap. But here's what we've learned: not every project produces proof that employers can trust. The difference between a project and proof isn't the output; it's the design.

Why Project Design Matters to Employers

When you sponsor a Talent Sprint through Work Ready Signal, you're not asking students to complete a generic assignment. You're presenting a real company challenge that requires demonstrated capability to solve. But if that challenge isn't designed correctly, what you get back won't give you the signal you need to make a hiring decision.

That's where the Work Ready Impact Framework™ (WRIF) comes in.

WRIF is the methodology we use at Work Ready Partners to co-create projects with employers, ensuring that the challenges you present actually generate verifiable proof of the competencies you're hiring for. It's not a pedagogical tool for educators. It's our approach to designing employer-sponsored work that translates directly into hiring confidence.

Originally, WRIF was developed through my doctoral research at NYU as a design framework for EdTech products and lesson plans. But when I started building Work Ready Signal™, I realized the same principles that made learning experiences employer-relevant could also ensure that employer-created challenges produced reliable verification. Today, it's the backbone of Work Ready Partners’ work with companies to structure Talent Sprints that deliver proof, not just participation.

Five Pillars That Are in Service of Verifiable Proof

When we co-create challenges with employers using WRIF, we're designing for five elements that help to ensure we make capability visible and verifiable:

Storytelling: Can They Communicate Impact?
Every professional needs to explain not just what they built, but why it matters. When we design challenges with storytelling built in, students must contextualize their work for real stakeholders. This isn't creative writing — it's the ability to turn technical work into business value. You see whether a candidate can translate complexity into clarity, which is exactly what they'll need to do in your organization.

Performance: Can They Actually Do It?
Readiness isn't claimed; it's demonstrated. When students tackle your challenge, they're not answering multiple-choice questions about the work; they're doing the work. They design, build, analyze, test, and defend their decisions under real constraints. Performance-based projects make skills visible in ways resumes never can, and give you artifacts you can review before you ever schedule an interview.

Advanced Technology: Can They Work Like Professionals?
Your teams use AI, data tools, and modern tech stacks to solve problems. The challenges we co-create mirror that reality. Students practice using technology the way your teams actually use it; not as a novelty, but as a working tool. When you review their work, you're seeing fluency with the systems and thinking processes your roles require.

Collaboration: Can They Work in Teams?
No workflow or job happens in isolation. When we design challenges with structured collaboration, students take on defined roles, share accountability, and demonstrate communication and leadership. This isn't group work where contribution is invisible; it's designed so you can see individual performance within team dynamics. You get verification of collaboration as a measurable skill, not just a resume buzzword.

Empowerment for All: Does This Reach All Talent?
The talent you need exists in places traditional recruiting misses. When we co-create challenges with equity built into the design, we ensure that capability, not privilege or prior access, determines who succeeds. This expands your talent pool without lowering standards, because better design creates pathways to proof that weren't there before.

From Your Challenge to Verified Proof

Here's how this works in practice:

You bring us a real challenge that your company is facing. We work with you to structure it using WRIF principles, ensuring it requires the competencies you're actually hiring for and produces artifacts you can evaluate. Students tackle the challenge in a six-week Talent Sprint. Our evaluation system reviews their work using a consistent rubric (that is co-designed with your organization) that maps to the skills you need today. You, as the sponsoring employer, receive Verification Summaries; these are one-page snapshots of what each candidate can actually do, with rubric scores, artifact links, and human review.

This isn't another skills assessment. It's not a badge or a certificate. It's proof of applied capability on challenges that matter to your business, verified by a system designed to give you confidence before you make an offer (if you are hiring).

Why This Matters Now

AI has lowered the cost of looking qualified. It's raised the cost of knowing who actually is.

Right now, 41% of recent graduates are working in jobs that don't require their degree. This is not because they can't do the work, but because you can't see what they actually did. A University of Waterloo study found that GPA predicts less than 3% of job performance. Skills-based hiring is 5x more predictive than degree-based hiring, according to McKinsey, and 94% of employers agree it works better than resumes, but most can't implement it because the infrastructure to verify work doesn't exist at scale.

That's what we're building at Work Ready Partners. WRIF is how we ensure the projects we co-create with your organization produce the verified proof you need to hire with confidence. It's the methodology behind the infrastructure. When trust is the platform, project design is the foundation.

If you're tired of making hiring decisions based on incomplete information, the answer isn't better resume screening. It's a better-designed proof.