Trust Is the Platform: Why Hiring Needs a New Foundation
Last week I introduced a concept called Work Ready Signal, a six-week TalentSprint designed to help employers stop guessing and start hiring based on demonstrated capability. This is still early innings but what kept coming up in conversations wasn't just about solving individual hiring problems; it was about something bigger: what does the industry actually need if we're serious about making this work at scale?
I'm not an HR professional and I've never worked in recruiting, but I have been a hiring manager, and I know what goes through your mind when you're trying to make decisions with incomplete information. That experience sent me down a research rabbit hole over the past year, digging into hiring studies, workforce reports, and verification challenges across industries, trying to understand why this process feels so broken and what it would actually take to fix it.
The problem isn't talent scarcity, it's the complete absence of trusted capability verification infrastructure. What Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli calls the "skills mismatch" isn't about students lacking capability; it's about employers lacking reliable ways to verify it, and that mismatch is costing companies both time and talent. And, of course, employers have a responsibility to communicate what skills they need for the future of work.
Here's the deeper question I keep getting asked: what's the long game for this industry, what's the end state we're actually building toward? And after sitting with all that noise, here's where I've landed. The long game isn't about building better tools to optimize broken proxies, it's about building the infrastructure that makes those proxies obsolete. The long game is trust.
The Real Crisis in Hiring Isn't Talent. It's Trust.
Every hiring manager I talk to says the same thing: "We're drowning in applications but starving for talent." That statement only makes sense if you believe resumes are reliable signals of performance, and they're not. What we're really facing is a trust gap between what candidates say they can do and what employers can actually verify.
Here's what the research shows, and these numbers stopped me cold when I found them.
Recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on a resume, looking at job titles and company names, while an estimated 90 to 95% of actual student work never reaches an employer.
Right now, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 41% of recent grads are working jobs that don't even require their degree, not because they can't do the work, but because nobody can see what they actually did.
A University of Waterloo study found that GPA predicts less than 3% of job performance.
A 2023 ResumeLab survey showed that 70% of job applicants have lied or would consider lying on their resume, but those are still the things we trust because the industry hasn't built anything better.
That's the system we've accepted, broken and biased, and for the first time, something we can actually choose to fix.
What Employers Actually Need
Through conversations with industry leaders and diving deep into workforce research, employers need to see capability demonstrated through actual performance, not claimed on a resume or inferred from a credential. They need what I call future-ready competencies, things like computational thinking, systems thinking, design thinking, and data literacy, but they need to see these in action. We're not just preparing people for today's jobs, we're preparing them for jobs that don't even exist yet, and that means verification has to assess how people learn, adapt, and apply knowledge to solve novel problems.
The elements that make verification meaningful aren't complicated: storytelling that humanizes outcomes, project based learning that demonstrates real capability, technology integration that mirrors workplace reality, collaborative problem solving, and intentional equity to ensure diverse talent access. These aren't theoretical frameworks, they're what forward-thinking employers already suspect they need but don't have practical ways to implement.
From TalentSprints to Trust Infrastructure
There's a lot of innovation happening in this space right now, new platforms, digital credentials, assessment tools, and much of it is moving in the right direction. But what's become clear to me through this work is that no single solution can fix this alone. What we actually need is something more fundamental: shared infrastructure that everyone can build on, and that will only work if industry and schools collaborate to create it together.
This verification model is informed by my doctoral research on inclusive workforce design and real-world project alignment, especially in emerging industries like space.
Work Ready Signal is where we're proving this works at project scale, but the deeper work is building the infrastructure that makes verification scalable, standardized, and interoperable across the ecosystem. Right now, the entire hiring ecosystem is built around the resume, which means it's built around claims. What the platform for hiring should actually be built on is proof, not branding, not pedigree, just real work reviewed with intention and verified by people who know what good looks like.
The research backs this up. Skills based hiring is 5x more predictive of job performance than hiring based on degrees according to McKinsey and the American Psychological Association, and a 2024 TestGorilla report found that 94% of employers agree skills based hiring works better than resumes, but most of them still can't do it because the industry hasn't built the infrastructure to verify the work. That's not a feature problem, that's a foundation problem, and if trust is the platform then the industry needs to stop building around broken proxies and start building the verification systems that make them obsolete.
At Work Ready Partners, we're building verification infrastructure that operates where employers make decisions, in the practical reality of hiring choices. This is what I call frontline verification infrastructure, designed for managers who are tired of uncertainty and companies that want faster, more equitable, more confident hiring processes. The framework is consistent, evaluated on relevance, mastery, communication, and collaboration — reviewed by trained evaluators who map performance to real roles. Every verification becomes a one page snapshot of what someone can actually do, with rubric scores, artifact links, and human review. Nothing magic, just real.
When trust becomes the foundation, everything gets clearer. Employers can see capability before the interview, schools can anchor learning in relevance, students can get seen for what they've actually done, and the industry can finally move past the proxies it's been stuck on for decades.
The Long Game Starts Now
What the industry needs is boring infrastructure that works: standardized ways to capture real student work, human reviewed verification that employers can actually trust, interoperable systems that work across institutions and platforms, infrastructure that's reliable and built to last. This isn't sexy and it's not the next shiny thing, but it's what we need if we're serious about making hiring more fair, more effective, and more based on what people can actually do.
That's the long game, and it's the only one worth playing. In five years (or sooner, I hope), we won't just ask where someone studied: we'll ask what's been verified. The infrastructure we're building now, through TalentSprints in San Diego and partnerships with forward-thinking employers, is how I believe we can get there. We cannot do this alone. If you're an employer interested in learning more, reach out here.
References
Cappelli, P. (2015). Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2025). The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates. Retrieved from https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
Ladders. (2018). Eye-Tracking Study. Recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds reviewing resumes.
McKinsey & Company and American Psychological Association. (2023). Skills-based hiring is 5x more predictive of job performance than degree based hiring.
ResumeLab. (2023). Resume Statistics Survey. 70% of job applicants have lied or would consider lying on their resume.
TestGorilla. (2024). The State of Skills-Based Hiring Report. 94% of employers agree that skills-based hiring is more predictive of job success than resumes.
University of Waterloo Work Integrated Learning Institute. Correlation of GPA to Co-op Work Performance. GPA accounts for less than 3% of job performance variance (R² = .022).
