Written by AI, Read by AI

Welcome to Know Your People from First Advantage, a show about trust in a changing world.

The rules, the technology, the way people work, what customers expect, all moving at once. Trust has to keep pace, and it’s two way. Organizations trusting the worker, the worker trusting organizations, and consumers trusting the provider, and it’s always changing. Trust is established on the first job and reearned on every job after.

This isn’t a show that hands you answers. We sit down with the people who live it, trust and safety leaders, those working in regulation, and the experts chasing fraud. The honest version, not the easy one. Let’s get into it.

Hello, and welcome to Know Your People, the first advantage podcast on the evolving landscape of identity and fraud. I’m Maureen Lally. Every episode, we sit down with the people rethinking how organizations know who they are dealing with, who they hire, who they work with, and who they trust. Today’s conversation is about the two rituals hiring has trusted for over a century, the resume and the interview.

And what organizations can rely on as the evidentiary value of both. I’m delighted to have Ben Eubanks with me today, and it’s a pleasure to be back in conversation. Ben and I have both known each other for years from earlier chapters of both of our careers.

Ben is chief research officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, where he studies how organizations actually find, hire, and keep their people as opposed to how they say they do. He is the author of two bestselling books, Talent Scarcity and The Payroll Promise, and the host of We’re Only Human, one of the most listened to podcasts in HR. His newest research puts numbers on something many of us have felt for a while. The documents and rituals that hiring has relied on for a century are quietly losing their evidentiary value, such as resumes that are being built by AI tools, which may be hard to believe, or interviews that AI can coach and a candidate through. And then funnels, huge funnels of job openings that are filling at a record volume. And that’s what we’re here to talk about.

So Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Maureen. Glad to be here and looking forward to diving into some of the research, telling some stories, and hopefully giving the audience some good takeaways in the conversation today.

Great.

So, Ben, you were quoted recently in a Bloomberg article on the use of AI tools in hiring where you make an observation that really stuck with us. Gig platforms, for example, never really trusted the interview in the first place.

Where did that thought come from?

So when I think about the times that I’ve worked in organizations, so before I was a researcher, I was an HR leader myself. And so thinking about all the decisions we made across hiring, whether it was for a contractor or whatever else, we really looked for evidence of capability. That’s what we hired on. Anyone can say they can do anything.

I could maybe convince you in the next few minutes, Maureen, that I can be really great brain surgeon, but you should never let me near an operating room. Okay. Don’t do that. So for those types of gig work, the thing that stands stood out to me as a practitioner was the people have to prove to us somehow they can do this and the interview unless you’re interviewing someone to interview other people, it it’ll teach you anything.

It doesn’t tell me that they can truly do whatever the task is. If they’re building electrical parts, if they’re training someone in an aircraft, if they’re coding software, whatever the project is, an interview is not always the best way to get at that. It it helps.

It’s useful, but it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about a So if AI can now coach a candidate through a live interview and a coding test, what is the interview still measuring?

The interview is measuring someone’s tolerance for interviews at some level.

You and I both know people probably that are looking for work right now and you hear some stories about well, I’m in my third, fourth, fifth interview for this company and there have to be decreasing returns at some point of the number of times you put someone in an interview situation. And I don’t know if companies are trying to gather like that one key thing and figure out if this is the right person or not. But there…

When AI can help someone do those sorts of things. I was talking with a friend of mine. I was quoting that article that had gone through this interview process, technical screening to hire someone for a data analytics team. And the person seemed incredibly qualified and capable and my friend’s like, she could do my job.

She’s brilliant. And then gets on the job and can’t do even a fraction of the actual work. And they realized that she had been using these tools to cheat in the interview. And we can go down a whole path of what’s cheating, what’s not.

I think most of us would agree if I’m getting answers from an AI bot to help me ace an interview when I can’t really do the job, most of us construe that as cheating and that’s what ended up happening to them. And unfortunately, I’m hearing from that sort of sort of thing happen more and more from the employers that we’re working with.

Right. So if knowledge work hiring is being forced to the place where gig arrived at a few years ago, what’s the the process? Do you verify the person’s identity, test the work, and trust neither the paper nor the conversation? Kinda how would you characterize that?

I’ll tell you that when we actually put them put them to the test, we say, tell us about the different signals that candidates and people can give you for for roles. What are the things that you trust the most? 98% of companies tell us they trust other things more than a resume. 98%.

Only 2% say the resume is the best end all be all thing to tell us if a person’s capable. Those other 98% though say things like a work test or a simulation. Let me put Maureen in this situation that she’ll have to do on the job, see how she does, how she reacts, what sort of work product she can produce. Those sorts of things are how companies are leaning.

And fortunately, the data back that up. There’s been long standing data in IO psychology that shows if you want to select someone, please do not use things like their GPA or their tenure industry or if they work for another company in the space or what college they went to, those things are not connected or correlated to their performance. But you can look at things like, they do this simulation of a task they’ll do every day on the job? If they do really well on that, then there’s a chance they’ll be able to be performing that day to day as a quality worker.

But unfortunately, those sorts of things are sometimes hard to do. In a coding situation, sure, we can build a build an example like that. But if someone’s applying for a a sales role, if someone’s applying for customer service or something like that, there are other jobs that are a little harder to may build build out a simple situation or scenario for that make it harder to to get at. But that is what the data show are the most valuable predictors of someone’s performance on the job.

And that’s the the thing we’re looking for. Before we ever pick someone, we wanna find whatever that signal is that we can make a decision because it’s very expensive to make the wrong decision and try to try to back out of that after the fact. So that’s that’s the the best thing to do there.

So was there a moment in your research when you realized that the interview was really being undermined rather than simply just changing over time?

I think that’s a great question.

I’m I’m thinking about when we start to hear about things like this example I gave a moment ago. When we start hearing about things like deep fake video, there was a company last year that launched and they’ve since changed direction because they came under some heat for their approach. But anyone, anyone with an iPhone could train an AI deep fake of themselves like shoulders and up that they could then use. And I’ve had leaders like, well, why does that matter if they’re interviewing, if it’s that, it’s not a big deal.

They can be over there looking all the answers up on a computer at the same time as they look like they’re attentive and focused and caring in the conversation and you don’t realize they’re actually cheating behind the scenes. So those sorts of things are continuing to emerge that are going to make interviews less valuable if they’re virtual. Let’s make that distinction right here. I’m talking to companies like LinkedIn.

There are software companies that are saying we’re doing more in person interviews than we’ve ever done in probably a decade because that’s a way around this. All the problems we’re talking about with the interview so far are around anything that’s going to be digital or virtual. You have someone in person, it’s much harder to do that sort of cheating that we’re seeing there and come to using that as a way to get someone in even when they quit doing those many years ago because it’s expensive. It’s time consuming and you bring in more people than you select.

And so it’s always going to be a bit of a cost added in there.

But again, as I said a moment ago, the cost of picking the wrong person is pretty high. And so we’re going to either pay that cost on the front end or we’re going to pay on the back end with the wrong decision.

Well, that’s well said. So now your newest research found only one in three employers are very confident a resume reflects the candidate’s true skills.

Yet two in three still put a resume screen at the beginning of the hiring funnel.

How does an industry end up leading with its least trusted document?

I’ll give you a quick story that illustrates this perfectly. So we have a a friend of the family, Emily.

And when some… Her neighbors went away for a trip and asked her to house sit for them. Hey, check the… Feed the cat, get the mail, things like that. And so when they came back, said, hey, thank you, Emily, doing that. We brought you a a plant as a gift. So thank you.

And Emily was like, oh gosh. I I kill everything I touch. I’m not good with plants. I I can’t have flowers.

Why did they bring this to me? You know what? I’m gonna do it right. And so she puts a schedule on her phone.

She starts watering it, moving it in the sun and and trying to do all this care. And a month later, the plant looks beautiful. It looks wonderful. But one day she’s cleaning her desk and she bumps it and knocks at the floor and she’s devastated.

All that work lost. And she picks this plant up and realizes that it’s fake. It’s not even a real plant. After all the…

A whole month of watering it and taking care of it, it’s completely fake. And we laugh at that, but every one of us does things like that at work. And this is an example of the interviews piece here. She could have kept doing the same thing over and over and never got a better result, but it’s something that she just had programmed herself to do.

And employers have programmed themselves to look at resumes and to do interviews because that’s what we’ve known for a long time. So to change that requires a behavior change, and that’s arguably the hardest part of any talent or HR function is changing behaviors and decisions. It’s easy to run reports. It’s easy to buy software.

It’s easy to do those things, but it’s really hard to change how people think and act at work. And at the same time, like they don’t control the whole hiring process. Hiring managers still want to see resumes. Hiring managers, many of them still think more resumes is better.

Even if it’s not, even if the quality isn’t there, they think more is better. So I think all of those sorts of things are little pictures of the way we think about this has been rooted in those two key things for a long time.

And increasingly reality is diverging from what that long held like about… There was value in that ten years ago. Today, reality that value is diverging from that.

So Ben, what are some things that employers can do right now to prevent a potential employee or candidate fraud?

So we’ve had…

We’ve talked to a couple dozen employers this year as part of this research effort, trying to get some context qualitative and we found out there are six big things they can be thinking about, six things they can be doing. So if anyone’s out there right now, this is your chance to take some notes and and get some good ideas out of this. So the number one thing is identity verification. Right?

Being able to do an ID check, a location check, plus try to figure out if this person is who they say they are just to give us that first cut. Next is interview integrity. When we’re doing an interview, maybe make them share their screen or do an on camera test. They don’t get that camera off Or we vary the questions a little bit to make sure that someone can’t find the answers out online and then come in and and fake it because they already seen the questions.

Number three is background validation. Go and check them out. Do…

Or do they have reference checks? Can we do an employment verification? Can we prove that they did that thing they said they did?

Number four, a digital footprint. Are they on LinkedIn? If they’re in many of the the types of jobs that you and I are in, then they’re probably going to have a profile out there talking about what they’re doing. They have social media profiles or GitHub profiles just to prove they are who they say they are. This is not to go three layers deep and check all their posts and everything else, but just do they have some sort of background we can verify?

Number five, policy and got…

Policy and governments. So do we have an AI policy? Do we tell candidates what we expect? Do we give them guidelines about when and that…

When not to use AI in the hiring process? If we say nothing, they’ll assume it’s okay. Some companies say absolutely none, never, not at all. And there’s a whole range of things on the spectrum between those two extremes.

But telling Candidates what you expect is helpful if you want them to follow that. And then finally is actually think about the readiness as your organization.

Do your hiring managers have the tools in their tool belt to tell if someone is a little bit off in the interview and not just nerves, but something is… Like, ask a question and it takes five seconds and they read an answer that sounds just like this. Okay. That’s definitely not a real answer. I could tell something’s weird is going on. So training recruiters, training hire managers. So those are six different categories of things that employers should be thinking about. Some of those people and skill, some of those process, some of those technology to try to touch on the different things and filter and make sure that they’re not getting caught by candidate fraud.

Right. Great.

So 92% of recruitment leaders say AI generated resumes are now commonplace. And 72% have seen application volumes rise in the last year.

So what happens to a funnel that is machine written at one end and machine read at the other?

I don’t even want to imagine that Maureen. I don’t even want to think about that future that we’re living right now. That’s that’s a terrible place to be. So we’re talking to so many companies that tell us when we open a job, we have to close it within a few days because we get a thousand applicants for it, for example.

And when I start looking through there, they can see immediately which ones are obviously AI generated because if there’s a cover letter or anything like that, you start to see very similar patterns emerge in the writing. The other day, a leader shared an example of this with me where he showed me two side by side resumes that were almost exactly the same verbatim because what they do is they drop in the job description. They drop in their resume, say rewrite this to look similar. And you end up with this thing that’s a cookie cutter approach.

And when all resumes look the same, we have a hard time as employers trying to figure out, okay, that’s not gonna get us where we need to go. We gotta find something else to look at that. That’s why they have started leaning on interviews, but even those are now suspect. So these leaders are seeing more volume.

They’re seeing and knowing that there’s more AI written content in those resumes and more resumes generated there. And so they are in this between a rock and a hard place. I’ve got to look at something to bet people. I’ve got to find some way to shortlist people, But the things that we’ve relied on for a very long time are becoming less and less useful by the day.

So do you think this is a fraud problem or a design problem? Did the hiring build a system that invites this sort of embellishment or is it just something that we’re evolving for?

I would say both of those are true. There are let me have a little bit of compassion for a second. I’m a dad of five children. If I was out of work for a period of time and I’m trying to find a job, I can’t say that I would not resort to using whatever tools I could to try to get a job because my kids are hungry.

So I have a hard time faulting people for that. At the same time, when you look at long standing research on success, one of the things you find is integrity is a key indicator of someone’s long term success. So there’s like two things pulling at me right there. So I have a lot of compassion and care for the people that are trying to find work, trying to find it any way they can.

We have built a system as employers that rewards speed and prioritizes just quickness.

One click apply and you’re done. Let’s make it as low friction as possible. And I will never forget that about three or four years ago in our talent acquisition research, we had surveyed about a thousand different employers around the world around their talent practices. And what we found was many of them were saying, hey, we’re getting so many candidates who are struggling to figure out the quality piece.

And in that same research, we look across on the candidate side, the candidates are saying, I’m willing to spend more time if it helps me stand out in the interview. If it helps me look more capable, if it helps me to show what I’m good at, I don’t wanna be picked or not picked based on how well I wrote my resume. And today it’s how well Jack GPT wrote my resume. They want a chance to put their best foot forward and employers that give candidates a chance to do that.

What we found was even if the person isn’t selected, but they got to show their very best, they know they were picked or not picked based on something they could control. And that gives people a better sense of comfort and respect for the hiring process and not this black hole situation many of them are in where they throw the resume in and cross their fingers and start to pray and hope for the best.

Yeah. So everything of everything that you looked at in your study, which number surprised you the most and which one should be most of a concern to a CHRO?

I’ll tell you that when we started looking at different cuts of the data, we actually asked a question in there about employers. Are you frequently encountering candidates that intentionally misrepresent their abilities?

Okay. If any of us hear that, we’re… As a as an HR leader, like, that’s that’s not a good place to be. We found for those companies that say they’re finding those things is that there’s a very broken signal in place. Those companies, the majority say that resumes are their primary decision driver.

About half of those say that volume has increased and then 32% of those companies. So one out of three are getting more than a 100 resumes on average. So they’re they’re building this whole process, like you said earlier, around this thing that’s not true anymore, that’s not accurate anymore, and they’re trying to figure out what to do different.

The number one concern for those companies around AI, you’re have lots of fears and worries about AI. We said, what is the biggest concern that you have around it?

They are worried that AI generated content will mask someone’s true ability.

Period. Plain and simple. It’s going to show up, look good and there’s nothing behind it. And we see that in all aspects of our lives today.

When you see a very polished post online that you can tell is written by an AI tool. There’s no substance behind it. It’s just a bunch of fluff. And that’s the same thing employers are worried about.

A lot of fluff on a resume and there’s no substance behind it with a person capable of stepping in to do that job.

I have a heart for this topic because when I was a recruiter, this was the lifeblood of the company. This made like was a make or break moment. This was the key to our success and growth as an organization as a fast growing company. How fast I could find qualified people was a limiter on our organization’s growth path.

And so I took this so seriously. I care so deeply about it. And so the leaders today that are having to make these decisions, having to champion these processes, anyone listening that’s thinking about Ben’s giving me more work to do because I don’t know how to how to address this. Any of those leaders that are facing those things have a big heart for them because they’re in a situation that’s gonna be really difficult to overcome because there’s not a fast easy solution to that.

Right. Okay. We’re gonna shift a little over to the gig economy right now. So one corner of the gig economy sits right at this intersection, which is professional freelance platforms. So skilled work hired through a marketplace at scale. No interview to fall back on. So do you think this is where these trends started and are potentially going to evolve to others?

So there was actually a piece of research that came out either late last year or early this year because I spoke about it in January at a roundtable event. We had a bit of a debate about this because this piece of research came out that said, as AI became a thing that was used more commonly, the number of low quality people selected on gig platforms increased. So companies were hiring more low quality workers in gig platforms as it became easier for someone to look polished using AI. Previously, someone’s effort, their capability around writing and communicating, the style they put into that, all those things made them stand out and was a good proxy for performance that employers could rely on.

And as it became easier for someone to simulate that proficiency using AI, employers started picking more low quality candidates. And essentially they were low quality selections were crowding out the high quality people. High quality person that could have done maybe two x better work is still sitting there waiting to get picked because they didn’t get selected because a low quality person did. Not a low quality person, but low quality work, right?

In terms of selection. So that was the thing that stuck out to me. This thing is already happening and has been happening in those gig platforms. And so anyone that’s relying on that cover letter or that profile as their primary decision driver is going to face the exact same problems that employers will using the signals that they’re looking at.

So when there is no employer in the middle, just the platform and a worker, who owns the risk of a misrepresented skill? Everybody sharing that?

I’m not an attorney. So I’ll say that the worker, if they’re using AI tools provided by the platform to make themselves look more polished, that’s the risk they’re going to run to is they’re going to look like the people using AI to write their social media posts and you start to see they all sound the same. So if they’re using those tools and they’re provided by that platform, that’s a risk because they may end up looking like and sound like everybody else and not standing out for the reasons that they want to.

What we find over and over again, whether it’s me speaking on a stage or it’s something that we’ve written in a report that we’re doing research on is we will add in little examples, little analogies, little things that tie back to real experiences that I’ve had as an HR leader because those are the things that an AI system can’t replicate. And so if someone’s out there as individual in the gig economy, trying to find roles, trying to get get selected for things, don’t fall to the easy trap that everybody else is because then you sound like everybody else. And then it’s just a gamble on whether you’re get the opportunity or not.

Great.

So if the resume is failing and the interview is compromised, what should hiring managers be using instead or in addition to? Verified identity, verified work, verified skills? What would your recommendation be?

I’ve got a magic wand here, Maureen. That might work just as well as some of the other stuff there they’ve been relying on.

Anything an employer can do to try to verify the work product or capability of the person is going to lead to a better selection decision than anything that’s written, any sort of interview experience, things like that. I’ll tell you, I have had incredible hires in the last two decades of my time helping to select people that were not good interviewers. People that were very nervous, people that were shy, people that were just not good in that setting, but I was able to draw out of them. I have done this thing you’re asking about and I’ve done it well, even if I don’t communicate that well, a good interview, I could pull those things out of people and understand that.

Again, most of those interviews were done in person though. That’s the caveat here. But if someone can understand about someone’s ability to do that, that’s going to give you a better selection decision than any of the other sorts of signals we’ve relied on for broader selection for a long time. So trying to vet who the person is, that will get you around some of the fraud issues, things like that.

If you can prove the person is who they say they are, that cuts through that one layer of bad actors. But then you get to the whole messy middle where people are trying to stand out, but they’re using AI tools to do it and they all start to sound the same. So anything we can do to get them to to show us what they’re capable of, what they’re able to accomplish, that’s a win. At the same time, I know there are people that are going to try to use AI to do those things.

And again, you see those stories. I hear them from employers where we give someone do this thing for us. Please don’t use AI. If you wanna see what you’re capable of this, you know, we’ll do AI stuff later in the hiring process.

And then they get all the answers back and I can clearly tell people use AI to generate those. And those people go immediately to the to the scrap heap because they can’t follow instructions. And they start looking through the other ones that are more original. The…

If I can take one step back to tell you why that matters. There are some research that came out from the University of Toronto about a year ago that says when people are using tools like generative AI, ChatGPT, Cloud, whatever else, their ideas are very homogenous. They’re very similar. They’re not diverse.

They’re not as expansive. They’re not as creative. And even after someone stops using those tools, their ideas are still fairly narrow compared to someone who is not using those to get their work done. There’s some other data that shows that it decreases someone’s ability or someone’s willingness to push through when they are faced with a challenge or a difficulty.

It’s not the easy button. They don’t go there. And so that sort of thing to me is why this matters so much. If I can’t get someone through a hiring process without having to fall back on that, how am I going get them to their first day on the job without having to have this tool as their lifeline to get things done?

So what does your research say that employers are actually moving towards versus what they say that they intend to do?

When employers are trying to think about how to move past the traditional signals, the number one thing they tell us they’re trying to do to verify someone’s abilities is a practical exercise, a simulation, or a work sample. Number one. Right behind that is putting them in situations or behavioral interviews that draw out their experiences and let them paint a picture of what they’re capable of. Not just just making the rookie mistake for interviewers.

Hey, can you do this? Yes, no. Move on from there. But tell me about a time that you had to do this as a leader.

Tell me about a time that you had to have a hard conversation with someone about their performance when you deeply cared about them or whatever those situations are. Get some understanding about that. The next thing employers are doing to help verify that is actually post hire probation. Going back to that thing that’s most…

Many employers have gotten away from that, but they…

That gives us a chance to sort of try before we buy from an employer context before we commit to that person. The next one is using more structure in interviews, not using as an unstructured conversation, but using it as a way to really dig in deep and make sure every candidate is vetted the exact same way. And we don’t get swayed by, oh, I went to the same school as you. Let’s talk about that for twenty minutes.

Oh, great. We’ve got an interview to do. No. We don’t waste time on those things.

We focus on the key attributes necessary to do the job and the questions aligned to that to make sure we understand someone’s competency capability for that work. So those are some of the ways that employers are trying to get back to that.

Some of them are successful, some of them are not. If I’m talking to an employer and trying to give them some advice on this, you can’t do it all at once. You can’t just snap your fingers and switch overnight. So look at those jobs you’re hiring the most.

Maybe you run a call center and you hire customer service agents and that’s 80% of your workforce and you hire them, you know, dozens of them a month. You run a small call center. That’s the job you start with. That’s the work…

That’s where you begin. You don’t try to do it for everything. You start there. If you’re in the manufacturing capacity and you’re hiring people working on the shop floor and you hire 50 of those people a month because there’s high turnover, let’s focus on that job and how do we start to vet for those people?

Whatever the job is you hire the most, whatever is most aligned to revenue or is a high consequence position for the business. I talked to a biotech company. They only had 20 employees, but their average comp was like $300,000 a year because they had these special medical researchers on the team. What they found was if one of those people left the people in their circle at the company were also at a higher likelihood of leaving.

And so they built special strategies not just for hiring but for attention to keep those people. So we have to employers that want to bring on the right people and keep them long term giving them a chance to show what they can do in the interview lets them make a better more informed decision. And again, as I said a minute ago from a candidate experience perspective interestingly enough, the person who’s picked, obviously they’re happy. But I’m not picked for that.

I feel better about the process because I got a chance to show what I was about and not just kicked out because my resume didn’t have the one keyword in it that would have put me in the stack.

Exactly. No. I think that’s a very good point as well.

So if we look forward five years, when anything on a piece of paper and anything on a screen can be synthesized, what does trust in a worker actually rest on?

I think trust in a worker’s ability five years from now is going to be very similar to what it was in the past. Other than the proxy of someone showing up in the office and us assuming that means that they’re they’re productive and and qualified and capable. That’s always been a bad proxy for someone’s capability at work.

It’s looking at their actual work products, what they’re about, what they can do, the results and impact they have. I was meeting with a company just last week and I was talking to their their GM, their engineering leadership. And they’re talking about some of the process improvement things they’re doing at the company, at this manufacturing plant. And what they told me is for most companies, it’s a common thing in The US especially where people have a suggestion box or someone throws an idea out there and it becomes someone else’s responsibility to carry that out to triage and then carry those ideas out.

He said, when he worked at a facility in Japan, he said, if you brought an idea up, it was assumed that you own that idea. You had to measure it. You had to proof proof proof it out. You had to do a beta test or a pilot.

You had to bring those results back and then you could get investment in it, but you couldn’t just say, here’s an idea. Someone else needs to vet it and figure it out and maybe use it. And he said that level of ownership in that was very different. And I feel like that’s the same thing here.

People will have or should have a better understanding of their abilities, their performance, what productivity looks like in their job, and we’ll have a better awareness of how that aligns to their ability to do to do the work they do. In a resume, if you’ve had a long tenure at a company and then you have to go back and refresh your resume, it’s always that weird moment like, what have I done? What have I accomplished? And you you have this moment where you think, did I do anything?

Okay. Yes, I did. And you start to realize I did a lot, but I was conditioned early on to think about those things through the impacts and the outcomes. That’s not a common thing.

You could teach that to most people when they’re writing their resume. Don’t just tell her what you did. Tell me what you accomplished.

Tell me what the outcomes and impacts were. And so as we think about those sorts of things, that is going to be the the future of this. Like it always has been. I think that’s going to continue to be this emphasis on proof and value and showcasing what you’re you’re capable of because that’s one of the things that speaks for itself.

So identity verification.

So does identity verification stay just a moment at the front door when somebody comes in as as a new employee, or is it continuous? And does it become an infrastructure so you have credentials verified once and then that travels with you throughout your tenure with the company even if you are a long tenure company?

Or does every employer have to recheck from scratch every time? What what do you think about the future of that?

I think the value of that at the front end has probably never been higher.

The value of making sure I know that Maureen is who Maureen says she is, it’s more important than ever. And I had someone the other day tell me, well, I’m sure that some of that fraud stuff happens, but it’s probably few and far between. Like, yeah, but if someone who truly is a bad actor from another government, whatever else, or a hacker, someone else gets their hands on your stuff, it’s not like you can say, oops, let me have a do over. That is going to be extremely costly and dangerous for the company and could cause that person their job if they let that happen. So the cost of that is too high for someone to leave with a chance.

So employers that are not thinking about identity verification, not thinking about how do we understand who is in our hiring funnel, who’s really who they say they are, how do we prove that and back that up, how do we make sure we’re confident in those things, employers have to have that as one of their points right now or they’re creating risk for themselves unnecessarily. Now beyond that into the employment process, we can probably debate whether that’s necessary for every kind of job. But there are some roles where that has to be done. If you’re hiring a bunch of nurses and we have to have verified credentials that they are, they still maintain their license, they’re still approved, they’re still capable of caring for the patients we have at our facility, those sorts of things, there’s definitely probably a need for that long term.

But in other cases, if I’m hiring someone on a manufacturing shop floor, maybe it’s not as important for some of those sorts of things when there’s there’s high turnover and we’re gonna have a new one in here in six weeks anyway, you know, maybe not as big of a priority. But for some of those other ones where it’s…

There’s high stakes or there’s a high compliance or consequence, we don’t do it right, I would definitely say that matters more.

So as you’ve just sort of described, whoever does the identity verification holds some real power.

So in the future, again, thinking, who do you expect that to be in the future? Employers, platforms, governments, or someone or something that doesn’t even exist yet?

Maureen, I’m getting a lot of cold sweats over here. I remember when E Verify became a thing. Okay. I’m going way way back in in the way back machine here.

So it’s it’s gonna be hard for employers to be the ones to own that because they have a very limited view and they only care about the people in their their lane. And if this person is not employed by them, they’re not going to pay to keep those records maintained. So it’s got to be some third party. Is there a is there a government piece to that?

Possibly. There could be because they’re they’re the ones that typically have a database that is gonna be…

Any other private companies probably pulling from a…

From one of those government databases anyway to check for identity verification. But that’s a great question. I remember the very first time I had this conversation with someone around a…

Not just identity perspective, but a skills perspective saying, what if there was a way to understand the training that Ben did in this job and the project’s been accomplished in this job and create this profile around Ben of what he’s really about that is portable, that I can take with me to the next company and plug it in and they can see all this stuff. Okay. Let’s not reset on all these trainings because you’ve got these three already done. Oh, you’ve already got this skill.

We didn’t realize that in the hiring process, let’s make sure and get you plugged on this team because we actually have been looking for someone and we didn’t realize you were going to be able to actually jump right in and start contributing from day one. That’s great. That sort of thing is still…

I thought it was gonna be closer than it is. It’s still probably a little bit out there in terms of who is doing that, who’s capable of doing that. But there are some pretty interesting solutions that I’ve seen that are touching on pieces of that or being used by either large employers or even governments to try to understand what people are about, what they’re capable of. But that’s, again, starting to edge into the the skills conversation, less so on the identity verification side.

Well, it was hypothetical, so it is interesting to see what will be taking place going forward.

So here’s what I really like about this conversation. The paper and the ritual, the resume and the interview, they’re losing their evidentiary value. So Ben’s numbers say that the industry already knows this.

The gig economy was simply first to face that really honestly when you can’t really rely on the paper or the conversation and that you need to verify the person’s identity, and then you need to test their work. Right?

The rest of hiring is now heading in the same place. And the organizations that treat identity verification as a foundation rather than a formality will be the organizations that most people can actually trust.

So then, what would you leave hiring managers with? If you could just leave some words of wisdom. All of your words have created with them, by the way. But if you wanted to sort of leave sort of some lasting comments for hiring leaders, what would you say?

Two different things. One that I didn’t touch on earlier and I should have, which is we talked a lot about technical capabilities in this conversation, but all of us have met someone with a really great resume, really great technical skills that has zero human skills and no ability to interact with others and doesn’t play well with others. And so that’s one of the challenges of resumes. I want people to use interviews.

They rely on them as a way to try to understand, hey, Maureen’s a real person. We can have a conversation and she’s, you know, not strange or weird or whatever else. That’s one thing that I think people would use the interviews looking for that sort of thing, hoping to find that. I don’t know that AI can replicate that part as much just the the feel that someone has.

The other thing I’ll throw out here is when we…

When I look back at the data, I’ll give you one last data point here.

Companies that don’t think they’re getting AI resumes very often are more likely to rely on interviews.

Companies that think that AI resumes are very common in their hiring funnel are about 50% more likely to rely on work samples and simulations and things like that that put someone through the paces of the job. So if you’re one of those leaders that’s said, I think we’re getting a lot of these. It feels like I’ve seen the same resume with a different name on it, all those sorts of things that are popping up. The answer to that is let’s look at other things that give us more validated proof this person’s capable of doing the job. And there’s some data out there showing that this is how employers are leaning in and trying to solve this problem already.

Great.

So, Ben, thank you so much. An unbelievably valuable insight that you provided. Can you maybe share a little bit more about your organization and your background?

Sure. Absolutely. So I’m the chief research officer for Lighthouse Research and Advisory and that really means it’s my job to survey employers, to survey workers and candidates and trying to keep tabs on what’s happening, what’s changing, and help employers make better decisions tomorrow than they did yesterday. Like to me, that’s an incredible opportunity and an honor and also a responsibility to really be asking the right questions and digging into that.

So I’ve used that research at springboard. I I do a a ton of speaking at conferences, things like that as a way to share those those insights. I do a lot of writing. I’ve written five books now.

The latest is artificial intelligence for HR, the third edition, which gets into how that world is changing. So some of the conversation we’ve had today is deeply intertwined into how we’re seeing the market move and change and shift. And so for me, it’s just an honor to serve and support the HR leaders, the companies out there that are trying their very best to find and keep the right talent and they’re doing their very best. So on my end, I’m doing my best to bring the information to them so that they’re supported and enabled to do that.

So if someone wanted to get a copy of your research, how would they reach out?

So lhra.io is the lighthouse website. They can ping me on LinkedIn if they’d like to do that. And our research is out there. Again, the books are out there.

I love to give and share and just make it easy for people. When I was an HR leader myself, we did not have a budget for research. And so we made the decision years ago to to make that freely available and give it away so that anyone that wants to improve is able to do that without the barriers of being able to to have a research budget or anything like that.

That’s amazing. Incredibly admirable. So thank you so much.

That’s it for this episode of Know Your People. Everything we covered is in the show notes.

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