I think you are spot on. One of the hardest things with hiring is that you don’t actually get a sense of how good your evaluation was until a few months (or years) in.

The biggest value of a credential is that it reduces time spent assessing candidates, but the biggest downfall is that it is a poor predictor of performance, talk less of performance under different conditions.

I don’t think we need to pick between seeing a persons work history and time spent assessing talent. Take for example basketball. One of the reasons hiring is so meritocratic (and a lot better) is that everybodys performance is observable over a long period of time under several different conditions. Their ‘work history /performance data’ is publicly available, so there is no need to rely on proxies (and even then they still faced some issues organising talent efficiently!).

What if we could do the same? What if we could directly measure an individuals performance under different conditions over a long period of time and have that data be observable by everyone? It would mean we would be building a completely different hiring process, interviewing (for the most part) would be obsolote. In a system like this, no time would be spent assessing talent (apart from a short ‘get to know’ each other interview). Prediction of performance would be done through modelling, similar to sabermetrics. That’s what I’m working on (details to be shared soon).

I think we can keep certain characteristics of credentials (easy to identify signal), without creating more traditional ‘credentials’ i.e proxies.