Leonardo da Vinci gets credit for inventing, among other things, the parachute, the armored car and the resume. Some 500-plus years later, employers still use the resume to assess job seekers’ potential.

That’s a problem, accelerated today with resume-scanning algorithms that can introduce biases and exclude many aspiring job candidates.

“Resumes don’t predict a damn thing,” Scott Dettman, chief executive officer of Avenica, said during a presentation in May at a From Day One conference in Minneapolis.

Dettman should know. He helped prove that resumes have no predictive value while working at ManpowerGroup. A massive study there, done with Google and Cognizant, concluded that resumes cannot forecast how a job applicant will perform. Or even whether someone will get hired.

Using resumes to assess job candidates, therefore, amounts to an act of “collective insanity,” Dettman said. “People are so much more than a resume.”

Besides resumes, Dettman contended, another obstacle to job seekers is human nature. Under the diffusion of innovation theory, which looks at how an idea or product spreads over time, only 15.5% of people are innovators or early adopters, including hiring managers.

“When we think about early career or entry-level people from different backgrounds or experiences, we are looking at basically 15.5% of hiring managers who are likely to bet on somebody who doesn’t have a proven track record of experience, a proven track record of doing a certain thing,” Dettman said.

Dettman defined potential as latent characteristics or “hidden superpowers” that, if developed, will lead to later success. Inherent within that definition is the idea that potential needs some kind of catalyst to kick start it. That’s less likely if the hiring manager is a laggard one rather than an innovator or early adopter.

“To achieve our potential, we need to have opportunity,” Dettman said. “But that opportunity is going to be greatly diffused based on who we get a chance to talk to.”

At Avenica, Dettman is leading efforts to find a better way to help job seekers unlock their potential. In his view, that means moving from resumes and an employer-centered, demand-side search for talent to an inclusive, supply-side focused method where candidates demonstrate their potential and develop skills as they advance in their careers.

Avenica, an entry-level career matchmaking company based in Minneapolis, gets 300 to 500 applications a day, Dettman said. Candidates have the opportunity to progress through levels on the company’s platform.

This self-directed process doesn’t filter out job seekers based on experience or where they went to college. Rather, it enables candidates to show that they can follow directions, be responsive, do what they say they’re going to do, pay attention and communicate effectively.

“For the vast majority of entry-level jobs in corporate America, those key kinds of attributes are the pillars of success,” Dettman said. “If you can do those things, you’re going to learn how to do all the other stuff through the process of exposure and experience.”

The platform’s levels include various “micro-experiences,” such as watching a video about a company and writing an email that summarizes key points, Dettman said. Candidates who prove “their level of grit, their level of tenacity and also their level of proficiency” get invited to schedule a meeting. 

That meeting is “more like therapy than it is like an interview,” Dettman said. Job seekers may get asked, for example, about challenges they’ve faced, what they do for fun, what friends say about them or what their guilty pleasure is. 

“We get to know these individuals, we get to hear their story, then we get to help them craft that narrative in a way that they may not even be comfortable with yet,” Dettman said.

Candidates explain what makes them unique and describe the “superpowers” that underscore their potential. That puts them in charge of whether they get access to an opportunity.

Using its approach, Avenica has launched more than 2,000 careers in recent years, Dettman said. Candidates stay with their employees for three times longer, with many getting promoted. Some 62% of candidates were Black, Indigenous and people of color.

“The secret behind every great company is great people,” Dettman said. “Today, too many great people are being missed, are being ignored or are just flat out rejected because of words on a resume. We can do better.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Avenica, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Todd Nelson is a Minnesota-based journalist who writes for newspapers in the Twin Cities.