Mapping the Human Genome of Potential

BY Judd Bagley | May 31, 2023

“The resume is one of the worst business tools on the planet,” said Scott Dettman, CEO of entry level career matchmaking firm Avenica. “Employers are missing anywhere from about 75% to 83% of the available talent by relying on these antiquated tools.”

Dettman’s attacks on the oft-maligned resume only grew more fierce as his talk at From Day One’s live event in Salt Lake City progressed.

“This happens because recruiting is heavily based on skills and keywords listed in resumes. So if you don't have those right, you are going to be missed,” he added.

Dettman’s passion for this topic is informed by his own experience entering the job market following his graduation from college in 2009, at a time when jobs were scarce as unemployment levels approached ten percent. 400 job applications later, he finally received an invitation to interview for an opening. While he expected to meet with a recruiter, Dettman was surprised to instead receive an audience with the CEO. 

“Oh, it’s him,” Dettman remembered the CEO saying while glancing over his resume. “You applied for an entry level marketing position. But you have a political science degree. So you have no business applying for this job.” 

Crushed, Dettman decided that as long as he was there, he’d make the case for hiring him based on his abundance of grit over lack of experience.

“And so I shared my story with him, I kind of poured my guts out. I told him everything I've been through, that I grew up in the south side of Milwaukee in a bad neighborhood, that I was born with a neurological disorder and had a lot of health issues, and an unhealthy home environment. But I'd overcome all that and played Division One, college football, I had done all these different things.”

The CEO responded, “I'm not going to hire you for this job. But come back tomorrow, I've got a better one for you.”

That position ended up being a great fit for Dettman, catapulting his career in vital ways. Eventually Dettman would be the CEO of his own company at just 32, far ahead of the average age of 58. And yet it almost didn’t happen. Dettman points to that experience as proof of the inability of a piece of paper to capture the true essence of a newly minted college graduate’s suitability for any position.

“The important thing to note here is that I only accidentally got a chance to pitch myself like that. Most people don't get the opportunity to spill their guts as I did, and tell their story. And that's a real problem.”

During his talk, Dettman referred to the irony of leading the presentation at the facility located within Salt Lake City’s famous museum, The Leonardo, named for Leonardo DaVinci. 

“The first resume was used 541 years ago, created by DaVinci,” he quipped. “We've been doing this thing for 541 years, right? Maybe we can evolve it a little bit.”

As bad as he feels the resume is, Dettman said it’s only part of the dysfunction plaguing the talent acquisition equation today.

Scott Dettman, the CEO of Avenica, led the thought leadership spotlight (photo by Sean Ryan for From Day One)

“Most job descriptions are not well-crafted. They’re vague. They say things like “self-starter” or “collaborative” or all sorts of meaningless things. But at the same time, they're also calling for an increasing number of skills to be present, and skills are important,” Dettman said. “But we should also acknowledge that skills by themselves, without the right fit, without the potential, without the right environment, are almost meaningless. And most job descriptions are written to be exclusive. As are a lot of job postings. And don't get me started on job titles. All these issues contribute to this massive translation problem.”

And the dysfunction of the status quo extends to the talent side, Dettman said. 

“The other side of this is employees are only making themselves available to the companies they're aware of. But a political science major from a state school has no sense for the entire variety of employers that are out there. There's no college course about that. Plus, they don't really know the kinds of jobs they could succeed at, or where they could do them. So it's a recipe for disaster.”

Recognizing all these flaws, Dettman determined that there must be a better way, and the outcome was Avenica.

“Before we ever take a look at a resume or send a candidate to an interview, we take them through a process called leveling, like in a video game. We have these individuals perform micro tasks on our platform. We'll send them a link, and it'll be to watch a video, and at the end, there'll be an instruction to follow, such as sending an email with the video’s three most salient points. And we're tracking every little movement, every data point along the path,” Dettman said. “We send them proprietary assessments that reveal their workstyle and workplace preferences. So we're building this big data cloud around these individuals. So they're not only demonstrating what their preferences are, what they're capable of doing, their ability to communicate and problem solve, to be responsive and follow directions. They're also demonstrating commitment, grit and intent.”

The outcome of this process is a very granular mapping of a candidate’s talent genome, which produces insights offering the same kind of explanatory power that comes from decoding one’s DNA.

“And we're mapping that to a hiring partner and their needs. This is the reason why we're focused on early career—because there's no better time to avoid resumes and besides, these people don't have experience anyway,” Dettman explained. 

Dettman said the data back up his iconoclastic approach, pointing to a particular client company, where 67% of promotions during one mid-year cycle went to candidates found by Avenica. 

“It just goes to show you that when you free your mind of the constraints that we've created on talent and the way that we look at things and the bias that we use to evaluate candidates, you realize that you can unleash all that human potential, and really make a difference.”

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

Judd Bagley is a Utah-based marketing communications professional and freelance journalist.

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