Is the hiring industry broken and can peer to peer validated skills fix it?

Career Advice
1

Hello everyone,

Resumes and CVs have a fundamental problem: anyone can write anything. As someone who’s been job searching, I’ve wondered if there’s a better way to separate genuine experience from creative writing, I am an engineer at the end of the day not a creative author.

I’ve been thinking about applying something similar to X’s Community Notes model to skill verification. The idea: engineers could “fact check” claims on each other’s CVs - not as formal references, but as a crowd-sourced verification layer, where you get a check-mark on your skill like X check mark. If someone claims they’re an expert in Kubernetes, other engineers who’ve worked with them (or reviewed their OSS contributions) could validate or challenge that. Also companies have repetitive interviews, why can’t I simply do one interview and be “interviewed” fully for all other companies?

I put together a rough prototype to illustrate the concept called Skill Verdict

Some questions I’m trying to work through(ask more please):

  • How useful will this be for engineers?
  • Would this create its own set of problems? (gaming the system, bias, grudges) Could it scale beyond personal networks? Would companies even trust community-sourced verification?

Curious what you guys think about the mechanism itself, not the prototype. Would something like this reduce friction in hiring, or just add another layer of noise?

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Hi @sv-ms

To help you stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to articulate about yourself. Prove your skills, with projects you’ve built. I think a lot of employers tend to gloss over degrees, and instead focus on skills, both technical and people. Most of the time, you’ll be working with other people, so you’ll need to demonstrate you can communicate, empathise, and handle conflicts.

One interview may not work in the real world. Each organisation looks for certain qualities and traits. What is perfect for one organisation, may not be considered as valueable or sought after at another organisation. Plus, how long could that one interview take? It would need to be exhaustive, and who is going to pay for it? Hiring for just one manager costs firms a lot of time and money, which they usually out-source to a talent agency.

Part of the recruitment process is the technical skills assessment, where you get a chance to prove your skills.

Most firms now use AI models to screen applications. Maybe look at how they work to distill how you can get on to shortlists.

Happy coding

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