Svitlana had been fascinated by math and computers since her childhood in Ukraine. In college there, she studied computer science. Afterwards she started working in quality assurance (QA) and moved up into complex software engineering.

But when she married an American citizen and moved to North Dakota, she couldn’t get a single job interview.

“Most hiring managers looked at her resume and saw some random person coming from Eastern Europe who went to some unknown university and worked at some unknown company. Nothing really stood out for her,” said Peter Lu, VP for customer experience and solutions engineering at CodeSignal, which has developed an objective, skills-based interview and assessment platform that can be used as a standard for technical hiring.

Lu, who spoke in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at From Day One’s Silicon Valley conference in June, highlighted Svetlana’s story as an example of what’s wrong with traditional recruitment processes. By relying too heavily on resumes and keywords, he said, recruiters fail to recognize strong candidates from unorthodox backgrounds.

“A PDF resume was Version 1.0,” Lu said. “A LinkedIn profile was Version 2.0. But at the end of the day, that’s still a proxy because it doesn’t represent candidates’ true skills and abilities. We’re trying to answer the question, What is Version 3.0?” The answer, Lu suggested, lies in data-driven approaches that test candidates’ actual abilities. Such approaches can identify skilled I.T. talent from non-traditional backgrounds—people who may not have gone to prestigious colleges or worked at brand-name companies.

In Svitlana’s case, one of her applications eventually landed at a Chicago company that used a coding test from CodeSignal. She performed so well on the test that they flew her to Chicago  to interview her, and then hired her.

Will that kind of skills assessment be the Version 3.0 needed by employers seeking better, more diverse talent? Yes, Lu said—but the assessment tool needs to align as closely with the actual job as a flight simulator does with flying a plane. At CodeSignal, they make sure their tests are relevant by seeking feedback both from candidates who do well and those who do poorly.

“It's no surprise that people who do well on your assessment are going to rate it highly,” he said. “More important to us are those people who don’t do well. If you’re able to get them to say, ‘I get why you asked this question, I get why these questions are relevant and fair,’ then you've created a good assessment.”

“By going beyond people’s resumes, we can open up the funnel and allow employers to hire for more diverse talents,” Lu said. “Employers can find those hidden gems—gems like Svetlana who would never have had a chance if they hadn’t gone beyond the resume.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, CodeSignal, who sponsored this Thought Leadership Spotlight.

Ilana DeBare is a former workplace and small business reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel “Shaken Loose” will be published in summer 2023.