Attaching Evidence is the Next Big Thing in Credential Innovation
If you’re not doing evidence, you might be doing it wrong
When issuing innovative credentials like digital badges, a key feature is the ability to attach evidence artifacts that demonstrate how the learner met the earning criteria for the credential. I believe this is empowering, meaningful, and will soon be impactful.
I’m also aware that close to zero institutions are currently attaching evidence artifacts to digital badges.
And I’ve heard many people smarter than I am dismiss the case for evidence by claiming that hiring managers say they don’t have time to click through evidence artifacts.
And I know full well that in September 2024, I look like Crazy Dancing Guy trying to start a movement, only in my sorry video, I’m still the only one dancing.
While the AIs will drink each others’ output without complaint, this dynamic leads to a party where the humans have figured out what the class clown put in the punchbowl and know to stay away.
And yet I’m here to keep dancing because dismissing evidence as a new normal in credential innovation only makes sense when assuming that the legacy ways of doing things will also be the future ways of doing things.
My assumption is that whatever the future looks like, it won’t look like the present.
Matching Humans with Opportunities is a Problem Looking for Solutions
The way we’ve been doing things is already broken and has been for a long time. For example: hiring managers have to vet hundreds of applications per role and spend less than 10 seconds on each resume. Now that AI makes it easy for job seekers to apply to more jobs in less time with customized resumes and cover letters, hiring managers (and admissions councilors, awards committees, and others) are tasked with an even greater volume of vetting.
Even if the legacy processes were working well (they weren’t), the old ways of doing things simply can’t work at scale in our new reality.
And this is why verifiable credentials (with metadata that includes evidence!) are about to have a moment: We’ve never been good hiring. According to Adam Grant: “imagine that you interviewed 100 candidates, ranked them in order from best to worst, and then measured their actual performance in the job. You’d be lucky if you put more than eight in the right spot.”
In other words, the problem is not new; what’s new is the urgency to solve it. And trusted, transparent, verifiable credentials that help opportunity providers like employers better understand (in machine-actionable ways!) who the opportunity seekers are is one of the right solutions to this urgent problem.
Urgency is one heck of a drug
While it has long been an open secret that we’re terrible at matching people with opportunities, opportunity providers like employers have had the privilege of not having to do anything about it. Even if internal champions were pushing for change, it was easy to dismiss as a nice to have, not a need to have.
Evolutions in artificial intelligence changed this.
Over the last two years, some employers enjoyed a brief moment of empowering hiring managers with AI tools that could take a job description and then scrape resumes and cover letters to identify highly qualified applicants. However, job seekers figured out that they could reverse engineer the same workflow and scrape job descriptions so that AI could craft their own resumes and cover letters to stand out as the most highly qualified applicants.
While the AIs will drink each others’ output without complaint, this dynamic leads to a party where the humans have figured out what the class clown put in the punchbowl and know to stay away.
So the old problem remains, just exacerbated. Employers still need to hire, and to do that they still need applicants to submit resumes and cover letters. And thanks to AI, applicant volume has soared while trust and reliability of what’s contained in applications are racing to the bottom. This is a vital need that’s being undermined by the HR equivalent of email spam back in 2008, when more than 97% of emails were spam.
This is a very big, and very bad situation! Fortunately, employers are realizing that this is a big problem and adopting urgency.
ASIDE: I heard Luis von Ahn, the creator of CAPTCHA, give a talk in which he described 2008 as a pivotal moment during which experts at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail were legitimately concerned that email as a medium would die. That created urgency and urgency led to his company being hired to create CAPTCHA. And while email spam remains a problem, email itself is still a thing. That’s a big deal and a hopeful lesson on the value of urgency.
The Solution is Not New
Now that employers are hip to the problem and are adopting urgency to solve it, the silver lining is that good products like verifiable credentials already exist, and good processes and practices like The LER Ecosystem are quickly developing.
For those that don’t get all the hype on LER’s, I promise you will come running to support adoption when you realize your inbox is being flooded by GenAI built cover letters and resumes. Good luck with reviewing triple the applications when they all look the same. — Sean Murphy, on LinkedIn
LERs (Learning & Employment Records) are digitized human highlight reels that can contain trusted representations of the lifelong learning and achievement that makes us awesome. LERs can bundle our transcripts, certifications, credentials, licenses, awards, memberships, and other artifacts that help us tell the stories about the stuff that actually matters to employers and other opportunity providers.
Importantly, like some technofuturistic version of letters sealed by a wax stamp from a king’s signet ring, LERs can share all of this recognition in ways that audiences can trust.
As exciting as LERs can be however, there is a low ceiling on their impact when done in isolation. What’s truly exciting and will soon change the world is the rapid emergence of LER Ecosystems that bring together the education providers, employers, standards bodies, software vendors, funders, HR systems, and other stakeholders to collaborate in concert on creating, issuing and meaningfully consuming LERs.
So what’s this all mean?
The near future will have hiring managers reading precious few resumes and cover letters; thanks to LERs and related tools and processes in the LER ecosystem, machine vetting will surface top candidates so that hiring managers will only see probable needles in the haystack, and none of the hay.
Instead of spending a few seconds on each of several hundred resumes, they will be able to dedicate actual minutes to each candidate, including evaluating their credentials and attached evidence. In this new reality, having valuable credentials with rich, machine-actionable metadata will help people stand out during the initial vetting process when competing for opportunities.
When hiring managers have the time to click on evidence, meaningful evidence artifacts attached to their credentials is how candidates will stand out during the human vetting process. Skills credentials that offer evidence demonstrating the earners’ skills will equip those earners with a competitive advantage over other earners whose credentials essentially default to, “Take our word for it.”
Conversely, credentials without evidence may be less trusted or even considered suspect by consumers who wonder: Why, if the technology allows for evidence, did the issuing organizations choose to omit it? Perhaps the debunked theory that “We didn’t think you had time to view the evidence,” will sound like a lacking excuse, and ultimately be a disservice to earners.
If you can picture a different future that ignores these solutions and somehow persists through the burdens being created by the legacy systems colliding with artificial intelligence, I totally understand why I still look like a crazy dancing guy by myself on the hill. It makes sense if you point and start rumors about the likelihood that I am a hoarder and that my digital house features digital manila envelopes stuffed full of badge evidence that nobody will ever read stacked digital floor to digital ceiling.
For everybody else who is thinking they might be ready to try this dance, I’m excited to party with you!
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click to 👏👏👏 and recommend it to others! If you have thoughts to share about this, I hope to learn from your own response post!
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium, you can find him in the garage because his partner no longer allows hoarding in the house. Some other posts you might like:
