The cornerstone of our South by Southwest trip was CEO Jacob Hsu’s talk “Kill the Resume to Bring Back the Middle Class.”
Some of the talk’s key points were:
- The American middle class was built on jobs that required skills/aptitude, not resumes/pedigree.
- With the decline of blue collar/manufacturing jobs, we’ve lost this idea.
- But resumes aren’t a good predictor how well an employee with perform and are biased on many characteristics (race, class, gender, education, geography).
- If we can use predictive analytics and AI to bring skills-based hiring in the tech industry, we can expand economic opportunities to more Americans, provide better workers for employers, regrow the middle class, help alleviate rising income inequality and revitalize people, communities and cities.
