EP 17: Hiring for Skills, Not Resumes: The Future of Talent

[00:01:06] Adriaan: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Leaders in Talent Podcast. Today’s guest is Olive Turon, the Head of People and Culture at TestGorilla. Hi Olive.

Olive: Hi!

Adriaan: Olive’s career is anything but traditional, and that’s exactly what makes this conversation so fascinating. Olive started out as a finance analyst in banking, made a leap to Google to lead sales in its cloud business, helped run Academy London, then pivoted into consulting. Eventually, she landed at TestGorilla—first as the Chief of Staff before stepping into her current role as Head of People and Culture at TestGorilla.

Wow. What a versatile and bold career path. We’re going to be talking about skill-based hiring and, if anything, when I see your career—and when we’ve discussed it before—it feels like you’re proof of skill-based hiring before it even maybe had a name. Can you tell me a little bit more about your different jumps and how this materialized? And also, maybe when you applied to different jobs or when you had interviews, how people reviewed your profile and resume?

[00:02:37] Olive: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for asking and thanks for having me here today. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while. So yes, when you condense my CV into a minute or so, it sounds really eclectic—it doesn’t make sense. And that’s fine. I’m very proud of my career. I’m very proud that it’s taken many different twists and turns, and I think it does make sense in the job that I have today.

I’ll explain why that is in a second—maybe we’ll talk about that at the end of my answer. But you asked about how, during the process, it happened and how people responded to me jumping around so much. And by the way, this happened probably over the span of, let’s say, just under 10 years or so that I did all those different kinds of hops.

I think I was probably—now knowing a little bit more about the hiring market—how difficult it is to move around and find dream jobs. Honestly, it’s only really become more and more apparent to me over the past few years of working at TestGorilla and being at the heart of HR Tech.

I think I was partly very lucky in that the kinds of roles I was applying for when I was moving around quite a bit—I was meeting people who were looking for candidates who were interested and had a passion. I’m quite a passionate and excitable person. I think that comes across in interviews. Especially earlier on in my career, I knew quite clearly when I was at a certain role at a certain point of time that I’d squeezed everything I wanted out of that particular opportunity. I knew it was time to move on and what I wanted to take from a previous role and transport into a new one.

[00:05:35] Olive: So taking my role from banking into Google, there were parts that I loved about the banking job—and there were lots that I didn’t. I really wanted to move into a much faster-paced, creative, innovative environment. So finding an organization and a department within it—Google Cloud was very young at the time—where I could clearly express my hopes and dreams for this next bit of my career, I think that was hopefully compelling to the interviewers, even though I didn’t have all the obvious experience to date.

And then as I’ve gone on and accumulated lots of different bits of experience and skills—and tested out the same skills but in different contexts…

[00:06:29] Adriaan: I think…

[00:06:30] Olive: …like leadership and people management, strategic pieces of work, and operational, more tactical and logistical stuff—it’s all culminated in my current job where I lead People and Culture at TestGorilla. We’ll talk about TestGorilla a bit more, I’m sure.

[00:06:49] Adriaan: Yeah. So tell me—maybe this is a good moment—share a little bit more about what TestGorilla does?

[00:06:55] Olive: Yeah. TestGorilla is a talent discovery platform. We help companies all around the world to source and identify the very best talent for the roles they have. We do that predominantly through skills-based hiring. So it’s a mode of hiring that really fights against traditional hiring practices. When we’re looking to hire candidates based on their past experience, education, their CVs—instead, we help companies hire people based on the proven skills they have and match candidates with the relevant skills required for the jobs that are open.

That’s what TestGorilla does. We’re a brilliant piece of software, and I want you to check us out. Our vision is about putting a billion people in their dream jobs. We believe there’s a dream job out there for everyone, and we just need to help people find those and help companies find people outside of traditional hiring processes. I’m certainly in my dream job. It definitely feels like all those tangled pieces of my previous career are making sense in this current role.

[00:08:19] Adriaan: Yeah. Now looking back, what do you think? Because you not only did it from finance to cloud sales at Google, you also helped run Academy London, worked in consulting for a little bit, and then you joined TestGorilla as the Chief of Staff, right? When you interviewed, do you feel that people were really assessing your skills, or was there fear that you didn’t have the right experience based on your resume? What was your personal experience? And maybe let’s translate that—how does TestGorilla help eliminate those biases?

[00:08:57] Olive: Yeah, I think there were certain points—certainly in the earlier part of my career—so the banking job I had was a graduate program, right? So that was actually pretty skills-based hiring, to be honest. You know, they still do them—those days where you’d go along to a physical center and take part in all these different kinds of assessment days. You were actually assessed in lots of different ways. So I guess that was a kind of skills-based hiring.

But then moving to Google—it was also a pretty junior, entry-level job. So I think there wasn’t much expectation that I’d already be a fantastic salesperson. I think I was really assessed as a graduate, as an entry-level person, even though I’d spent three years in a bank. It was a relatively junior role.

And as I went on to different roles—actually, there’s a job that we’ve left out of the CV. After doing a bit of consultancy work, I was a Chief of Staff at a FinTech before moving to TestGorilla. That role required a little more explanation. Like, “Who are you? Why have you had six different careers in not many more years than that?” Because people do look at CVs, right? They take whatever signals they want to perceive from a CV—whether that’s time spent in a role, the kind of companies you’ve worked at, the university you went to.

I think I’ve been lucky, and I have a huge amount of privilege—in the school I went to, the companies I’ve worked at. Frankly, I’m very open about this. I think my CV, and the sort of biased practices that happen when people recruit using CVs—I was favored by those, to be honest, in a way that people who don’t have certain names or experiences on their CVs wouldn’t have been.

TestGorilla—on the other hand, and the other part of your question was, how does TestGorilla deal with this? One of our core focuses and what we want to deliver to the world of hiring is democratizing opportunity. So if people don’t have specific education or experience—or if they’re from an underrepresented group that tends to be discriminated against in traditional hiring processes—we believe we give those people the opportunity to have their skills tested.

And if companies know what skills they should be looking for—which, maybe we can get into, because that isn’t always obvious—but if we can create an opportunity for that match to happen on a skills level, then we’ll see the door being widened for so many more people to find their dream job. People who maybe would’ve been discounted otherwise because they have a non-traditional career path or didn’t go to the “right” schools.

[00:12:26] Adriaan: So Olive, let’s talk a little bit more about skills-based hiring in general. The term has been floating around for the last couple of years. I see relatively few companies that fully embrace skills-based hiring. So talk me through how, as a company, you should think about skills-based hiring. And what are some of the first steps you can take to move away from screening résumés and toward implementing a skills-based hiring approach?

[00:13:04] Olive: Of course. Yeah, it’s funny—TestGorilla was one of the companies that really put the terminology “skills-based hiring” on the map, to be honest. And you’re right—it’s been a few years.

[00:13:17] Adriaan: You did a good job. You definitely did.

[00:13:21] Olive: It’s there, right? And you are right—many companies are starting to use or lean into an element of skills-based hiring. When I do conversations like this or speak to other audiences, the questions over the years have pivoted away from “What actually is skills-based hiring?” to “How can I do it completely? How can I do it well?”

So just to recap—skills-based hiring is really about looking beyond those traditional measures, like CVs that tend to include things like work experience or education, and hiring on that basis. It’s about using other tools and methodologies to hire.

Now, skills tests are one way you can do that. That’s the obvious one most people think of when they hear “skills-based hiring”—and it’s what we do at TestGorilla. We create an assessment made up of a certain number of tests that evaluate the technical skills, behavioral skills, competencies, and more human skills that are required for the role.

That’s one way of doing skills-based hiring—but it’s more than that. At TestGorilla, we look at it holistically. Throughout the hiring process, how can you add in different approaches to complement the skills test?

We recommend starting with screening based on a skills assessment right at the beginning of the funnel. That way, you’re screening people into your process only after establishing that they have the right skills. Then during interviews, we emphasize structured interviews—ones rigorously aligned with the needs of the role, culture fit, etc.—and asking every candidate the same questions.

We also advocate for using multi-measure testing. Things like take-home assignments and work samples create another layer of assessment and skills verification. These allow for deeper probing than you might be able to get from a 60-minute test at the beginning.

So those three things—skills tests, structured interviews, and multi-measure testing—together create a very holistic way of getting to know the full spectrum of a candidate.

[00:16:01] Adriaan: Yeah. So how do you identify, for every role, the right skills? How does that process work, and how do you make sure that it’s aligned across the organization? I assume that, based on my experience too, some roles are easier to define—clear-cut skills—while others are a bit more fluffy and vague. So talk me through that.

[00:16:31] Olive: It’s definitely part of the process, right? We try to do a job analysis for every new role we need to hire for—including backfills. I really have an allergy to just rinse-and-repeat backfills. Like, we’ve got a customer support rep who’s left—we need to fill that role—so let’s just bring back the job description we used two years ago. That’s not good enough.

So we start every new job opening with a very thorough intake meeting. It’s an analysis of the job and its requirements. And it doesn’t just come from the manager—we also engage with other stakeholders. For this person to be successful in this role, what’s the job going to be, and what are the skills required?

Over time, that changes. Like many other companies, we’re doing a lot around AI transformation at the moment. So what does AI proficiency look like—at TestGorilla in general and in specific roles?

We establish the “must-haves,” and then find a means to test those. We’ve got over 400 tests in our TestGorilla library, so generally, there’s a structured way to assess the skills needed for the job. If not, we have the ability to include custom questions in the test, so we can cover those bases.

And if there’s no way to test for something in a skills test, then we use our interview process to probe further. But you’re right—it can be difficult to nail down exact skills all the time. That, for me, is the role of the manager: to know what their team needs to be doing. You look ahead, know what your team needs to achieve in the next 6–12 months—maybe not longer than that, depending on the company stage—and managers should be able to express what “good” looks like in the role.

[00:18:51] Adriaan: Is this something you can do for just one job unit, or if you want to do it successfully, does the whole organization need to be behind it? What’s your take there—can you grow into it gradually, or is it a profound change that needs complete buy-in?

[00:19:20] Olive: Yeah. Well, I would say that we absolutely eat our own dog food at TestGorilla. Everyone goes through this process—regardless of department or seniority. We have the same process for all.

So yes, we’re a bit different, because this is what we do. But we believe it’s the only way to hire. We think all organizations should be making the shift toward it. I struggle to think of an industry, company size, or stage that shouldn’t ultimately aim to hire everyone through skills-based hiring.

That said, it is a change management process. Depending on your company’s stage, size, or the volume of hiring you’re doing—and the sensibilities of your people team—I’d say start small. Do a pilot with a few roles. Bring the key stakeholders onboard, provide proper training and enablement for TA partners, and find champions in the business.

Once you’ve nailed skills-based hiring for one team, department, or region, then expand. And depending on your timeline, you might also want to look at outcomes: how are the people hired through skills-based hiring performing versus those hired through more traditional processes?

It takes time to see results, of course, but we know from our case studies and research—ours and others’—that satisfaction with new hires is generally higher when they’ve been hired through skills-based processes.

[00:21:48] Adriaan: So if we zoom in on that—what are the main benefits of switching to a skills-based hiring approach?

[00:21:58] Olive: Yeah, several. Which I love, because it means skills-based hiring is relevant to pretty much any hiring challenge.

From a company perspective, we want the right people in the right jobs at the right time, doing the right things. Skills-based hiring can do that. If we look at studies on the validity of different hiring tools, skills assessments are about as high as you can get in predicting someone’s success on the job. It’s proven.

Testing someone’s skills and having clear, objective data to make hiring decisions based on what they can do is a strong predictor of job success. That’s great.

Then you’ve got the efficiency gains. For companies that deal with huge volumes of candidates, skills tests allow you to confidently assess large numbers of people and highlight top performers—either relative to others or in absolute terms. For every test result, you can benchmark how someone performed compared to anyone else who’s ever taken that test on TestGorilla.

Then, of course, we have DEI and bias-reduction benefits. When you’re hiring based on skills instead of assumptions or gut feeling, you’re automatically reducing bias.

And candidates love it too—though people are sometimes surprised by that. The idea of a test can be a bit stressful, sure. Some worry that it removes the human angle. But candidates actually enjoy seeing their results. They like seeing how they performed.

[00:24:11] Adriaan: Yeah, so this is what you do, right? I remember you telling me—and it’s good for our listeners to understand too. Help me understand, in terms of the recruitment process, how do you run it at TestGorilla? What do those steps look like?

[00:24:23] Olive: Test first. We test first. In our job descriptions, we include a link to the assessment. When someone applies, they’re directed to complete the test. Once they’ve done that, we get in touch.

[00:24:34] Adriaan: And once they’ve passed the thresholds, that’s when you get introduced to the candidate, right?

[00:24:43] Olive: Yes. There’s an automated message that goes out when they click to apply, and we explain the process, including the test. They sit the test, they get their results—which is really important too. People love seeing how they performed.

We review the results—both quantitative results and other formats. Some parts of the assessment aren’t automatically scored, like video answers or essay questions. So we manually review those. We do still sometimes look at CVs—there might be specific experience we’re targeting. This isn’t about saying there’s no place at all for CVs, but rather about not making hiring decisions based on them.

After that, we invite a certain tranche of candidates—depending on the role and interest—to a first-round interview. That’s usually with the hiring manager, straight away, so we can really dig in from the beginning. That early hiring manager involvement also sends a strong signal to candidates.

Then we have a technical stage. This could be a take-home assignment or a live simulation where candidates solve problems on the spot. After that, we run a culture or behavioral interview, usually with peers and cross-functional stakeholders.

That’s the core process. For more senior roles, we might also include a leadership interview. That’s less about evaluation and more about selling the role—giving the candidate a chance to meet leadership and get excited about the opportunity. And that’s it. But we definitely start with the assessment.

[00:26:49] Adriaan: So good. So good. In terms of skills-based hiring, what are some of the things to consider—really take into account—when deciding if skills-based hiring is the right fit for an organization?

[00:27:02] Olive: Yeah. After three and a half years at TestGorilla, I really struggle to think of any company where it wouldn’t make sense.

There are certain roles, maybe more executive-level, where we still have senior people take our tests—but you might want to adjust the flow a bit. Especially if you’re sourcing candidates through headhunters, you might want to warm them up with some conversation before dropping an assessment in front of them.

There are also roles outside of white-collar environments. Most of our customers use TestGorilla for office-based jobs, but we do have some using it for factory roles or more manual work. Those are less of an obvious fit.

But overall, for any desk-based environment? For sure. Skills-based hiring makes a ton of sense.

[00:29:03] Adriaan: In terms of internal mobility—especially with AI and how roles are evolving—can skills-based hiring help with transitions inside the organization? Like going from a business analyst to someone selling cloud solutions?

[00:29:26] Olive: Yes, definitely. Because it comes back to the idea of: is it what you’re doing that counts, or is it the skills you’ve acquired along the way?

And I think it’s the latter.

Take me as an example. I work in HR now, and we could never have mapped that from the start. But the skills I acquired along the way have been honed throughout. So it’s less about experience and more about the skills developed through that experience. That’s the nuance.

So yes—companies should be looking at the skills they need now and in the future. Skills mapping across the organization is important—recognizing gaps, identifying hidden or latent skills. Sometimes people don’t even realize how good they are at something.

At TestGorilla, when someone moves roles internally—for example, we had someone move from HR into product—we still use assessments to validate that the skills match. And we have clients using our tool for skills mapping too. It helps shape internal mobility and guides development for evolving roles.

[00:31:30] Adriaan: Last but definitely not least—in terms of where skills-based hiring is going and evolving—if you look into your crystal ball (we won’t hold you to it, Olive), what trends do you see? Is this getting more widely adopted? Are we going to see the resume disappear, as some have predicted?

[00:31:57] Olive: I don’t think we’ll ever say goodbye fully to resumes. They provide a data point, and many great hires have been made using them. But it shouldn’t be the only data point, and we are definitely moving away from that model.

Our research suggests that one thing that might quietly fade away—and I hope it does—is the cover letter.

[00:32:33] Adriaan: Yes!

[00:32:33] Olive: I hear it in your voice—please say more?

[00:32:37] Adriaan: Please! What’s the point—especially with ChatGPT now? Why?

[00:32:45] Olive: Exactly. They’re kind of pointless now.

But I also think where skills-based hiring is going is into the realm of redefining what we mean by “skills.” At TestGorilla, we’re talking not just about technical skills, but also more human skills—things like critical thinking, communication, influencing. These are often more important than hard skills.

Over time, we’ll see organizations rely more on human skills, especially as AI automates more technical tasks. These are the skills that will endure—and that AI won’t replicate. So I think skills-based hiring will lean more into those human capabilities and become more holistic.

At TestGorilla, we’re talking a lot more about “holistic hiring.” We’re launching new types of tests that focus on behavior and cultural alignment—really different ways of assessing the whole person, so we’re not just looking at pure technical capabilities. Those still matter, of course, but we want a well-rounded view of what someone brings.

[00:34:39] Adriaan: And Olive, what advice would you give to Heads of Talent? They’ve listened to this podcast, they’re interested—where should they start? How do they experiment with this?

[00:34:53] Olive: Definitely get in touch with TestGorilla—we’d be happy to show you some cool demos and share case studies to get you inspired.

But even before that, really understand what you’re trying to fix in your hiring process. Is it a diversity challenge? Is it about reducing time to hire? Do you want to improve quality of hire? Find your key metric.

Then, build a small pilot. Choose a few roles—probably junior ones, easier to fill, lower risk for a first experiment. Even better if it’s a role you’ve recently hired for using a traditional method, so you can compare outcomes.

Go for it. Make it a tightly scoped project.

That said, we are talking about people. Hiring is a significant, life-impacting process. So treat your candidates well, even during a pilot. And if it doesn’t work right away, that’s okay. You can always adjust. You can fall back on your traditional process if needed.

But I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And if not—let us know. We might be able to help and recommend how to try again next time.

[00:36:49] Adriaan: Olive, what’s the best way for people to find you? LinkedIn?

[00:36:55] Olive: Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way for sure. Drop me a line there.

[00:37:02] Adriaan: Olive, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and personal journey. I’m excited to see where we’ll be in two years—hopefully without cover letters, and with many more people getting assessed the right way and landing their dream jobs.

[00:37:21] Olive: Yes, yes—for sure. I hope so too. Bye-bye.

[00:37:24] Adriaan: Thank you.