Tom Brunskill

Sorry, I say school.

I'm changing my vernacular now that I'm in the U.S.,

But looking beyond, I think, those historical data sets to make recruiting decisions and starting to look at other signals which we think correlate to long-term success much more than those broken data points.

And those historical data points are quite exclusionary or prohibitive to only certain parts of society.

And you certainly see that here in the US where you're 77 times more likely to

to be accepted into an Ivy League school if you come from the wealthiest 1% of America than if you come from the bottom quintile of America's wealth.

So what we're seeing companies do is look beyond the transcript, look beyond the CV.

But more importantly, it's not just looking at soft skills.

It's actually looking at the development of a candidate or a potential candidate over an extended period of time.

So it's not just looking at

at their aptitude at one point in time, it's actually looking at the development of their aptitude over an extended period of time.

And that becomes a very powerful signal itself.

So we're seeing companies engage with talent far earlier and looking at candidates' actual potential and development over an extended period of time.

There's a lot of work to be done, but I may have walked into this line of work being slightly cynical, but I can honestly say that most of the companies that we're working with are doing everything they can to do things differently, to get different results than what they've been doing for the last 10, 20, 30 years.

So one of our core theses at Forage is that as companies move away from looking at transcripts or CVs in the future,

what they'll actually be looking at is like portfolios of work.

So if you think like you're a graphic designer, right?

And you apply for a job as a graphic designer somewhere, like it is accepted that you have like a portfolio of work that you would show a potential employer and they would look at that.

And that's something that they'd heavily weight when making a recruitment decision.

And for whatever reason, most other industries don't look at portfolios.