The Work Sample That Turns Candidate Claims Into Proof

Michael Campbell:

Every hire, I think there’s really two fundamental macro questions, right? And it comes down to claims and it comes down to evidence. So if someone is hiring, let’s say, a market analyst, they might claim that they have spreadsheet skills, they have Python skills. But quite frankly, interview is a performance. What you then need to have is some material evidence that says this person has the demonstrated capability to do the job.

Sarah O’Melia:

Welcome to Don't Get Played, a podcast from Cisive.

This show is for talent acquisition leaders and people managers who care about trust at work. How it's built. How it's measured. And how leaders design systems that hold up when speed, risk, and accountability collide.

I'm Sarah O'Melia, VP of Learning and Employee Communications at Cisive.

Every hiring process is built to answer two questions. Whether a person is who they say they are. And whether they can actually do the job. Companies have gotten very good at the first one. The second is still mostly guesswork. And generative AI has made it harder. When anyone can produce a polished resume in seconds, the old signals stop telling you much.

My guest today is Dr. Michael Campbell, Founder and CEO of SignalVerified. He built the company around one diagnosis. Hiring has a signal gap, and it sits between what candidates claim and what they can prove.

We talk about why scarcity, more than volume, broke the old proxies for talent. We get into triage under uncertainty, and why entry-level jobs end up requiring two years of experience. We cover the credibility tax a bad hire puts on a manager. And Michael walks through a three-question audit any hiring leader can run on themselves.

Verifying who someone is was never the hard part. Verifying what they can do is the next decade of this work.

Let's get started!

Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Campbell:

Great to be here. Thank you.

Sarah O’Melia:

Great. So I wanted to kick it off because for decades, recruiters understood some sort of tried and true signals that indicated a good potential hire, like a strong resume or a good interview. And these served as good ways to predict a high level of competence. But what’s changed?

Michael Campbell:

Yeah. Well, I think what’s changed is what broke: scarcity. You know, when you wrote a resume, you spent time. I grew up, you know, writing resumes. In the nineties, you would sit in front, and I’m gonna date myself here, in front of a typewriter. You would have your thesaurus next to you, maybe a dictionary, and you would spend time writing your history, your experience, your accomplishment.

And it was yours. It was your writing. It took time, and then you would head over to a department store to buy some nice resume paper, and then you would print it out and it was something you would turn in, you would feel proud about. So it was time invested. It was something that was yours, and it was quality because it was personal.

Now, depending on your app of choice, a frontier model, and whatever you’re paying, 20 bucks a month, you can produce a resume in less than 10 seconds. So we’ve gone to something that was premium, that was trust-based, that was human essentially, to something that has become pretty much commoditized that anyone can produce.

So, scarcity, I believe, is the main reason why things are different right now. And that’s, you know, having that recognition, I believe, is the first step to working towards solving this problem.

Sarah O’Melia:

Yeah, and you know, you obviously alluded to software and AI, things that used to be premium human services going into that automation space, that’s like you mentioned, right? 20 bucks a month.

So in that age of AI that we’re in right now, there’s the automatically generated resumes going to the ATS, and it’s getting to the point where recruiters, at least from a resume perspective, can’t exactly tell candidates apart as easily. So you mentioned scarcity, right? Is that a volume problem? Is it a tooling problem? Is it a little bit of both?

Michael Campbell:

Yeah, I think it’s both. And I do believe that they feed each other. No question that, you know, volume is up. I believe back in 2025, LinkedIn reported that they were receiving more than 11,000 applications per day, and that was last year, I believe. This year, of course, those numbers are up, and any single role, I’ve been talking to dozens of leaders over the past few months and I’ve heard, for one job requisition, they’re receiving thousands, literally thousands of resumes.

I spoke to a Harvard professor a few weeks ago, and she said that she spoke to a bank leader and they received 20,000 resumes for one particular role. So you have AI being used by candidates and you have AI ATS systems being used by employers. So it’s like AI fighting AI. This is not sustainable, right?

So you have a volume problem, you have a technology challenge. But what I truly believe is that even though there is a volume gap issue, we have a signal gap. And I’ll talk more about this, but this is where I believe it’s a challenge for recruiters, but it’s a challenge also for hiring managers. And because of this, one thing I’ve heard talking to managers is that they would rather have an empty seat than to fill it with the wrong person.

Sarah O’Melia:

Definitely. And when we’re thinking about how sort of blind recruiters are when we’re trying to make decisions and, you know, looking through resumes that all look perfect, the thing that jumps into my mind is really around verifying a candidate. Because when we think about verification, we often jump to background checks, right? So their education, their experience, their identity.

But walk us through the difference between is this person who they say they are, and can they do what they say they can do, more into that competence framework.

Michael Campbell:

Every hire, I think there’s really two fundamental macro questions, right? And it comes down to claims and it comes down to evidence. So if someone is hiring, let’s say, a market analyst, you know, they might claim that they have spreadsheet skills, they have Python skills. These are claims, and it’s really a matter of how well you communicate those claims in the interview.

But quite frankly, it’s a performance, right? Interview is a performance. What you then need to have is some material evidence that says this person has the demonstrated capability to do the job. Right, and that’s where I do believe, you know, hiring managers are incumbent to be able to ask that question, but do it in a way that allows that candidate to show proof of skill, proof of capability to do the job.

And I believe the solution here is a work sample or a work scenario where you’re doing a project or a micro project that connects back to the day in the life of that job. And if you can do that, then a hiring manager has a lens of whether or not that person has the evidence that backs up the claims that they’re making to do the job.

Sarah O’Melia:

So this all makes sense, and I’m thinking about if I’m a company, right, or a recruiting firm or a TA team, right, that is really focusing on identity verification as really that primary focus. What does that cost me as a company when I’m only answering that one aspect and sort of putting to the side all of those great points that you just pointed out, with the profile, with the proof, with all of these areas where you can show your work?

Michael Campbell:

Yeah, well, it’s really hard to put a dollar amount on this, and there’s some documentation out there that says that if you get a hire wrong, call it a mis-hire or bad hire, the cost can be 30% of that first year salary. What I believe, and this is just Michael Campbell’s opinion, I think the cost is higher and you can’t really put, again, a number on it because there is a credibility tax to the manager.

Like if you get that person wrong for whatever reason, you might consequently compromise your integrity or your credibility with your stakeholders. You will likely compromise your trust within your team and the morale within your team, and then of course productivity, top line, bottom line. And it’s really hard to put a number on that.

Right? So getting the hire right is not only critical, it’s necessary for that business and for that team so that it can deliver the outcomes and the results that its clients need. So understanding that is really important, but it’s not meant to be a scare tactic. It’s really just meant to be just having that awareness so that you can take action so that you can minimize that risk of a misfire.

Sarah O’Melia:

You know, I literally wrote down in my notebook “credibility tax,” because I love that term, and it gets to really the heart of what can happen if you make bad hires, right? Not just, oh, this costs the company money, which is a clear point, but also this is going to impact morale. This is going to impact productivity. This is going to go deeper than our wallets.

So we want that trust, right? And it feels like it needs to stop being just a feeling and start being part of infrastructure. So what would that potentially look like inside of a company?

Michael Campbell:

You know, we hear the term a lot around infrastructure, and, you know, the way I think about infrastructure is it just works. You know, when you’re doing a financial transaction, moving money from Bank A to Bank B, there’s infrastructure involved. You know, when you’re going to, you know, a store or to whatever, you know, picking up your kids from school, the stoplights that are around, that’s infrastructure. You expect it to be there to guide you, to direct you, to support you, to keep you safe.

And when it comes to like talent decisions or human capital decisions, I think what we’re relying right now is on intuition and gut, and what I fundamentally believe is that livelihoods are too important to just rely on a gut feel.

You know, we might have years of experience. Certainly intuition that is material is really important, but I do believe that we’re living in a time where it’s important to have decision-grade evidence so that you can make decisions. So building systems or, you know, solutions in your organization so that becomes fabric is essential.

And there’s more than one way of doing this. You can do this yourself, right? You can ask yourself, what are the right questions to ask? You know, is there a way we can do a work scenario so that we can test and validate skill before we extend the offer? These are things that you can do. It’s not about just integrating or incorporating, you know, new technology or new assessments.

I think we are tooled out, honestly, but I do believe it just comes down to a certain mindset, and that’s really important to shape the right infrastructure for your organization.

Sarah O’Melia:

Yeah. And with infrastructure, you mentioned, right, comes not just tools and systems, but process. And one thing that I’ve noticed is to ensure good hiring, sometimes companies can have sort of defensive hiring habits. So I’m thinking about inflated requirements, overpaying for pre-vetted talent, or freezing out junior-level talent.

So when I think about these more sort of defensive actions, what’s the, I keep asking about cost, but what’s the real cost when capable people get filtered out because they lack the right proxy?

Michael Campbell:

You know, I love this question, and it’s a personal one for me because I think about myself earlier in my career, when I was doing supply chain and operations and I wanted to do marketing. And I was told, hey, well, you know what? You don’t have the right proxy, you don’t have the right background.

And I was like, well, I’ve got an MBA in marketing. Well, you don’t have the experience to do product marketing. And after a lot of, you know, self-introspection and self-doubt, I was able to find an opportunity to do a short rotation when someone went on maternity leave in marketing. I was doing more of like a demand creation role.

So I was able to prove that person wrong, that I could do their role. But unfortunately, in many cases, especially young talent, they don’t have that opportunity. So one thing that I tell my kids is that never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes. If you don’t have necessarily the proxies on paper, do it yourself, right?

I think there are two types of people in this world. Are you a creator or are you a consumer? Organizations need to have more creators who are building and solving problems, right? We all are consumers. We all consume content. But if you want to be, for example, a digital marketer, then solve a problem. Take the initiative and say, hey, I saw that you were looking to expand this widget, or this product and this demographic. Here is what I recommend you do.

You create that experience and you meet that manager or that hiring decision maker and say, this is why I’m more than capable to do this job. Can you give me this opportunity? So creating those opportunities for yourself is how you can manufacture proxy and meet that employer where they are and create opportunities that will knock that manager’s socks off.

Because I do believe initiative really does matter. But it’s gonna require some unconventional ways, but it starts with that creator mindset.

Sarah O’Melia:

I love that because that is such a paradox sometimes, when people don’t have experience, but you need experience to get in the door to get experience. So I love calling that out, where it doesn’t have to be traditional experience, right? It doesn’t have to be, I’m walking in the door to this company. It’s, I’m going to create my own experience, my own expertise, and my own representation of what that looks like.

Michael Campbell:

That’s right.

Sarah O’Melia:

Yeah. So one phrase I’ve heard you use in the past is something called triage under uncertainty. And that’s when a company demands what we’re talking about, two years of experience for an entry-level job. So why is that actually a rational response to bad information?

Michael Campbell:

So when we think about, you know, requiring two years of experience, you know, the reason for that is somebody else has already gone through the experiment. Somebody else has gone through that experience with that particular candidate. So that’s why you see a lot of entry-level positions requiring two years of experience.

I think it’s a fair point because of things that we’ve been talking about. You know, managers want some sense of assurance that person is qualified. But having that two-year experience, it really shows that if somebody hired them, that person did well, they stayed in that role and they were not let go for whatever reason.

So that’s why you do see that. You know, when it comes to early talent, who doesn’t have, again, that two years of experience, you need to do other things to show that you’re more than capable to do the job, which is what we talked about earlier, projects, capstones, for example, internships, if you can find that. These are ways to try to circumvent that two-year requirement. But again, I think that’s one of the reasons why managers are requiring it.

Sarah O’Melia:

I love that, and I feel like the thread here is all around, can I trust that this person has competence? And I have heard that you built a three-question audit that any hiring leader can run on themselves. So can you walk us through it live?

Michael Campbell:

Yeah, sure. Now, these are three questions that are somewhat uncomfortable but necessary. And the question number one here is, can you point to someone that you’ve hired recently, and that person may be someone who, let’s say that person is not a high performer or a bad performer, somewhere in between, but that person you have just hired, when you made that hiring decision, can you point to evidence for why you made that decision?

Question two is, during that hiring decision cycle, when you made that decision for that person who is now working for you, who was the runner-up, and did you evaluate that person in the same way? Did that person have some level of evidence for why that person was not the right person for that particular job?

And the third question is, you know, do you have a reason for why you picked one over the other? And is it written down anywhere? Right. And it goes back to, in many cases, what I believe, and I’ve talked to dozens of leaders, is that they don’t have an answer, or it’s no to all three. And if that’s the case for you, you are not unique.

It’s normal, right? And I do believe, though, that with AI becoming as fast as it is in terms of doing more and more work, it’s gonna become really critical that we have processes and protocols in place to really filter out the noise so that we can see what’s human versus what’s machine. Because if we can do that, then we are building systems and environments where, you know, people can flourish in this world of AI.

So those are my three questions.

Sarah O’Melia:

I love that. So I wrote it down, right? So it was evidence, evaluation, and really being able to articulate why you selected a candidate. Beautiful. So if I’m a leader and I take this assessment and either I score all zero, right, out of three, or all three out of three, right, so each end of the spectrum, what does that mean for me?

Michael Campbell:

Well, one, you have self-awareness of where you stand. If you answer no to all questions, and as I said earlier, I think that is probably more status quo. But you have awareness so that you can take action the next time you do hire, be it this quarter or next year. Just put down on paper that the next time I do hire, when I get to that last round and I have, let’s say, two or three candidates, my recommendation is put a playoff together.

Have those two or three candidates compete for the role and have them show with evidence that they can deliver on the job, right? You create a micro project that snaps or connects back to the day in the life of that, the first 90 days, and you are requiring to see exactly evidence and proof that they have the skills to do the job.

Now, I wanna be very clear here that I’m not saying that this should replace the interview, right? You need to have a way to assess the intangibles. Intangibles will never go away, right? Eye contact, energy, chemistry, those are all things that are measured and assessed, I believe, through human connection, and no machine will ever be able to do that, I believe.

Now, but in terms of evidence to do the role, just create some type of work scenario that can be done, you know, in an hour or two, and use that as a way to connect claims with evidence. And if the two are disconnected, you have enough information to consider somebody else. If they’re connected, you now have unequivocal evidence that person is the right person for the job.

Sarah O’Melia:

I love that. I love that. So with this framework in mind and with an eye on the horizon, what does winning this look like for a talent org five years from now?

Michael Campbell:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I believe it starts with just maybe changing your mindset from speed to velocity. You know, we think a lot about, I gotta go fast, I gotta move this to here and I gotta get it done in X days or X months. I think speed can go any which way if you don’t have a clear destination. Then you don’t know where you’re going. You might be moving fast, but you might not be going in the right direction.

Right? I loved physics growing up, and velocity is something that we learned a lot about. Velocity is speed in the right direction, or in a given direction, right? So being very clear about what that endpoint is for your organization, thinking about that North Star that connects back to your mission, and every organization knows what that is.

And designing or reverse engineering the steps to get there, right? So velocity is the right mindset, I believe. And if you embrace that, I think you’re gonna be going in the right direction.

Sarah O’Melia:

I love that. Excellent. This has been so incredibly insightful. Thank you so much for being here with us, Michael.

Michael Campbell:

Well, Sarah, thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation.

Sarah O’Melia:

Hiring has always come down to two things. Identity and capability. We've built a lot of infrastructure around the first. The second deserves the same attention.

A claim is not evidence. An interview is a performance. If you want to know whether someone can do the job, give them a piece of the job. A short work scenario tied to the first 90 days will tell you more than another polished answer.

The cost of a bad hire also goes well beyond salary. It shows up in a manager's credibility and in the trust inside their team. Morale and productivity follow. That cost is hard to measure, which is exactly why it gets overlooked.

If you can't point to the evidence behind your last hire, you're not alone. Start with the next one.

And speed alone won't fix any of this. Velocity is speed with a clear direction. Know where your organization is headed, and build a hiring process that gets you there.

Michael, thank you for joining us, and for giving every hiring leader an audit they can run on their last hire.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to Don't Get Played on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And share it with a hiring manager staring at a stack of perfect resumes.

We'll see you next time. And remember, in the meantime… don't get played.