Coffee & Change · 2026-05-30 · 55 min
What if the resume - that document we've built our entire hiring process around - is the wrong place to start? Jason P. Carroll makes a compelling case that it is. Drawing on research from the 1980s and 90s, he points out that prior skills, experience, and formal education have almost zero predictive value for success in a new role. Add AI-generated resumes to that picture, and the traditional hiring process starts to look like a relic. Jason's company, Aptive Index, approaches the problem differently. Rather than measuring what someone has done, it measures what drives them - motivators, emotional resonance, internal activation, cognitive style. The platform pairs that psychometric data with Aria, a behavioral AI that knows your team's profiles and can guide everything from hiring decisions to conflict resolution to job description writing. The conversation takes some unexpected turns. Jason shares stories of clients using Aria as a personal growth tool - including two CEOs who credited it with saving their marriages. He talks about a CEO forum where Aria identified, in real time, that one member felt like an outsider in the group - and was right.
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