Credentials Are Dead

Navigating the job market in a world of empty credentials

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

I’ve read several articles recently (some of which were from university professors) about how everyone’s cheating. Virtually all students, they say, are now in the habit of using AI. They’re using chatbots to not only work on their homework and take their online exams, but also to write all of their papers.

And if students are using chatbots to write their papers for them, what that means in a literal sense is that students are no longer thinking.

One of the main features of the university is that it teaches you to write. And what “to write” really means is “to think.” An essay is both a gauge and a direct output of a student’s thinking; an essay literally is a student’s thinking, hardened into the crystal of words. It’s a reflection of who they are and what the hell they’re doing at school.

And many professors, discouraged and overworked and jaded and underpaid, are now using AI to grade students’ papers as well. Computers are grading computer-written papers. It’s like one of those machines that you have to start by hand and then it keeps going forever without any further interference. It’s a self-sustaining pointlessness machine, a trinket that’s entertaining to watch.

College degrees have already been on their way from being an exclusive measure of value to a hollow consumer product. And AI might have put the final nail in the box. As Kyla Scanlon said in a recent piece about the economics of friction,

This is all economically quite weird. The credential still costs money and at least now, still signals value. It still unlocks jobs, internships, visas, and salaries (although the wage premium has eroded over time). But the effort that used to underwrite that value has vanished.

I mean, think about this as a recruiter for a large company. You can’t tell anything about a graduate — nothing at all — when all of them have basically used the exact same tools with the exact same prompts to earn the exact same degree with the exact same grades.

OK, so we probably all know all of this by now. The university degree has lost its signaling value. But where does that leave us? What do we do about it? My opinion is, we’ll do what we always should have done, and used to do. We’ll go back to focusing on who people are. We’ll be forced to give good interviews again, on both sides of the table.

Job interviews of college graduates will go back to being about a person’s character and what makes them interesting. If you aren’t interesting, you won’t be hired. If you can’t show in twenty minutes that you’re worth hiring, you won’t be. Which means that young people better start hurrying up and gathering life experience instead of just coasting through high school and college the way many do. The way I did. (I never got any good jobs in my twenties. I was a totally uninteresting, unassertive person who did not interview well. I wouldn’t have hired me.)

It will no longer suffice, and frankly hasn’t for quite a while, to go through high school and college wasting time on Instagram and Netflix and having no outside interests. It will no longer suffice to be a regular person. Or, let me say that more optimistically: the pendulum has gone too far and will now swing the other way. This is an opportunity for all of us to become more interesting again. For kids to grow up quicker again so that we can all set ourselves apart and stop being so damn same.

A real, true display of skills will become necessary. The interview process might start including deeper questions about a person’s extracurricular activities. That is, we’ll no longer performatively ask interviewees “so what do you do outside of work,” and barely even listen to their responses. This question will now be a serious gauge of ambition, creativity, and, for lack of a better word, aliveness. As a recruiter for any serious position, you’ll need to know that there’s someone behind the wheel. That this person isn’t on tech-enabled autopilot, and that they’re capable of solving real problems.

Or more interview processes might start including unpaid tasks for testing a person’s abilities. One time I was applying for a writing job and I had to do a reading comprehension / writing task that took several hours. Was it a pain? Sure. And I didn’t like giving away my time like that. But I understood why it was necessary. And this was before chatbots were a thing.

Most knowledge-economy jobs might necessarily become like that. Because if you’re hiring now, in the age of AI-enabled carelessness, you quite honestly have to assume the average job applicant is a complete moron who doesn’t do most of his knowledge-based tasks himself. Who doesn’t think for himself, who doesn’t have the life experience to solve real problems. That sounds harsh, but am I wrong? You have to assume that. To protect your company. And to protect your own job as a recruiter.

I have always had a problem with bureaucracy, credentialing, and the “machine” that programmatically determines worthiness. I mean, it has its uses and upsides of course. For the past 50 years, hiring someone with a degree over someone without at least ensured you were hiring someone who could complete something difficult. And that’s a useful signal.

But the credentialing machine also does two things which are dangerous:

1. Ignores the intangibles.

Which, for 99% of jobs in any field, are more important than a basic, vanilla “skill set.” You can teach an optimist anything. But a pessimistic welder can sink your ship. An entry-level data analyst who doesn’t even want to wake up in the morning is not going to do a good job for your company.

Baseline skills are great, but I’d rather teach those skills to someone on the job than accept a subpar applicant just because I don’t have to train them. That’s what our economy has become, and I think it’s utterly foolish. Employers these days want a 4-year degree and 3 years of experience when what they really should be looking for is people who are happy.

Anyone who truly wants to do quality, interesting work is going to be more valuable than a “credentialed” or “trained” applicant nine and a half times out of ten. Look at me: I do not have a degree, and would not get hired for most white-collar jobs in our economy. But I have learned more skill sets at my current job than most people will in their entire careers. Because I wanted to. And I’m really damn good at my job. Because I want to be.

Which leads me to the second thing wrong with the credentialing machine:

2. Credentialing bureaucracy front-loads the discovery of quality. Or it tries to.

What I mean by this is, credentials try to guarantee upfront the worthiness of a person and their skill set, the way the FDA’s job is to guarantee a product’s safety for public consumption. And unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. I know some miserable pricks with college diplomas. These people are not safe for public consumption.

You can’t always know upfront whether a thing will turn out well — or whether a job candidate will be a great candidate. It’s foolish to pretend that “the most qualified candidate” is always the most qualified candidate.

For example, imagine a highly talented chef starting a restaurant in a crowded city. If you were a credential obsessive, you might think “this guy has a track record, his last two restaurants were successful, and he is clearly passionate.” And those things are great. But what if he’s bad at hiring, or he treats his employees poorly? What if the culture at his restaurant sucks? What if he can’t source ingredients as well as he thought he could in this city? What if the people in this particular city just aren’t in the mood for what he’s cooking?

A restaurant isn’t always something that can be guaranteed, because it relies on things like taste and local culture and hiring and momentum. Only time can tell whether it will succeed in a particular time and place. With many things in life, you have to let the market tell you whether it wants something or not. Many college graduates have found this out the hard way — they go into crippling debt for a degree (a guarantee) and then the market tells them it doesn’t want them. It turns out that even for the past twenty years, the degree has not been a guarantee. As Chris Rock said, “Stop telling kids ‘you can be anything you want to be.’ You can be anything you’re good at, as long as they’re hiring.”

Front-loading the discovery of quality is an illusion that the modern world sells us. Both because it’s attractive to management-minded people (who now run the world), and because discovering quality organically just doesn’t jibe with bureaucracy. Everything must be credentialed, labelled, and judged upfront so that the paperwork can be filled out and filed. Everybody’s jobs depend on following protocol. Everybody’s job depends on never taking on the risk of discovering quality organically — or, heaven forbid, through mistakes.

And that also applies to our personal lives. We spend far too much time listening to the opinions of people on the internet, when we should be out walking our cities and discovering the best places to eat.

In the most important parts of life, such front-loading, such rigid risk avoidance, generally isn’t possible. And it’s going to be even less possible now that the homogenizing effect of AI will start to dilute the usefulness of signals you can get about people on paper. The people who are most worth your time cannot be compressed onto paper. And that’s always been the case. We just conveniently forgot about it in the era of Mass College Education and Degree Required™.

The important things in life are about what you’ve tried and who you know. And both of those things are going to become more important, on both sides of the interviewing table. Hollow credentialing is no longer going to cut it.

Date around. Hire degree-less people who make you belly laugh. Hurt yourself and go broke a few times early in your life so you’ve actually faced some hard problems, and you can take that experience into interviews. Because that will set you apart.

We have an opportunity before us, for young people to start being interesting again. To rely on more than college to say “I’m an adult and I’m worth taking a chance on.” And we should take it. Not just so we can get better jobs, but so that we can be more alive in a time when computers want us not to be.

Drink some water and don’t be regular.

JR

“Everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.” - a woman named Rose on Substack