Minneapolis recruiting firm Avenica aims to eliminate the 'collective insanity' of résumés

Résumés don't predict anything, and using them amounts to collective insanity.

At least that's how Scott Dettman, CEO of Minneapolis-based recruiting firm Avenica, sees it.

Avenica helps job seekers — about a thousand a year — find work, all without a single résumé changing hands or having a recruiter on staff. The firm places recent college graduates in entry-level, career-track jobs in industries such as insurance, financial services, logistics, supply chain, corporate real estate and manufacturing.

Dettman has big goals, aiming for Avenica to reach 50,000 hires a year by 2030. That depends in part on changing the culture of hiring from a demand orientation — where employers search for people who fit a job description — to a supply-side approach that identifies candidates' "hidden superpowers," Dettman said.

Avenica offers job seekers opportunities to demonstrate their potential, latent characteristics that, when met with opportunity, will develop and lead to future success. Rather than a résumé's list of past jobs, colleges and majors, Dettman said, Avenica learns candidates' work styles and their "interests, quirks and preferences."

"Those data points are the greatest predictor of their ability to succeed in anything," Dettman said. "How many of us go into any sort of profession and, on day one, know exactly what to do?"

A personal process

Dettman described Avenica's approach as "artisanal scale," automating early stages of its process but then meeting with every candidate who completes those preliminary steps. Dettman himself meets with a couple of candidates a week.

"When it comes to interaction with a human being, the one-to-one, we get as bespoke as we need to and really dig in," Dettman said.

Rather than a typical job interview, Avenica's meetings are "much more like a kind of behavioral health intake," Dettman said, framed with input from people in social work and psychology. The meetings can be emotional, and the expectation is those on Avenica's talent operations team will "stamp the heart of everyone they interact with," Dettman said.

"We get a truer and more comprehensive understanding from the qualitative data we're capturing of who this person is, what drives them, what motivates them," Dettman said.

Roughly 500 people a day begin the application process on Avenica's website, Dettman said. They perform worklike tasks, such as watching a video and then writing an email about it, to show they can follow directions, pay attention, be responsive and communicate effectively. Candidates don't have to pay anything and can opt out at any time.

"In most entry-level positions, you're not coming in and saying, 'I've got the strategy for taking this Fortune 500 company to the next level,'" Dettman said. "You come in, you're given a set of tasks and things to do and comprehend and learn and communicate and collaborate. And that's the essence of most entry-level positions, especially those requiring a degree that isn't super-specialized like history or psychology or English."

Avenica asks employers to trust its ability to assess candidates' potential, Dettman said. This can help applicants who might not perform well in certain interview environments or underestimate their abilities. An English major last year, for example, claimed to have no math skills. Avenica, however, discovered the candidate had volunteered as the treasurer for a nonprofit theater company for five years, and that helped the candidate overcome that mental block about handling numbers to land a job with a financial organization.

For applicants who potentially fit an open job, Avenica assesses how they would align with the company's culture and current employees. Employers receive avatars of several recommended candidates and can select the one, or sometimes more than one, to hire. Companies hire some candidates based on Avenica's recommendation alone, without interviewing them themselves. More than 92% of the candidates Avenica recommends nab the job, Dettman said.

Some hiring managers tell Dettman they wish Avenica had been around when they graduated college. Some ask Dettman to speak to their college-age offspring about reaching their potential. A number of people Avenica has placed come back to the firm for candidates after they have advanced into hiring positions.

Expanding the pool

In the past 18 months, through June, 67% of people hired through Avenica were diverse candidates.

"Our goal is to reduce barriers and provide people a path," he said. "We want to remove a lot of the existing bias as it relates to assessing potential. And when that happens, it's amazing to see the talent that comes through the pipeline."

Realizing his potential — proving and improving himself to the point of developing something of rebellious spirit — has been a concern of Dettman's since he was "a poor kid growing up on the South Side of Milwaukee." After graduating with a political science degree, he earned a job running a new division for a consulting company specializing in health care technology. He relied on some of his superpowers — tenacity and relentlessness — to learn what he needed to know to do the job well.

Dettman's skepticism of résumés gained further support in his previous role at ManpowerGroup. A study there, with Google and Cognizant, found résumés can't forecast how a job applicant will perform or whether a company will actually hire the applicant.

Where other firms hire recruiters and invest in outreach efforts to find candidates, Avenica leverages marketing and online targeting to attract people to its platform, Dettman said. Avenica can place two or three dozen people in jobs in a week with only 13 or 14 employees. Because of the firm's lower costs, "we charge a fraction of what these other firms charge," Dettman said, adding employers pay $4,000 to $7,000 per applicant they hire.

To scale up to the Dettman's goal of 50,000 hires a year, Avenica itself is planning some hiring of its own, expanding sales and marketing to expand its network of employers. Dettman, who joined Avenica four years ago, has done much of that work himself. He holds a minority ownership stake in Avenica, with University Ventures, a New York-based fund, as majority owner.

"We're going to continue to test and evaluate different ways to better unlock human potential," Dettman said. "We have to get better. We're happy to be at the forefront of that charge and working to make that happen."

Todd Nelson is a freelance writer in Lake Elmo. His e-mail is todd_nelson@mac.com.