Previous work and achievements definitely carry valuable signal - we don't disagree with that. And relying on them makes sense for companies where the time of hiring managers is constrained and you need a quick way to identify the (likely) best people within a population.
Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies.
Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.
But for some things either you know how to do a job or you don't.
If I need someone to build me a compiler, there's no point sending me any number of job applications who did brilliantly on a coding test, if they have never built a compiler before.
(Of course sometimes it's great to build someone up from scratch, but you can't do that for an entire team all the time).
We work less well with very specialized positions. However, the approach of identifying strong general programmers, and then matching the ones who want to work on compilers with compiler jobs works surprisingly well (still often results in higher offer rates than the approach that companies themselves take of filtering first on compiler experience, and then checking technical strength)
>If I need someone to build me a compiler, there's no point sending me any number of job applications who did brilliantly on a coding test, if they have never built a compiler before.
Ok, then shoot me an email, and we'll build the compiler. I'd be happy to find a position that actually involves compiler work at all.
Relying solely on those signals though acts to the detriment of skilled people whose best work hasn't been done at prestigious, name brand companies.
Our approach to removing credentials from our screening process is to prevent ourselves being biased by them and forcing ourselves to build a process that can find strong engineers who don't look good on paper. This is a win for the companies we work with as it expands the pool of talent they can hire from.