This week the World Economic Forum published a piece putting a name to something a lot of hiring teams have been circling. Marvin Starominski-Uehara, PhD, an assistant professor of international business at Temple University, calls it "Trace Hiring." Instead of judging a candidate by a resume that AI can now generate in seconds, you design interactions that leave traces of how someone thinks, adapts, and builds.
The problem he's answering is one every recruiter already feels. Applying used to take effort, and that effort filtered out casual applicants on its own. AI removed the barrier, and the numbers show it.
The resume didn't stop mattering. It stopped proving effort.
Trace hiring runs in three stages. Candidates respond to a real problem by video or conversation. A shortlist then works in small groups on a fresh problem while evaluators watch how the group works rather than what it produces. Finalists answer one question about what they learned. Each stage is built so the people who lean entirely on AI converge on the same generic answer, and the people who engage produce something you can't script.
Stage 1 is the one you can run this week
The full three-stage version is worth building toward, and each stage catches something the last one can't. You don't have to stand up all of it to start. Stage 1 is the fastest to put in place, and it's where most of the filtering happens.
Here's how to run it without standing anyone up.
Pull one real problem straight from your team's work. Not a brainteaser or a take-home project. One genuine question your team is working through right now, the kind you'd raise in a first conversation.
Ask every shortlisted candidate to answer it in a short video. Two minutes, on their phone, no slides. Just how they'd approach it.
Watch how they think. The candidates who piped the question through ChatGPT sound identical and say nothing specific. The ones who engaged sound like themselves and surface something real. That contrast shows up in the first thirty seconds, and it does the filtering for you.
McCoy IQ sets this up in minutes
This is exactly what we built McCoy IQ for. It puts one real question in front of your shortlist and lets you hear every candidate think through it, on video, in their own words. It sits between the resume and the interview. The resume tells you who cleared the bar on paper. The video tells you who's worth an hour of your time.
The WEF is right that the resume has stopped proving effort. The full framework is worth growing into, but you don't have to wait for it. Stage 1, one real problem and two minutes of someone thinking out loud, is the fastest, cheapest, and fairest filter you can put in place today.