A résumé can't show you the work. A work sample can.

Every hiring manager for an entry-level operations role knows the pile. Hundreds of résumés, most of them saying the same things: "detail-oriented", "strong communicator", "fast learner". None of them tell you the one thing you need to know: can this person do the work on day one?

The last decade's big answer was skills-based hiring: drop the degree requirement and look at skills instead. It was the right idea. The evidence says it mostly did not happen.

Removing the requirement was not enough

A 2024 study by the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School followed what happened after large employers dropped degree requirements from job postings. Postings changed. Hiring mostly did not.

The report's conclusion is blunt: simply removing a stated requirement seldom opens a job to people without the credential. The filter did not go away. It moved to the next step, where managers still had nothing better to judge than the résumé and the interview.

Why work samples work

Industrial psychologists have studied how well different hiring methods predict job performance for decades. In a widely cited review, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that work sample tests were among the strongest predictors of later performance, well ahead of years of experience or education. Later research by Paul Sackett and colleagues revised many of those figures downward and found structured interviews to be the strongest single predictor. The lesson held: the more an assessment looks like the job, and the more consistently it is scored, the better it predicts.

The reasoning is simple. The closer the assessment is to the real job, the less you have to guess.

What a useful work sample looks like

For junior roles on operations desks, a work sample earns its place if it does four things:

1. It uses the real tools and real case types of the job
2. It runs against a clock, as the job does
3. Every decision is scored the same way, every time
4. Each score links back to the work that produced it

That last point matters most. A number on its own is just another claim. A score you can open, to see the ticket, the checks and the note behind it, is evidence.

Where Zeloric fits

Zeloric gives candidates realistic desks for the four roles: Tech support, Fraud prevention, Anti-money laundering and Medical claims. They work full shifts against the clock, and every case is graded on that desk's own rubric. The result is a Shift Record: every graded case, every score, and the work behind each one, which the candidate chooses to share.

You can open a sample record to see what an employer sees, or read more on the employers page.

The question was never "degree or no degree". It was "what can we look at that actually shows the work?"

Sources and further reading

• Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, summarized by the Harvard Kennedy School Project on Workforce.
• Schmidt, F. L., and Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., and Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068.