A big breakdown in getting people hired is proving that they have the skills employers say they need. An overwhelming number of employers think they’re not really getting what they buy based on what workers sell them.

But the idea of “validation” of skills is messier and more contradictory than employers tend to represent, which is probably why some of the deep building in this space doesn’t seem to be working out.

I spend a lot of time thinking about hiring and how it’s broken, and I still think that policymakers will need to swing big to get employers started on the significant work they need to do to make it better. That said, I also understand employers’ predicament: how do you efficiently get through an endless stack of resumes and interviews (further complicated by AI-enabled fraud)? And when you do, how the hell do you trust that the person you’re thinking about hiring actually can do what they say they can do?

That last part, which I’ll put under the umbrella of “skills validation” for the uninitiated, is something many employers don’t feel great about. Last year, The Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America surveyed 550 employers. All but 4 percent of them said they “experienced [some kind of] misalignment between the skills job candidates say they have and what those candidates are actually able to do.” Only 20 percent of surveyed employers said they experience misalignment “a lot” or “a great deal,” but the results suggest these employers can expect that what a candidate says and what a candidate can do won’t line up.

I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that most hires are manipulating their way through the hiring process, or that the misalignment here is necessarily hard proof of a “skills gap” that means workers don’t have the skills employers are looking for, or that colleges and schools are to blame for not teaching people right. Rather, I think the issue is a bit more nuanced than any of those easy answers—the type of thing you’re likely to hear from political leaders when they talk about these issues.

The technical skills employers say they want are often Polaroids—they develop fast, but they’re not really meant to last. In my experience, a lot of policymaking discussions assume the skills employers hire for are much more fixed and orderly than they really are. Yet, what a manager is looking for in that moment often depends on where the business wants to go next (or what’s trendy with their bosses). Plus, just like how you might have found yourself hunting for the opposite of your ex at one point, all the quibbles and grievances a manager has with the last person to hold that job flavor what they want for the next person.

In other words, you have a moving target (the employable skills that workers have or think they have) trying to hit a moving target (what employers think are the skills they need at the time they’re hiring). Validation, then, probably oughtn’t be a fixed idea, either, but it also seems to stay fairly static.

UpSkill America’s survey found that more than three quarters of surveyed employers used interviews to determine if a worker had skills.¹ I don’t want to make it seem like interviewing is a terrible way to gauge skills, but again, in my experience, very few employers prepare their interviewers to know what to look and listen for in terms of the skills they’re hunting, let alone how to adjust to listen for the new skills they’re after. That’s before you get into things like unconscious bias and things like an interviewer using a hiring process to validate the interviewer’s professional path.

Still, validation is a roadblock. In talking to a mess of people around employment, I’ve heard concerns about it cited as a holdup to deploying things like skills-first hiring—or hiring based on verified skills a worker actually has, regardless of how they got them—as well as trusting the results of workforce programs at all.

I’ve met some incredibly smart people who are trying to solve employers’ hesitance around skills validation. I’ve seen them build out ornate and intricate systems that provide as much validation as possible to satisfy employers’ concerns. That’s at least some of the idea behind what are called “skill wallets” or “learner employment records” or whatever want to call them—validated digital records that a person has the skills they say they do so employers can feel comfortable hiring them. At a House hearing late last year, Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, likened LERs to the invention of human flight.

And yet, I’ve had far too many employers tell me that this LER stuff ain’t flying with them. The rap on LERs, and the one I’ve yet to see any good evidence to counter, is that they’re a neat invention that employers just aren’t interested in using. The UpSkill survey noted that the term LER “lands flat with employers.”

“[W]hat employers are interested in is skills,” the report says. “Moreso, they’re interested in having the ability to understand easily what skills people have, evidence of skills demonstration, and insight into an individual’s proficiency.”

So, employers don’t like the problem and many aren’t really down with policymakers’ preferred solutions. If validation is so vitally important, what can policymakers do that they’ll actually use?

My answer to that, somewhat annoyingly, sprouts from another question.

Last year, a couple of colleagues asked me this: all those years employers were hiring people based on the pedigree of their college or whatever, how hard were they working to “validate” skills? To paraphrase those conversations, validation can be bound up in comfort and how you’re proving someone belongs in a certain kind of role.

I’ll caution that I don’t think this is the case for every employer… but yeah, that struck me as truer than I’d rather it be. I’ve talked with staff at employers that are working hard on opening up new pathways because they see inefficiency and a talent pool their competitors aren’t reaching into. At the same time, I’ve heard staff at those same employers complain about how their executive and management classes are still largely defined by collecting grads from the Ivies who certainly haven’t validated they have the skills to do those jobs.

That’s not only frustrating as hell, it’s fraught. Just to state what should still be obvious, race and class have historically—and quite presently—been a big part of why some managers aren’t comfortable.

So how do we handle this basket of issues in a way that gets workers hired without making things too complicated for employers and also push hiring to a better place, which involves accounting for the things that have kept good workers out of jobs in the past?

To get people hired, we do need to sew validation into the fabric of workforce programs—many of which still tend to stop short of guaranteed placements or any promise someone will get hired at the end of them. As in a great many things in workforce, the best starting point to finding an answer is having a more honest conversation about it than we’re having now.

I think incredibly highly of some of the leaders in LERs and talent marketplaces. Constructively, though, you can build the coolest and most intricate system on the planet, but if you don’t account for employers’ ease of use (and head off their worst instincts), the returns on the investment of your time and money are going to be real limited. At the same time, if this all comes down to comfort, you’re also wrestling with employers worst instincts as much as you are trying to serve them people that can do the work.

I don’t think there are fabulous answers here, but I do think that the more you can show an employer someone can do the work—in terms that are hard to debate—the more likely you’re going to get them hired. There are a lot of options for doing that.

If you do want to take advantage of technology, there are options out there that go beyond skills wallets. I recently got a demonstration of a platform called VALID-8, which I joke is like football recruiting videos for welders. Workers record videos that show them doing the job, which is a pretty good way of showing that they have the skills to do the job. There are controls and tools that not only authenticate the video, but also help connect the dots for hiring managers as to what the video shows.

If you’re a smaller employer (or workforce program trying to convince employers to do stuff better), and you’re worried about whether you can afford a tech solution in the current economy, you also can keep this stuff simple. Setting up in-person demonstrations of skills is a great idea. And I’m a big believer in things like blind resume reviews—which are cheap and straightforward—to head off unconscious biases on race, class, and pedigree that can cost employers good talent for dumb reasons.

Lastly, if it’s not clear yet, I strongly recommend you read the UpSkill America report. Clearly, I reached my own conclusions from it, but it’s probably the clearest and easiest research I’ve read about what employers say they want and need in validation and what they’re getting. Unsurprisingly, one of those things is that employers are more likely to trust a validator if they have a history of getting good information from them.

That last part is an important lesson for those championing LERS et al. You need word of mouth and proof of concept that you get good candidates through these systems. I’ve seen more policymakers praising the mere existence of these systems than emphasizing their results. The latter is where employers are looking for answers.

Greetings from D.C., a city that’s clearly novel and a treat to visit for a longtime Ann Arborite like me. I’m wrapping up my time at Jobs for the Future Horizons today. If you’re about Workforce Comic-Con today, feel free to say, “Hey.” I’ve absorbed an absurd amount of workforce stuff since I hit the ground here, and I’m thrilled to share some of the things I’m already cooking up after this trip.

I’m sure some of that will bleed over into Thursday’s edition of THE MONEY, where I suspect I’ll have some more thoughts on the big spending updates we’ve had in recent weeks, as well as a new Trump II funding opportunity that’s more curious than it might look on its face. See you then.