Rotterdam twins (25) are building on the ‘honest’ application procedure

It is the most common method of hiring personnel worldwide: reading a resume. And yet Charlotte Melkert (25) is vehemently opposed to this list of education and work experience. The CV is ‘hopelessly outdated’ and also keeps ‘discrimination in the labor market afloat’.

These are strong claims, but Melkert is not just saying something: she has seen it with her own eyes. In 2016, when she became a part-time recruiter with twin sister Fleur. In addition to their studies – business administration and criminology respectively – the duo were looking for candidates for clients in business services. The 19-year-olds only supplied female candidates, and that turned out to be a golden move thanks to the striving for diversity. The teenagers mediated more than forty candidates in two years.

Dubious reasons

But while the money was pouring in – a placement brought in an average of 15 thousand euros, the sisters were annoyed by the behavior of some customers. They saw countless talented candidates rejected. Melkert: ‘Customers had strict requirements: the applicant had to come from a certain university. Or have worked at a large accountancy firm for at least four years.’

Other candidates were rejected for even more dubious reasons. ‘The non-Dutch name was too complicated. Or the candidate was in her early thirties, they were afraid she might get pregnant.’ It went down the wrong way for the twins. ‘We spoke to candidates that we knew 100 percent would do well. And they were pushed aside on the basis of such a prejudice.’

In 2018, that was the reason to close down the recruitment agency and start something new: Equalture. The twins wanted to design an application procedure in which apparently trivial matters such as age, gender and origin would no longer play a role. ‘We wanted to eliminate as much as possible the chance that the customer would select based on gut feelings.’

But the sisters soon learned that education and work experience—the key ingredients of the resume—are poor predictors of future job performance anyway. Melkert gets American research concludes that the correlation between educational background and job performance is 0.10. The relationship between work experience and performance is also not much stronger: 0.16. According to science, cognitive skills have a significantly higher predictive value: a correlation of 0.65.

And so they aim the arrows at the resume. Melkert: ‘When you read a CV, about one hundred and fifty prejudices bubble up. You see a photo, education, place of residence and unconsciously already form an extensive image in your head. But appearances can be deceiving: in 9 out of 10 cases the candidate is a completely different person.’

Highly flammable employee

With a team of neuroscientists, neurobiologists and psychologists, the twins develop a replacement for the resume: games. ‘They are more reliable than personality questionnaires or exercises such as series of numbers. Unlike with a questionnaire, you cannot give socially desirable answers in a game. In the right setting, a user is completely immersed in the game. That’s how you trigger intrinsic behaviour.’

The company has four beautifully designed games. For example, you have to find the fastest route with a racing car, where the game tests cognitive flexibility. In another case, your personality is tested, in the form of a simulation in which you lead a team consisting of an ambitious colleague and a highly flammable employee.

Equalture now has 280 customers who use the games, including PostNL, PepsiCo and Holland Casino. A total of more than eight thousand candidates play the game every month. They are mainly used in recruiting for all kinds of office jobs, such as sales, legal and marketing roles. It is also used to recruit for more specific positions such as engineers.

Melkert underlines: they have never wanted to make companies more diverse, only the process fairer. ‘And fair can mean that a team that only consists of white men, after an application round, gets another white man.’ Nevertheless, in practice the games do indeed promote diversity. ‘We often hear from customers: we hired someone who we wouldn’t take seriously based on the resume, thanks to the game score.’

Melkert finds this hardly surprising. ‘It is conceivable that a team of male engineers is less likely to hire a female colleague. They are less able to identify with her. But if the game proves the woman is a good match, you’ll need to have strong arguments not to hire her. Then you can’t say: ‘I didn’t quite feel the click.’

No government interest

About 6 out of 10 customers continue to consider their CV in addition to the game scores. Melkert understands that, ‘the CV is so ingrained’. Still, the twins hope that in the future candidates will only be judged on game scores. “That’s fairest.”

In the meantime, the sisters are doing well. In five years Equalture grew into a mature company with forty employees and a three-storey office in the heart of Rotterdam. Expenditure that cannot be made solely on the basis of turnover, which last year was stuck at 500 thousand euros. The company is highly dependent on investors. Last January, the company again raised 2.75 million euros in capital. A month later, the twins were honored by the business magazine Forbes, which included the sisters in the European list of most influential people under 30 years old†

The future beckons, with the prospect of expansion to several European countries, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden. But despite international ambitions, one thing is bothering them. Because although turnover growth is not to be complained about, that growth is almost exclusively due to the business community. With the exception of a few small municipalities, customers from the government domain show no interest.

And drivers should be ‘ashamed of themselves’ for that, says Melkert. “The government has said so many times that unbiased hiring should be a priority, but no ministry has taken a step towards that.’

Ultimately, it is the shore that will turn the ship, the entrepreneur suspects. ‘The labor market is changing very quickly. Roles that we knew for years will soon disappear. Thanks to digitization, roles are being added that we do not yet know. How are you going to hire someone for a role that never existed? Ultimately, those organizations will catch up.’