HRTech Edition: Two years ago, Atlassian stopped asking candidates for résumés in many of its hiring processes. Walk us through the decision.
Amy Knight: It wasn’t a single decision — it was an experiment that kept showing the same result. We were running a parallel process where some teams evaluated candidates through structured skills assessments and others went through a traditional résumé-first screen. The skills-first cohort consistently produced better hires by every downstream metric we cared about: 90-day performance ratings, retention at two years, manager satisfaction. After twelve months of that data, it stopped feeling like an experiment.
HRTech Edition: What was the pushback?
Amy Knight: The pushback was real and it came from two directions. From hiring managers, it was: “How do I know who I’m talking to?” They were used to using the résumé as a shortcut for credentialing — specific school, specific company, specific job title. The assessment took that away. The second wave of pushback was more interesting: it came from candidates. Some found it refreshing. Others, particularly senior candidates, found it disrespectful. They felt like we were asking them to prove themselves when their track record already spoke for itself. That tension is real and we haven’t fully resolved it.
HRTech Edition: What does the data show about who benefits most from skills-first hiring?
Amy Knight: Clearly, people who don’t have the traditional signals — the brand-name schools, the brand-name employers — benefit the most. We see more career-changers, more people from non-traditional educational backgrounds, more candidates who built their skills through unconventional paths. Whether that translates into greater diversity on the demographic dimensions people care about is more complicated — the answer is yes in some categories and not meaningfully different in others.
