Missing Context — with Allison Danielsen, CEO of Tallo

Why do hiring technologies struggle to match the right people to the right opportunities?

Job descriptions don't fully capture what employers actually want. Resumes don't fully represent what people can do. Yet we ask increasingly sophisticated matching algorithms—and now AI—to connect the two.

Tallo CEO Allison Danielsen joins Ian Davidson to explore the missing context inside today's hiring systems and what the next generation of talent marketplaces will need to understand about people and opportunity.

They discuss talent marketplaces, job boards, skills-based hiring, degree and experience requirements, defensible hiring practices, resumes, skills and capabilities, early talent, career navigation, AI, and richer career profiles.

Allison explains why hiring managers often struggle to translate qualities like curiosity, motivation, learning potential, adaptability, and lived experience into objective and defensible hiring criteria. They explore why removing degree requirements isn't enough to make skills-based hiring work, why people struggle to identify their own transferable skills, and how talent marketplaces could build a richer, continuously evolving understanding of human potential.

This is the fifth and final interview in The Signal Lab's In Search of Signals investigation into the information that actually shapes hiring decisions.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — The missing context in hiring 03:00 — What is Tallo? 06:00 — Why traditional job boards are changing 08:00 — What job descriptions don't tell us 11:00 — Why employers use defensible requirements 14:00 — The Defensibility Grab Bag 16:00 — Is skills-based hiring actually working? 18:00 — Building a fuller picture of a person 21:00 — What Talent Marketplace 2.0 needs 25:00 — What should we know about every job seeker? 29:00 — Why career navigation matters 35:00 — Why asking people to list their skills doesn't work 38:00 — How talent marketplaces will change 40:00 — Four findings: why better matching needs better context

ABOUT ALLISON DANIELSEN

Allison Danielsen is CEO of Tallo, a digital platform helping early talent move from career uncertainty to confident action.

Tallo: https://tallo.com/

Connect with Allison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-danielsen/

ABOUT THE SIGNAL LAB

The Signal Lab explores the systems that shape opportunity—how people prove what they know, how employers evaluate talent, and how better data can connect learning and work.

The show is hosted by Ian Davidson, Founder and CEO of Signol Labs.

CONNECT & EXPLORE

Signol Labs: https://signollabs.com/

Signal Mapping: https://signollabs.com/blog-signal-mapping/

Connect with Ian Davidson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianwdavidson/

Schedule a conversation: https://signollabs.com/contact-us/

What if the biggest problem in hiring isn't finding qualified people—but helping employers make sense of the thousands of applications already sitting in front of them?

Most conversations about the future of hiring focus on skills, AI, resumes, or credentials. But underneath all of those discussions is a much more fundamental question:

How do job boards actually decide who sees opportunity?

Job boards have quietly become one of the most influential recommendation systems in the labor market. Every day they determine which jobs appear in front of millions of people and which candidates employers are most likely to notice. Yet most of us still think of them as digital bulletin boards.

They're anything but.

In this episode, Ian Davidson sits down with Matt Plummer, Chief Product Officer at Appcast, to understand what modern job marketplaces are actually trying to optimize—and why richer candidate data alone isn't enough to change hiring.

One of the biggest surprises from the conversation is that employers aren't asking job boards for more information about candidates.

They're asking for fewer applicants.

Matt explains why job seekers won't tolerate repeatedly rebuilding their professional identity across every platform they use, forcing marketplaces to make recommendations using incomplete information. He also explores how richer signals—skills, credentials, projects, certifications, and verified experiences—could dramatically improve matching, but only if enough people possess them and enough employers can actually consume them.

It's a conversation about incentives, scale, recommendation systems, and one of the largest hidden constraints shaping opportunity today.

Along the way, Ian and Matt discuss:

• Why application overload has become one of hiring's biggest problems
• How job boards balance supply and demand across labor markets
• Why recommendation quality depends on context—not simply more data
• What richer candidate signals could make possible
• Why adoption, not technology, is often the hardest challenge
• How future hiring systems may evolve beyond today's resume

This conversation is also an important milestone in Signal Mapping, Signol Labs' ongoing investigation into the signals employers use throughout the hiring process.

Earlier episodes explored how hiring managers evaluate people, how recruiters scale judgment, and how applicant tracking systems filter candidates. This episode shifts upstream to the marketplaces responsible for connecting people with opportunity in the first place.

Understanding those systems helps answer a much larger question:

If we can improve the information flowing through labor markets, can we improve opportunity itself?

About Matt Plummer

Matt Plummer is Chief Product Officer at Appcast, one of the world's leading recruitment marketing platforms. He has spent years building technologies that help employers reach candidates more effectively while balancing the realities of modern hiring at enormous scale.

About The Signal Lab

Hosted by Ian Davidson, Founder and CEO of Signol Labs, The Signal Lab explores the systems connecting learning and work—from hiring technology and workforce development to digital credentials, AI, and labor market infrastructure.

If your organization is thinking about hiring technology, workforce strategy, Learning and Employment Records, digital credentials, or the future of talent marketplaces, we'd love to continue the conversation.

Learn more at SignolLabs.com

Every hiring system in the world depends on one assumption:

The information applicants submit tells employers something meaningful about what they can actually do.

That assumption is beginning to collapse.

Artificial intelligence now allows job seekers to generate customized resumes in seconds. Employers are using AI to generate job descriptions. Applicant Tracking Systems are using AI to rank candidates. Meanwhile application volumes are exploding.

The result?

Everyone looks qualified.

Recruiters are drowning in applications.

Employers are adding more requirements simply to reduce the number of people they have to review.

And the signals that hiring systems have relied on for decades are becoming increasingly difficult to trust.

In Part 3 of In Search of Signals, Ian Davidson sits down with Andrew Cunsolo, Principal Customer Solutions Partner at Employ, one of the world's largest Applicant Tracking System providers. With more than twenty-five years spent building recruiting technology—including some of the earliest resume parsing systems—Andrew has watched hiring evolve from keyword searches to AI-powered ranking.

His conclusion is surprisingly simple.

The problem isn't AI.

AI is exposing weaknesses that were already built into hiring.

Together, Ian and Andrew explore why applicant tracking systems behave the way they do, how employers actually use resumes, why application volumes are skyrocketing, and what happens when every candidate begins looking equally qualified.

More importantly, they explore what comes next.

Throughout the conversation they discuss how trusted, verifiable information—from digital credentials to Learning and Employment Records to the Trusted Career Profile—could fundamentally change how hiring systems understand people.

Rather than asking recruiters to work harder, the future may depend on giving systems better information.

This episode is part of In Search of Signals, a five-part investigation from Signol Labs examining how employers, recruiters, technology platforms, and marketplaces evaluate human potential.

Each episode follows another layer of hiring infrastructure.

Together they reveal a much bigger question:

If our systems can't reliably understand people today, how will they understand human potential in an AI-driven economy?

Guest

Andrew Cunsolo Principal Customer Solutions Partner Employ

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/acunsolo/

Employ: https://www.employinc.com/

About Signol Labs

Signol Labs helps organizations design the infrastructure of opportunity by connecting learning, work, skills, credentials, identity, and workforce technology.

Learn more: https://signollabs.com

Signal Mapping: https://signollabs.com/blog-signal-mapping/

Connect with Ian Davidson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianwdavidson/

If your organization is exploring skills-based hiring, workforce strategy, digital credentials, Learning and Employment Records, talent marketplaces, or trusted hiring data, we'd love to hear from you.

https://signollabs.com/contact-us/