A letter from our founder
My name is Natalia Tapia. I’m the Founder and CEO of Gradstack, and I’ve spent over a decade working inside talent acquisition, workforce intelligence, and recruiting strategy across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise. I’ve helped businesses build teams from the ground up, design hiring frameworks, and design candidate and brand experiences people actually want to work for.
This letter is about something I’ve wanted to say for a long time. Not as a founder only but as someone who has lived on both sides of a broken system and watched it fail good people over and over again.
The resume is a relic. And it’s time we said it plainly.
If I’m honest, the moment I knew the resume was broken wasn’t a slow realisation. It was one specific year that I’ll never forget.
2015.
I was brought in to grow an engineering team from 9 to 50. Part of that brief was building a graduate cohort of 10. No early careers brand. No university partnerships. No prior experience hiring grads at this company. Just me, 49 other live roles running in parallel, and a directive to “keep it cheap.”
So we did what you do. Posted the role. Went to market.
Over the following weeks, somewhere between 500 and 800 applications came in.
Half were immediately irrelevant. Not close. The other half all looked identical, pages and pages of university projects that meant nothing to us as employers, with no way to tell what this person could actually do on day one. I sat down with the engineering lead and we worked through the pile together. We pulled a shortlist. We ran interviews.
And the grads kept failing.
Bad communication. Skills that didn’t hold up under questioning. An inability to articulate what they’d built or why it mattered. Some of it, in hindsight, wasn’t even accurate details on paper that didn’t match reality once someone started asking real questions.
Five months. Hundreds of hours of business time. Unverified pieces of paper that sent us down dead end after dead end. We got our team of 10 in the end. But the cost in time, in productivity, in the sheer exhaustion of the process was enormous. And the worst part? We did everything we were supposed to do. The process didn’t fail us. The system did.
The problem isn’t the candidates
That’s the part most people get wrong.
The graduates who applied weren’t bad. They were doing exactly what the system told them to do: build a resume, list your projects, put your degree at the top, and hope someone sees your potential through two pages of text.
The problem is that resumes have never actually shown capability. They show self-reported history. Two very different things.
And right now, that gap between what’s claimed and what’s real is getting wider. Application volumes are rising up 30 to 50% for many employers since 2023 while hire rates have stayed flat. More noise, not more signal. In 2025, a third of Australian job seekers admit to embellishing their applications, and 71% of HR professionals report encountering fabricated or misleading candidate information. Yet only 20% say they’re confident in their ability to detect it.
We’re screening harder for less and getting worse outcomes. That’s not a recruiter problem. That’s a structural problem.
What the data says about grad outcomes
Here’s what makes this harder to ignore.
Full-time employment for domestic Australian undergraduates dropped from 79% in 2023 to 74% in 2024, according to the QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey. At the same time, 30 to 40% of employed graduates reported they weren’t fully using their skills and education in their current role. They’re employed, but mismatched.
The Cengage Group’s 2025 Graduate Employability Report found that 33% of 2025 graduates are unemployed and actively seeking work. And when graduates were asked what actually got them hired, the degree itself ranked fourth, behind personal referrals, prior work experience, and interview skills.
Fourth. Let that sink in!
The credential that students spend three to four years and tens of thousands of dollars on is the fourth most useful thing when it comes to getting a job.
Jobs and Skills Australia has a category in its Occupation Shortage analysis called the “suitability gap.” It describes roles where there are enough qualified applicants, but too many are unsuitable to hire. The reasons cited? Lack of employability skills. Lack of real work experience. This isn’t a pipeline problem. It’s a readiness and verification problem.
On degrees: an honest take
Degrees have their place. I genuinely believe that. They build foundational knowledge, frameworks, ways of thinking. For truly specialised fields such as medicine, law, engineering at depth, they’re still essential.
But in today’s workforce, for most careers, a degree is a portion of what gets you hired. Not most of it. A portion. And in an AI-driven world where the half-life of a technical skill is shrinking every day, a degree that doesn’t include real industry exposure, real tools, and real AI fluency is already partially out of date before the ink on it dries.
Education providers need to close the loop between what they teach and what industry actually needs. Not just through the occasional industry partner or a semester of work integrated learning, but structurally with modern systems, live projects, and a genuine connection to how work is changing right now.
Until that happens, a degree tells an employer almost nothing about whether a graduate can do the job.
What needs to replace the resume
Not another resume format. Not a better LinkedIn profile. Not a portfolio site that most hiring managers won’t open.
What’s needed is verified capability scoring. A way to show what someone can actually do, confirmed by something other than the candidate’s own word. Matched to what employers actually need, not what a job description template from 2015 says they should ask for.
That means:
- Skills that are demonstrated, not declared
- AI fluency that’s measured and scored, not listed as a keyword
- A profile that updates as someone grows, not a static document that ages
- Verification that doesn’t rely on a hiring manager making 200 phone calls
The resume served its purpose for a long time. It was never designed for a world where thousands of applications arrive in hours, where AI can generate a perfectly formatted CV in 30 seconds, and where the most in-demand skills didn’t exist five years ago.
That world is here. The resume isn’t equipped for it.
So why did I quit my well established career in Talent in 2023 and become a Founder?
Well because if there was no one willing to build a more fair and equitable system, then I was going to do it myself!
Over the years more products came that just created more noise and stress for us in Talent, the system had deeper issues and it needed a bigger look 👀 a more strategic high level look to distinctly fix all the broken pieces of a huge puzzle!
What we’re building
Gradstack is Australia’s Workforce Activation Layer for the AI economy. We replace the unverified resume with a Digital Human Profile the DHP® , built around two core scores: the Verified Capability Index (VCI®) and the Verified Employability Index (VEI®).
VCI® measures what a graduate can actually do across six verified capability areas, including AI fluency scored on our five-level GAFI® framework. VEI® measures job readiness: communication, adaptability, workplace behaviours etc the things that kept failing in those interviews I ran five years ago.
Employers don’t receive a pile of applications. They receive a VCI®-ranked shortlist of candidates who have already been verified. No credential guesswork. No hours of screening unverified paper. A shortlist of people who can actually do the job and in real time!
We launch early 2027.
If you’re a graduate who’s tired of being invisible behind a resume, or an employer who’s done wasting money and months on processes that shouldn’t take that long, this is for you.