How to assess course certificates when hiring
What to ask when a certificate appears on a CV.
When you’re hiring, a course certificate can tell you what a provider awarded and give you something specific to ask the candidate about. If you need to know whether the candidate can do part of the job, give them a small example of that work and ask them to explain a decision they made.
What does the certificate establish?
Start with the issuer and what it says the award required. Two certificates with similar titles may represent different things: a course completion, an assessed task or an exam. The distinction matters if you are using the certificate to decide who should advance. If a candidate lists a course on discovery, ask them to describe one question they learned to ask and why the answer would matter.
In my AI credential experiment, I authorised AI agents to take courses and assessments through my account. In total, 424 credentials were issued to the account and verified on providers’ public pages. They included course certificates, skill badges, vendor-designated certifications and other learning achievements. That verification confirms issuance. The experiment did not measure what I learned, what an applicant could do in a role or how hiring decisions would change.
What would you need to see the candidate do?
When I led Sales Engineering at Leapwork, understanding the customer’s work was part of the role. Here is a fictional exercise for assessing that skill in a hiring interview. Give each candidate the same short fictional customer brief. The operations manager says reporting takes too long, but the brief gives no baseline and never says who uses the reports. Ask the candidate to choose two questions for the next call and explain what each answer would change.
You can score the response against criteria set beforehand. For example, you might look for whether the questions would uncover a missing baseline, show who uses the report or help the team avoid promising a solution too early. A candidate might find a different gap that matters just as much. For instance, “Who uses the report to make a time-sensitive decision?” could reveal different needs, such as a daily report for one team and a month-end report for another.
Keep the task short enough to fit inside the interview, and use a fictional brief so the applicant isn't doing unpaid work for a customer. Tell candidates in advance what the task involves, which tools are available and how they can request an adjustment. Use the same underlying criteria even when the format needs to change. The UK government’s structured interview guidance describes how to plan questions and agree scoring criteria before interviewing.
Which part of the work belongs to the candidate?
Decide what you want to observe before you set the rules on AI. If the role calls for working with AI, let candidates use it under comparable conditions and ask them to explain one suggestion they changed or discarded. If the role calls for thinking on the spot with a customer, include a short conversation where everyone works under the same stated rules. You can then point to what you actually observed when you compare candidates.
A candidate can also use the certificate to start that conversation. If a course introduced a method, they can explain where they tried it, what they found difficult and what they would do differently next time. If they have yet to use it, they can say so. A short account of the work gives the interviewer something to ask about that the certificate alone cannot show.