Opportunity@Work and Warden AI Partner to Verify AI Hiring Tools Recognize Skills, Not Just Degrees

WASHINGTON, D.C. and AUSTIN, TX – October 6, 2026 – Opportunity@Work, the national nonprofit working to rewire the U.S. labor market for workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), and Warden AI, which has developed the industry standard for AI auditing and verification in hiring and HR, today announced a partnership to build a new way of testing how AI-enabled talent systems recognize skills across different education and career pathways.

The partnership combines Opportunity@Work's research and decade of expertise on STARs and skills-first hiring with Warden AI's independent testing infrastructure. Warden is known as the leader in AI auditing for hiring and HR, working with 60+ HR tech vendors, as well as enterprises and staffing agencies. Together, the organizations are developing Education Pathways Assurance, an independent testing framework designed to give employers and technology providers measurable evidence of whether AI hiring systems consistently recognize qualified candidates, regardless of where they built their skills. This first-of-its-kind offering builds on Warden's existing certification standard, Warden Assured, which already covers bias testing across up to 16 protected characteristics.

The work marks the next step in skills-first hiring: from changing job requirements to verifying that the technology now matching people to opportunity actually performs as intended.

AI gives talent systems the potential to understand candidates with far more precision than a traditional resume screen — weighing skills, experience, certifications, and career progression together. Education Pathways Assurance is designed to help platforms realize that potential, by independently checking whether comparable skills are recognized consistently across candidates, no matter how those skills were acquired.

This matters for the more than 75 million U.S. workers who are STARs — workers who built valuable skills through community college, military service, apprenticeships, workforce training, certificates, partial college completion, or, most often, on the job, rather than through a bachelor's degree. STARs represent half the U.S. workforce, and while millions have the skills for higher-wage work, hiring systems can still screen them out based on pedigree rather than demonstrated ability.

"As AI rapidly transforms how employers find and evaluate talent, we have an opportunity to build a skills-first labor market," said Scott Gullick, Vice President of Platform Partnerships at Opportunity@Work. "A degree tells us how someone learned. Skills and experience tell us what someone can actually do. Our partnership with Warden gives technology companies and employers a new way to verify their systems are recognizing that distinction, so they can find talent they might otherwise miss."

From skills-first principles to measurable performance

Warden AI's platform helps HR and talent acquisition teams adopt AI responsibly, offering independent, third-party verification of how these systems perform in terms of potential bias against protected characteristics (such as sex and race). Education Pathways Assurance will test whether AI hiring systems evaluate candidates with comparable skills differently based on how those skills were gained — helping technology providers spot where qualified workers may be overlooked, and improve accordingly.

"Independent verification is most valuable when it helps organizations understand what their AI is actually doing, and gives them evidence they can act on," said Jeffrey Pole, Co-founder and CEO of Warden AI. "Opportunity@Work has built an extraordinary body of knowledge about skills and mobility. By translating that into rigorous testing, we can help technology providers show where their systems are working well, and where their assessments can become even more accurate." 

Building the trust layer for a skills-first AI economy

This collaboration extends Opportunity@Work's growing work with HR technology companies, AI developers, and other partners to embed skills-first practices directly into the infrastructure shaping how workers are matched to opportunity.

As AI takes on a larger role in interpreting resumes, matching candidates, and supporting hiring decisions, Opportunity@Work believes the next generation of skills-first infrastructure needs more than better data and product features — it needs independent ways to measure how these systems actually perform.

Education Pathways Assurance is designed to complement existing responsible AI practices by answering a specific question grounded in workforce research: when two people bring comparable capability to a job, does the system recognize that capability with comparable accuracy — even when the paths they took to build it were different?

Answering that question can benefit the whole talent ecosystem: giving employers and public sector organizations greater confidence in the AI systems they use, while helping ensure workers are recognized for what they can do, regardless of how they learned to do it.

Together, Opportunity@Work and Warden AI aim to make independent verification part of the infrastructure a skills-first AI economy requires — giving technology providers evidence to build more accurate systems, employers greater confidence in the tools they use, and STARs a better chance of being seen for their skills.

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About Opportunity@Work
Opportunity@Work is a 501(c)3 nonprofit social enterprise on a mission to rewire the labor market so all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential. As a national leader in skills-first research, our work advances economic opportunities for the 75+ million U.S. workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) instead of through a bachelor’s degree. Opportunity@Work engages with talent technology leaders to improve the data, technology, standards, and infrastructure that connect people to opportunity, in addition to publishing landmark labor market research and data analysis, driving public awareness and narrative change, and building multi-sector networks. Learn more at www.opportunityatwork.org.

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About Warden AI
Warden is the platform enabling HR and talent teams to adopt AI responsibly. We audit and certify AI systems for fairness and compliance, helping vendors and enterprises as they develop, deploy, and defend AI solutions in HR. For more information visit www.warden-ai.com.

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Media Contacts
Opportunity@Work: press@opportunityatwork.org

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