August 11, 2026 – Avature, the AI-powered platform for strategic recruiting and talent management, today announced that it has joined the Tear the Paper Ceiling Coalition. Avature joins a group of over 90 other corporate, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations affiliated with the public awareness campaign led by the Ad Council and Opportunity@Work, dedicated to supporting skills-first hiring practices and developing technology that facilitates mass adoption of those practices. This coalition membership formalizes Avature’s long-held belief that skills should drive opportunity.
Avature’s platform enables organizations to put skills at the center of hiring and talent decisions, helping recruiters identify qualified candidates based on what they can do rather than traditional proxies such as degrees or job titles. Powered by a robust skills ontology and AI capabilities including skills matching, resume parsing and semantic search, the platform helps organizations surface relevant talent, uncover transferable skills and make more informed hiring decisions at scale.
The Tear the Paper Ceiling Coalition calls on employers to adopt skills-first hiring practices, empowering over 70 million U.S. workers who have been Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), such as on-the-job experience, trade certifications or military service. STARs often face “paper ceiling” barriers, such as degree screening and other outdated hiring practices that block them from higher-wage jobs. Their exclusion not only limits workers’ opportunities but also unnecessarily shrinks employers’ talent pools.
As part of its participation in the coalition, Avature is partnering with Opportunity@Work to advance a skills-first framework for employers. The initiative will leverage skills dashboards to surface actionable workforce insights, helping organizations make more informed, data-driven workforce decisions while expanding access to qualified candidates. More details on the collaboration will follow as the initiative progresses.
“Skills-first hiring lives or dies inside the tools employers use every day. Thirty-three states have moved forward with skills-based hiring policies, opening the door to hundreds of thousands of roles for STARs, but those policies will succeed or fail inside platforms,” said Scott Gullick, Head of Platform Partnerships at Opportunity@Work. “If the systems screening candidates are black boxes trained on yesterday’s biases, nothing changes for the 70 million-plus STARs in this country. What makes Avature’s commitment meaningful is that they’re building transparency into the architecture itself. Recruiters can see the skills that surfaced a candidate and why. That’s AI as ‘amplified intention’ – technology designed to screen STARs in for the skills they have, not screen them out for the degree they don’t.”
“Too many employers still screen out strong candidates before they ever get a fair look. Skills-first hiring is a better way to expand opportunity and widen the talent pool, but it only works if organizations can make skills visible throughout recruiting and workforce decisions. That is why we joined the Tear the Paper Ceiling Coalition and keep building Avature to make skills visible and usable at scale,” commented Dimitri Boylan, Founder and CEO of Avature.
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. Our work advances economic opportunities for the 70+ million U.S. workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) instead of through a bachelor’s degree. Opportunity@Work engages with corporate, public sector, talent technology, and philanthropic partners through landmark research and labor market data analysis, public awareness and narrative change, STARs-centric software tools, and multi-sector networks. Our goal is to enable upward mobility for 1 million STARs by opening 10 million jobs and boosting their earnings by $100 billion by 2035. Learn more at www.opportunityatwork.org
About the Ad Council
The Ad Council convenes creative storytellers to educate, unite and uplift audiences by opening hearts, inspiring action and accelerating change. For more than 80 years, the nonprofit organization and its partners in advertising, media, marketing and tech have been behind some of the country’s most iconic social impact campaigns — Smokey Bear, Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk, Tear the Paper Ceiling and many more. To learn more or get involved, visit AdCouncil.org
About Avature
Avature is an AI-powered platform for strategic recruiting and talent management. Founded by Dimitri Boylan, Avature brings consumer-grade internet technology and digital innovation to human resources departments globally. Avature solutions, which include candidate relationship management, applicant tracking, career sites, onboarding, internal mobility, social learning and performance management, are used by 110 Fortune 500 companies in more than 164 countries and 32 languages.
Avature delivers its services from its private cloud, located in data centers in the US, Europe and Asia and from the Public Cloud. Avature has offices in Buenos Aires, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Munich, New York, Paris, Shenzhen and Virginia.