A resume was once the only way to understand and assess an applicants’ candidacy, forcing recruiters and hiring managers to infer potential from only two factors: education and experience. Next, an interview occurred, and based on the limited interaction, your assumptions were either initially proven right or wrong. Even then, some incongruous hires would happen with those who simply “interviewed well” or “looked good on paper,” a common and expensive mistake made by even the most talented interviewers.

Firms who use Suited are interested in doing things a little differently — they want a complete picture of every applicant’s potential, and they are able to leverage broad datasets and predictive analytics to know even before the first interview if a candidate is likely to succeed on the job.

We created Suited to help those who hire better structure, strengthen, and develop teams that are more well-rounded, diverse, and efficient.

Read on to learn how.

01.

Mining your general applicant inbox

Let’s be honest with one another: how much attention are you actually giving to all of the candidates that apply via your careers page? We understand —there’s a lot of interest in your open jobs and ultimately no good way to vet the hundreds or even thousands of applications coming straight through the internet.

However, if you require every candidate from every recruiting channel to take the Suited assessment like our partners do, you can easily mine this huge pool for high-quality talent. This will allow you to stop using ineffective shortcuts (AKA: did they go to an Ivy League school?) to determine whose resume should be reviewed and who should be considered for an interview.

02.

Broadening the schools you consider

Another problem we aim to solve is the reliance on university rankings to make decisions about someone’s candidacy. According to Opportunity Insights, three dozen of the country’s “elite” colleges enroll more students from households in the top 1% of the income scale than they do students from the bottom 60% of that scale, and the students from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend “elite” colleges than are their peers in the bottom 20%.

Often times, recruiters will not consider resumes from universities outside of these same top schools. But does coming from wealth automatically make someone a better performer on the job? The answer is no — and neither does where they went to school. So, while addressing educational inequality may seem out of reach for our industry, we certainly can do something about increasing access to high paying jobs for people from all backgrounds of education and thereby backgrounds of wealth.

The majority of firms recruit from the same places, creating an unnecessary amount of competition for a select few students while leaving candidates with a lot of potential undiscovered. Many industries have already come to accept that the best job candidates do not always come from elite and expensive colleges. In fact, the majority of the Fortune 500 CEO’s did not attend a top twenty school. Our data has also consistently shown that university ranking has limited bearing on whether or not candidates have the potential to become successful employees.

We understand and sympathize with the approach many recruiters have taken up until this point — your firm only has so much time and so many resources to send to campuses, and if you don’t go to “the best” universities, how would you decide where to use your time and money during the crucial, small window of recruiting?

By using Suited’s predictive analytics, you can essentially remove the need for your firm to visit the campuses you previously had to go to in order to compete for the limited selection of students. Instead of letting thousands of resumes and dollars to go to waste, you can let Suited identify the highest potential candidates from any school and help you find the right people quickly and fairly.

03.

Filtering and targeting diverse talent

Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely. Diverse teams make better business decisions 87% of the time. The statistics are endless, and the story they all tell is clear: increased diversity will create new opportunities for your firm to succeed.

With your normal applicant tracking system, trying to identifying candidates from underrepresented populations can be tedious and even assumptive. One of our goals is to allow the firms we work with to be more proactive and deliberate in their diversity sourcing efforts. To facilitate this, Suited candidates are given the option to disclose their demographic information within the network, allowing recruiters to find them more easily.

Suited's algorithms don’t give an advantage to anyone based on demographic criteria. However, within the Suited platform, recruiters are able to filter candidates by certain demographics. In order to diversify your candidate pool, you can consider the top candidates identified by Suited that meet certain gender or racial criteria. The candidates will be stack ranked based on their suitability for your firm, making your diversity sourcing efforts much more seamless and efficient.

04.

Preplanning your on-campus visits

If you are still interested in visiting some campuses, use Suited to easily determine which students you want to focus your attention and resources on during campus visits. Schedule coffee chats and on-campus interviews with those at the top of Suited’s list to avoid wasting too much time at information sessions trying to attract and suss out the best candidates with barely any information on them besides a short face-to-face interaction.

05.

Combating bias

We cannot emphasize this enough — you no longer need to use merit proxies such as school, GPA, and standardized test scores to determine a candidate’s potential for performance. Suited prediction scores encapsulate a more complete view of their capabilities and suitability for positions with your firm.

Provide your interviewers with data on what really drives success at your firm and why someone would be a fit through our context engine. Help them understand why things like team dynamics, value-alignment, or innovative thinking drives higher performance and engagement rather than the other outdated measurements of “merit.”

06.

Qualifying experienced hires

As you know, the consequences of a bad first year Analyst or Associate hire are not as severe as those of a bad experienced hire. Typically, placing experienced Analysts, Associates, and VPs is a high-touch recruiting effort that can cost a lot of money (especially if using a headhunter), but you can use Suited to easily source qualified experienced professionals, too, without incurring any headhunter fees. Filter by years of full-time experience to find candidates qualified to join as a more senior professional. Or, if you have sourced someone that looks fantastic on paper, use Suited to vet their potential in more quantitative ways. When the stakes are this high, we recommend trusting our proven, data-driven predictions to guide the way towards your next hire.