Suited is on a mission to enable firms to expand the way they consider talent and provide every candidate a holistic way to demonstrate their full potential.
In 2017, a team of investment bankers realized they needed a better way to recruit new talent.
High volume applications and competitive recruiting timelines made it impossible to effectively consider every candidate. They were forced to focus their efforts on a small portion of talent landscape, only considering candidates from “target” schools with the “right” credentials. Resumes and interviews provided little insight into the things they really wanted to know—will this candidate be a high performer, a culture-add, and a long-time contributor?
So, they built Suited to address these challenges and inefficiencies in the professional services industries at large. Now, finance and law firms rely on Suited to predict the potential of early-career candidates, without bias.
Together, with our network of firms, investors, and supporters, that same team is breaking down decades-old preconceptions about what drives success, and is replacing them with fair and evidence-based methods for candidate discovery.
Equity: We believe that professional opportunity and success should be independent of chance or circumstance.
Validity: We believe that the most talented teams are built by making validated, evidence-based hiring decisions.
Diversity: We believe that representation is a necessity in the critical and influential sectors of society that we serve.
Identity: We believe that no one attribute defines a person’s potential, and that understanding a candidate’s identity is key to making the best matches.
Efficiency: We believe that the adoption of artificial intelligence is essential to discerning and de-biasing what drives human potential at work.
Through our research, we have discovered that resumes provide very little insight into how a candidate will perform on the job. Additionally, relying on resumes can result in biased hiring outcomes and homogenous teams.
To combat both the lack of predictive validity and equity associated with resumes, Suited has identified a series of core traits that correlate to high performance as an investment banker.
When firms rely on these traits to make selection decisions, we see a much more fair selection rate across demographics. The below charts show how GPA cutoffs create severe differences between members of different demographic groups. When psychometric data is evaluated however, selection rates improve dramatically. Evaluating candidates on more than just their resume creates a more equitable hiring process.
We also see a substantially higher degree of hiring accuracy. The chart below shows the differences in scoring rates of current high and low-performing bankers across all of Suited’s banking clients. GPA shows very little differentiation, while the Suited assessments meaningfully differentiate high and low performers.
Considering data from the Suited Investment Banking Assessment enables our clients to expand their consideration of candidates, resulting in more accurate and equitable hiring outcomes.