Ousmane Sall is the Founder & CEO of PeerChecked, a Silicon Valley Founder Institute portfolio company aiming to change the paradigm in college talent acquisition. PeerChecked offers a free collaboration platform that includes an exportable Smart Resume, which leverages 360 student performance data to help users stand out to top university talent recruiters.
Now, PeerChecked has officially launched its newest update, bridging higher education and the workforce through relevant class metrics for recruiters and hiring managers to better assess college talent.
In this interview, Sall outlines the challenges that recruiters and hiring managers have long faced in differentiating student talent from a broad applicant pool, as well as how PeerChecked captures quantitative and granular data of student performance to help students stand out, and help hiring managers make more informed decisions.
We use raw data that’s generated by students, based on their performance and engagement on the platform… We also track the NACE competencies - these are skills that were developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers - these are things like communication skills, leadership skills, team work.
Key Problems
- HR managers and recruiters have a hard time determining a college student’s potential based on the ordinary resume. This leads 80% of recruiters to rely on a minimum GPA cut-off
- College students don’t believe a GPA is a great indicator of their ability
- Research has shown that the difference between a 4.0 GPA & 3.0 student when hired to do the same exact job, is just 2.4% in performance
- Current technologies focus on aggregating the most CVs, and do little to verify the metrics and vet the talent pool.
PeerChecked Solutions
- Class Performance: Our platform captures data on student’s class participation, teacher endorsement, helpfulness, clever and creative work, and number of students tutored
- Technical Skills: With every technical skill listed on the SMART resume, there will be a project portraying that skill
- NACE Competencies: The National Association of Colleges and Employers has developed a set of skills that determine a student’s career readiness. PeerChecked has a peer to peer rating of these skills on a 1-5 scale
Product Features
- Experience: Students can enter the internship experiences and clubs they have participated in.
- PDF/Word Resume: To help new users comfortably navigate our advanced platform, we also provide the exportable ordinary resume for direct comparison
Visit the PeerChecked website to learn how the free class management software enables students and faculty to participate in an unstructured way of learning, as well as allows employers to access more meaningful datapoints to assess a college student than the conventional resume or CV.
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