Recruiters have been looking in the wrong places, at the wrong attributes.
Most searches fail before they start, in two ways.
The scope is too small. A recruiter’s network, a job board, the first page of a search tool. The best person for the role is usually not in any of them, because the best people are not looking. Choosing the best of a small pond feels like a choice; it is a coin toss with extra steps.
The attributes are wrong. Years of experience, the names on the resume, how someone comes across in an hour of conversation. These are the easiest things to see and among the weakest predictors of how someone will actually perform. Meanwhile the attributes that do predict performance, what someone has built, how they reason through problems, how they have grown, are the hardest to read from a resume and are rarely read at all.
The result is familiar: a hire who interviewed well and did not work out, or a role that stayed open for four months while the right person sat unnoticed two cities away.
Keystone started with a question: if you could read every profile in the market with the same care, score each one on what actually predicts performance, and only then pick up the phone, would you hire differently? We built the method and the system to answer it before we took our first client, because a method you cannot run on a thousand profiles is an opinion.
Hiring for my earlier startups, I watched candidates get judged on how they came across rather than on the substance of their responses, and watched the hires that followed. I wanted a more objective and more accurate way to evaluate the people we were about to depend on. Keystone is built that way.
The firm is based in Montreal, Canada.
The name is the method. A keystone is the one stone that holds an arch together. Every search is a search for that stone.
Transparency.
The score comes with its evidence. The brief includes what we did not like. The terms are on this website. We tell candidates we recruit for a fee.
Rigour.
The same questions for every candidate, the same rules for every profile, and a method we check against outcomes. Instinct is where we start a conversation, not where we end a search.
Judgment.
The system reads and ranks; people decide. Every candidate you meet has been read, called and written up by a person who would stake their name on the brief.
Speed with care.
Ten business days to a scored shortlist, because the search runs at the scale of software and the screening runs at the pace of a careful conversation.
Respect for candidates.
They are told who we are and why we wrote. Nothing is shared before they say yes. A “no” is a no.
Long-term fit.
We look for the person who will be excellent in year two, not the one who interviews best in week one.