How Northeastern University achieved 86% hiring effectiveness and cut phone interview time by 53% with Testlify

Dozens of departments. No shared standard for who was qualified.

Northeastern University’s talent acquisition team was hiring across a wide range of functions simultaneously. Faculty roles required deep domain expertise. Administrative positions had entirely different skill profiles. And the university operated under pressures most employers do not face: diversity targets, long-term succession planning, budget constraints, and the need to balance interdisciplinary expertise across departments that defined “qualified” differently.

The Talent Acquisition Partner at Northeastern described the core issue plainly: every department was running its own evaluation process, using its own criteria, with no consistent scoring system to make candidates comparable across teams. A strong candidate in one department might have been filtered out under a different department’s informal rubric. Decisions were being made on uneven ground, and there was no reliable way to audit whether the process was fair.

For a university publicly committed to equitable hiring, that gap between intention and process was becoming harder to ignore as hiring volume grew.

“We had no consistent way to evaluate candidates across departments. Every team was making decisions differently, and there was no data to tell us whether any of it was working.”

Talent Acquisition Partner
Northeastern University

How Testlify was implemented

Custom assessments per role. One consistent standard across the university

Northeastern deployed Testlify across both faculty and administrative hiring tracks. Each department built assessments around the specific technical and soft skills their roles required. A hiring manager in engineering was not using the same test as one in administrative operations. The assessments were integrated early in the process, filtering candidates automatically before any human review time was spent.

Standardized scoring meant that candidates across different departments could be evaluated on a shared framework for the first time. Hiring managers received detailed performance reports for each shortlisted candidate, reducing the subjectivity that had made cross-department comparisons unreliable and giving teams evidence to back their decisions.

Candidates responded positively to the clarity of the process. Knowing what they were being evaluated on and why reinforced the university’s reputation as a fair and structured employer in a competitive market for academic and professional talent.

“For the first time, we could sit across departments and compare candidates on the same terms. The data gave us confidence that our decisions were fair and defensible.”

Talent Acquisition Partner
Northeastern University

Phone interview time dropped 53%. Candidate activation fell 47%. Hiring effectiveness improved 86%.

The more significant shift was structural: a university with dozens of independent hiring teams now had a single, auditable standard. Managers could compare a faculty candidate in engineering against one in administrative operations using the same framework, something that had never been possible before.