Wayne-based SkillSurvey Inc. smooths the hiring process

It wasn't too long ago that the housing market was in the basement and unemployment in construction soared, with more than 25 percent unemployed.

That's not the story now.

"We're aggressively hiring people around the country," said Jay Lehman, vice president of talent acquisition at Toll Brothers Inc., the Horsham-based home-building company.

The good news is the hiring. The tough part is the necessity to bring candidates on board fast, which means moving quickly through what is often the most daunting part of the hiring process - the reference check.

It's a problem that's working out well for SkillSurvey Inc. The company, based in Wayne, has patented a software method for streamlining reference checks in a way that standardizes the information. It also provides some anonymity to the person giving the reference with the aim of getting more truthful responses.

"The reference becomes more of a true portrayal," said Lehman. He uses the system for every job candidate above the seasonal and temporary level.

For the hiring manager, an accurate reference provides valuable information on a potential employee, but getting that kind of reference is a challenge.

In the 1990s, highly publicized employment lawsuits involving big awards to plaintiffs stemmed from references from former employers, said Ray Bixler, president and chief executive of SkillSurvey.

As a result, he said, many companies, as a policy, did nothing more than confirm employment.

"The value of getting feedback on a reference evaporated overnight," Bixler said.

"There have been studies showing that exaggeration [on resumes] is at an all-time high," Bixler said. "People are desperate because they want work."

Doug LaPasta and Martha Mincer, two human resource professionals and consultants from the Stroudsburg area, developed the company in 2001. Both still retain shares in the company.

In 2006, when the founders wanted a chief executive who would concentrate on marketing and sales, they hired Bixler, formerly a senior vice president at Caliper Corp., the Princeton talent management and hiring assessment company.

The company, which is profitable and privately held, employs 65 in the U.S., plus 40 software developers in India.

Here's how SkillSurvey works: An applicant identifies references - usually five to seven people, and provides e-mail addresses. Some must be supervisors or managers, others can be coworkers.

Through the SkillSurvey software, references receive an e-mail questionnaire asking how the candidate performed based on job requirements. There is also space for comments.

While the employer knows the identity of the references, each of their survey responses are aggregated with others and their verbatim comments are provided without attribution.

"Because [SkillSurvey] is confidential, we have found that [references] are so much more honest. The honesty we are hearing and seeing is helping us make better hiring decisions," said Jean P. Kozicki, recruitment director at Main Line Health System of Hospitals and Health Centers.

"There have been quite a number of people we have not hired because of what we saw on the SkillSurvey results," she said.

"No one seems to feel comfortable saying something negative about an employee or a friend," Kozicki said.

Main Line Health, which runs Lankenau Medical Center and Paoli, Bryn Mawr and Riddle hospitals, uses the survey for health-care professionals, accountants and human resource managers - only doctors are exempted, Kozicki said.

In the past year, references for more than 1,200 Main Line job candidates were gathered, she said.

SkillSurvey says it is processing references for 50,000 job candidates a month for 1,400 national and international clients.

Through working with clients, SkillSurvey has become more proficient in devising survey questions.

Bixler said the company was trying to work with more clients to determine outcomes - to see how scores on particular questions correlate to turnover.

For example, he said, hospitals' compensation is increasingly tied to patient satisfaction, which is at least partially linked to staff behaviors.

Questions designed to see if nurses, for example, were customer friendly, also indicated turnover, he said. Nurses with low scores on the customer-friendly questions also tended to leave the hospital more quickly - either resigning or being fired.

In April, SkillSurvey introduced questions designed to tease out candidates' safety awareness and behavior for jobs in power, oil, gas and other heavy industry.

"They've developed really good questions," said Lehman, at Toll Brothers. "They can be very technical - if I'm hiring an engineer as opposed to hiring a sales person."

215-854-2769 @JaneVonBergen

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