iCIMS has announced the acquisition of SkillSurvey from its current shareholders, which include Primus Capital and PNC Erieview Capital. Neither party disclosed the terms of the deal. Founded in 2001, SkillSurvey provides a talent intelligence platform that helps hiring organisations verify candidate skills and check references to improve the talent pipeline and increase retention. The SkillSurvey platform enables organisations to complete reference checks earlier in the hiring process, often before the interview stage.
What is SkillSurvey
The patented reference-checking platform verifies skills and delivers feedback faster and earlier. At CoBank, Amy Brown, MS, PHR Senior Corporate Recruiter, recalled her challenges before using the solution, saying, “It takes so much time and effort to call references only to find that they aren’t as transparent with us on the phone as they could be.” Now with SkillSurvey, she added, “We gain so much more by getting their comments and their ratings through the survey than what we could get from them on the phone.”
SkillSurvey has been used by more than 3,700 employers and has also identified that its survey-based reference checking can help reduce unconscious bias during the hiring process. Its recent research identified that highly structured feedback from job references, both quantitative and qualitative, is an effective tool in the advancement of fair and equitable hiring practices. It has collated information from more than 50 million people, and its solution has enabled organisations to reduce turnover by 35% in the first year of employment.
SkillSurvey has also begun a vertical industry approach to its offerings with a peer reference solution for healthcare organisations. The solution enables healthcare organisations to shorten the onboarding time through rapid peer reviews, shortening the time to provide care.
Steve Lucas, CEO of iCIMS, commented, “At iCIMS, we’re focused on delivering everything talent acquisition teams need to find and hire the best talent. With the iCIMS Talent Cloud, SkillSurvey enables companies to automate the time-consuming assessment and verification of candidate skills with digital reference checking and reliable, data-driven insights.”
Removing a hiring pain point
The Skillsurvey platform will strengthen iCMS Talent Cloud even further. Together they will enable enterprise businesses to attract, engage with, validate, hire and advance the talent they need to build winning teams.
Skilsurvey has also developed a library of around 600 surveys with the help of industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologists. These industry and job-specific surveys deliver qualitative and quantitative information about candidates’ hard and soft skills. This information about behaviours provides deeper insights into candidates.
Arelis Correa, Global Talent Acquisition Director, Brown-Forman, illustrated the value by saying, “One person’s references indicated they were a workhorse – to the point where it might actually be unbalanced. So I spoke to them when they joined and said, ‘Look, we work hard, we play hard, but we really want you to have a work-life balance.’ And then I told them they’d hear this from everyone else at the company. So if someone ever told them to take a step back for a little while, it wasn’t a bad thing.”
Ray Bixler, President & CEO, SkillSurvey, commented, “Innovation and science have always been deeply rooted in SkillSurvey and our solutions, and I am pleased that we are now a part of iCIMS, an industry leader in talent acquisition. Joining iCIMS will provide our customers with deeper support and innovative solutions across the entire talent journey, and we will be able to help more organizations transform burdensome processes into streamlined, automated business practices.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This appears to be a win-win acquisition for both companies. For iCIMS, it delivers not only a valuable technology solution that enhances its core product. There is also an opportunity to cross-sell to the existing customers of SkillSurvey. A large number of joint customers already include companies such as Auburn University, Burlington, The Adecco Group, Penn Medicine and Brown Forman.
There will be an opportunity to look at the SkillSurvey platform at its third annual INSPIRE global conference on Nov. 17. For SkillSurvey, iCIMS will also provide an opportunity for international expansion as part of a larger firm that has offices across the US and Europe. What will be interesting to see is how quickly iCIMS merges SkillSurvey into the Talent Cloud and how it strengthens the integrations between the two solutions.
