SocialCheck.me Lets Recruiters Survey Colleagues of Job Candidates

Finding great talent is a tough process. Recruiters and HR try to find out as much as they can about job candidates who purposefully seek to hide their own flaws. Resumes, interviews, and listed references help, but what employers really need to know is how a candidate actually performs at work.

SocialCheck.me is a brand new service that lets employers distribute opt-in, anonymous, private, customizable surveys to the colleagues and past co-workers of job candidates. Employers get data, charts, and calculations about a candidate’s quality which they can use to hire competent, hard working candidates that will fit their company’s culture. SocialCheck.me is launching its beta today and our readers can get free access by going here, entering their email address, and then entering TECHCRUNCH as the signup code.

There’s currently a shortage of top talent, especially engineers, and many think teams make or break a business. The wasted time and momentum from employing a crappy worker and having to re-hire can be devastating. Unfortunately, many past employers refuse to give qualitative assessments of past employees, and references listed on a resume can be biased in the candidate’s favor.

The bootstrapped SocialCheck.me started working on this problem 10 months ago and now has a solution. Employers create a custom survey for a job opening, and ask candidates to send it on to their colleagues. Respondents anonymously pass their reviews to the employer, but have their identity and connection to the candidate verified through LinkedIn.

Others in the space such as Honestly, Duedil, and Mixtent create public profiles that aren’t customized to assess a candidate’s fit for a particular job. They also aren’t focused on empowering hiring managers to solicit reviews of a particular candidate.

Ways to game SocialCheck.me are limited. Candidates could refuse to forward the surveys, but this could indicate they have something to hide and other candidates with positive responses could get the job instead. Candidates could ask friends for glowing reviews, but respondents could say they will and still give an objective assessment, or note the sleazy request in their response since candidates never see the answers. If a candidate can’t get responses because they have a sparse network, employers might wonder why they’re behind the times or why no one wants to connect with them.

In the future, SocialCheck.me plans to add other respondent verification methods, and might expand into an end-to-end hiring suite or add other features. Lately I’ve seen a proliferation of social recruiting solutions that let hiring managers distribute openings or search for candidates on Facebook and other social networks. This tool lets recruiters make the best decision of who to pick from their enlarged candidate pool.

People who make great employees should have nothing to hide. SocialCheck.me is a powerful way to confirm new hires will perform just as well as they say.