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Perhaps the first thing visitors notice at Brainbench headquarters is the lack of offices. Everyone, including the three founders, works in a large room, within earshot -- where sunlight pouring through windows reaches every cubicle. It's part of the philosophy: Hierarchy is not what makes an organization successful. People make it successful. The right people.

It all started in 1997 when Mike Russiello and Mike Littman embarked on a project at Electronic Data Systems. The two were top performers in the government-services division. Russiello was a leader in sales for the $12-billion company; Littman had helped design and launch the EDS Eastern Region Metrics and Estimating Center.

They worked together on the Department of Education Loan Servicing contract. The project required a staff of 20 IT workers at a time when unemployed IT specialists were hard to find. Russiello and Littman had to look abroad, in India.

About 80 foreign resumes rolled in. "They all looked exactly the same, with the exception of the person's name," said Littman. The candidates had similar salary histories. The same amount of experience. Applicants claimed to have the same technical skills.

There was no way to determine skill sets remotely. It was then that Russiello and Littman discovered the need for online testing that would help predict employee success.

They invited Bill Lake, also of EDS, to lead sales and marketing. Bill was VP of sales for an EDS division and a former EDS salesperson of the year. Thus, in early 1998, Brainbench was born. The three of them worked in their basements for a year and a half, without pay, as they built a great new capability and found their initial customers.

Brainbench's first customer was PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the "Big Four" firms of the accounting industry. Its second customer was, fittingly, Electronic Data Systems.

"We started with no money and no salaries," said Russiello, Brainbench president and CEO. "And we set out to discover how to build a tool that would help project managers evaluate the skills and capabilities of people on their team, so they could give them the right training or the right assignments. Or not hire them."

The company leveraged what they knew of technology to change the employment testing industry. Brainbench became the first to combine assessments of all natures into a single instrument for pre-hire testing. The first to offer adaptive testing over the Web. The first to offer unproctored, online certifications.

And the innovations keep coming.

Today Brainbench has helped over 5,000 corporations throughout the world, some of the largest including government agencies -- such as NASA and the State Department -- in addition to IBM, Advance Auto Parts, and Wells Fargo Bank.

"Companies have been settling for ineffective assessment tools for too long. We want to change that," said Russiello. "Commitment to changing the industry has propelled us to where we are today, and we expect it to propel us to much higher levels of success down the road."