SkillsTech FAQ: 10 questions to ensure your HR solution brings value
Adopting a new HR solution can be a complicated process. Even after you’ve identified the solution that aligns with your business goals and approach, it’s important to do your due diligence on whether it can bring value to your company.
Talent experience is an essential — arguably foundational — part of your HR tech toolbox and the data a skills-first solution can generate, centralize and distribute can supercharge the other tools in your stack as well.
The first question anyone – you to yourself, but also your colleagues, CHRO, CFO or any other stakeholders involved in the process – is going to ask is what, exactly, does a talent experience platform do and how can it benefit your company?
Broadly speaking, a skills-based talent experience platform addresses people management and professional development HR functions. This can involve internal mobility and upskilling actions on an individual level for professional development and career pathing, as well as strategic workforce planning and the positioning of HR as a strategic leader for business impact more holistically.
A skills-based HR tech solution can improve your existing HR processes by centralizing your skills data and leveraging the skills-based approach to break silos and broaden the strategic vision of your HR department while empowering your employees to engage and invest in the business success of your organization.
10 questions to ask you to ensure your HR tech platform can deliver value for your company
As a HR pro, here are some questions you might ask to ensure your HR tech platform and/or talent marketplace can deliver value for your company.
1. What specific HR functions does the platform address, and how will it improve our existing HR processes? How will it benefit our organization?
2. How will the platform (e.g., talent marketplace) be structured, and what types of skills and positions will be included? How will they be validated?
3. What rules or guidelines will be in place to ensure fairness and transparency? How will the platform support our organization's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and what measures will be in place to prevent bias or discrimination?
4. How easy is it to integrate this platform with our existing HR systems and other enterprise software?
5. How will the platform be promoted to employees, and what is the anticipated adoption rate? How do you ensure engagement on a platform employees won’t use every day? How user-friendly is the platform, and what is the user adoption and/or activation rate among other companies in our industry?
6. What level of customer support is included with the platform, and how responsive are the vendor's customer support team? How is change management supported?
7. What is the workload for our HR and project management teams?
8. How will the platform (e.g., talent marketplace) be monitored and evaluated over time, and what metrics will be used to determine its success?
9. What is the estimated cost of implementing and maintaining the platform, and how will we measure its return on investment (ROI)?
10. How scalable is the platform, and will it be able to support our organization's growth over time?
Now let's take 365Talents as an example...
365Talents acts on 7 use cases in the skills and talent management function:
- Increasing employee engagement
- Building skills maps
- Boosting internal mobility
- Bridging skills gaps and fostering skill development
- Staffing projects and succession planning
- Career pathing and projecting professional development
- Operational strategic workforce planning
365Talents takes the skills-based approach further with a uniquely employee-first approach to skills declaration and management: Your people are in the driver’s seat of their career, transforming your employees’ evolution into your business solution.
This innovative approach drives more engagement and results in more enriched and up-to-date skills frameworks, providing HR with a better view and understanding of your company and people. The frameworks, assessments and profiles you (and our AI) are working with are informed not just by industry benchmarks, but by the real, self-declared and manager-validated skills of your people.
Your platform has more real skills, making your analysis more accurate, your opportunity matching more relevant and your employees more engaged.
The philosophy of 365Talents is based on the decentralization of knowledge and the empowerment of employees to define their own professional identity and future. Thus, each employee can declare their experiences and skills, in their own words, and then self-assess. This can include hard and soft skills, but can also include “mad” skills such as hobbies or interests, but only skills that are validated by HR or a manager will make it into the global organizational skills framework.
For example, your employee could declare “horseback riding” as a mad skill and it will appear on their profile, but (unless validated by HR) it won’t appear in the framework nor will be it used for matching.
365Talents offers several methods to validate the skills and competency levels self-declared by employees:
- AI
- Peers
- Managers
How will the platform support our organization's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and what measures will be in place to prevent bias or discrimination?
365Talents offers your people unprecedented visibility on the opportunities and career paths available at your company. This creates greater levels of transparency at your company with respect to opportunities, trainings and career paths. The AI-driven smart suggestions and matching means that all relevant employees receive notifications for opportunities and developments that match their mobility or development interests – not just the candidates who HR or the managers have personally pushed the opening to.
With respect to DEI initiatives, the 365Talents AI is designed to help your HR team fight bias in your mobility actions and professional development planning by evaluating candidates solely on their skills and interests and empowering them to articulate and declare what those strengths and ambitions may be. By emphasizing transferable skills and with explanations that connect the dots between experience and potential, employees can envision new career paths and feel empowered to pursue the course that is most motivating to them.
Of course, 365Talents can be customized to follow your mobility policies, allowing you to support DEI initiatives and break organizational silos within the corporate structures of your company.
365Talents makes pursuit of a best-of-breed approach to HR tech easy with seamless integration across your organization’s solution stack. Additionally, 365Talents offers a centralized home for all your skills data, identifying the semantic variations and nuances in skills data expressed across your network to build a unique skills framework adapted to your own vocabulary.
Here are some of the solutions 365Talents supports and the data it integrates:
- HCM and HRIS modules (e.g., SAP SuccessFactors, Lucca, TalentSoft, Workday, Altays): Skills, annual reviews, training plans, assessment, internal mobility, career pathing, strategy workforce planning reports
- Workplace and collaboration apps (Teams, Slack): real-time notifications, email alerts
- Analytics and BI apps (Tableau, Azure Data Lake): Profile data, skills data, job data, matching, employee feedback, analysis insights.
- Assessment (Prismo, AssessFirst, SHL): job and skill frameworks, recommended trainings
- Performance (Altays, Jevelo, SAP SuccessFactors): annual reviews, training and development plans
- Learning systems (360 learning, edflex, LI learning, degreed): courses, mentoring, coaching, training interests
- ATS job board & resource planning (workday, smartrecruiters, altays, careerbuilder): Job descriptions, job postings, job applications, candidate interests, candidate availability
- Other relevant systems: Projects, rewards and recognitions, certification
Don't let your HR projects false-start
42 percent of respondents rated their HR technology implementations as failures after two years, according to Josh Bersin Co.
As a mission control for sharing skills data, integration with 365Talents can supercharge HR projects across your tech stack with skills data so you can boost adoption and avoid false-starts before you launch.
Discover our integration capabilities and see how 365Talents can transform your talent management strategy.
How do you ensure engagement on a platform employees won’t use every day? How user-friendly is the platform, and what is the user adoption and/or activation rate among other companies in our industry?
365Talents measures and increases employee engagement at two stages:
First, there is the initial engagement at the start of the project, both activation and adoption rates. During the deployment of 365Talents, employees are encouraged with a profile pre-filled with imported data from integrated sources (or their choice of uploaded resume) and are engaged through prompts to enrich, modify and complete their profile as they wish in their own words. The user-friendly interface and easy-to-use experience has resulted in high activation and profile completion rates across our clients, ranging from +50 to +150%.
Then, there is ongoing engagement over time. 365Talents keeps employees engaged in their professional development and profile updates through smart suggestions of new skills to add and trainings or mobility opportunities that might be of interest. The ability to provide feedback and fine-tune recommendations encourages use and promotes positive opinions of the tool as a valuable asset.
365Talents also engages employees through the use of:
- Notification systems that alerts employees
- Intelligent and regular suggestions of skills to add to the profile detected by the AI
- Truly personalized suggestions of opportunities
- Opportunity matches that exceed "what's in for me" expectations from your employees. They can connect through expert communities, find mentors, trainings, etc.
- The possibility of defining one's wishes for progression, training, etc. and receiving career plans.
- A solution perceived by employees as a career booster
How responsive are the vendor's customer support team? How is change management supported?
365Talents offers a high level of customer support through every step of the process.
Our international, multilingual customer success team has proven experience tailoring, deploying and measuring talent experiences at scale according to the needs of your company. From working together to set objectives during goal alignment, training your team during set-up and launch, analyzing your results to boost adoption and performance and providing customized support to roll out 365Talents at scale to broader populations, expert support specialists are present for all elements of your project.
Furthermore, our role is to support you on change management related to the identification of use cases, and everything related to the talent platform itself. Our change management experts help our clients to efficiently transition to a talent experience platform and manage HR & managers expectations. They have managed complex projects across countries or with 100k employees. If your project involves modifying your existing HR processes, we can collaborate with different consulting partners as well.
At the start of the project, the workload on your side is moderate. Indeed, the AI automatically detects your skills and jobs, and offers a skills taxonomy perfectly adapted to your company. Our Customer Success Consultants assist you to modify if necessary and quickly validate the skills framework. Depending on the project, the workload varies from 3 to 6 days for HR experts and between 3 to 5 days for IT experts.
In the run phase, the workload on your side is minimal. 365Talents eliminates a traditional administrative burden in this regard. The AI Skills functions make it possible to automatically detect the appearance of new skills and to automatically propose to asign them to a category in your framework. Thanks to its ability to interpret descriptions and match skills, AI recommendations allow you to quickly validate proposals or even accept everything by default if you want to go very quickly. Depending on the project, the monthly workload for HR experts varies from 0.5 to 1.5 days per month.
However, if you add new populations during the run phase, you should plan to allocate some additional resources.
365Talents is monitored and evaluated primarily through 5 key metrics:
- Skill maps
- Profile completion
- Activation rates
- Adoption rates
- Time between staffings
Our clients have measured the impact of 365Talents using many business KPIs, including:
- Increase Talents engagement
- Decrease Talent turnover
- Increase internal mobility and decrease external recruitments
- Increase in successful upskilling (percentage of employees who complete specific trainings)
- Increase in skill development
- Decrease external staffing for strategic projects
- Productivity gains for HR
- Major decrease in resources to manage skills frameworks
- Better strategic HR and talents insights to drive business transformations
Prices for 365Talents vary by the bespoke product options available to you.
Upfront investment includes hands-on support, workshops and change management. This includes your first skills framework, data integration, platform set-up and delivery in 6-8 weeks.
In addition to your platform delivery for your specific use cases and a number of user licenses, you receive premium system maintenance and customer service, technical support, personalized guidance, best practices, and custom methodologies provided as-needed at no extra charge.
This can include:
- Admin, HR & Manager Trainings
- Change Management (docs, training, communication plan...)
- Dedicated Customer Success Consultant
- HR Consulting and AI Impact Analysis
In terms of measuring ROI, our clients often look to retention, staffing and upskilling expenses as well as productivity gains, business transformation and solution costs from decreased time to impact and launch.
On average, for a company with 10K employees 365Talents leads to:
- 100% increase in employee engagement through talent platform usage
- 10% decrease in employee turnover
- €1M saved by increasing by 30% the internal employment rate
- 25% decrease in number of outsourced assignments, leading to a saving of €1M
365Talents’s robust architecture and technology ensures seamless global expansion for as far as you want to go. Our platform supports anywhere from 1,000 to 150,000 live users with elastic computing power and storage capacity, meaning the same personalized experience and best matching opportunities for each employee.
With a team with proven experience with large scale global roll-outs for high visibility and strategic HR projects, you enjoy strong service level agreements for 99.5% service availability, guaranteed by contract. Deployment of new features is performed online and without downtime, and global support is available 24/7 in multiple languages.
With robust architecture, platforms distributed across multiple availability zones and data centers, frequent backups and seamless updates, 365Talents is built for however and wherever your company chooses to grow.
To learn more, schedule a call with our team and see how 365Talents can help you achieve your business goals.
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