Paris, the Home of Revolution, Gave Me the Confidence to Move Away from the Herd

Let me take you back to Paris, a city steeped in history and revolutionary ideas.

I was there, just after a customer workshop, sitting in a café beside the Eiffel Tower. I had been reviewing with our Chief Product Officer why the skills we were extracting for customers weren’t great and how this was impacting the matches we were generating.

Truthfully, this realization came after we lost a customer because the matches and logic simply weren’t working. We loved this customer, and the outcome devastated us. We were determined to learn what went wrong.

As we dug deeper, we realized that the job data we were receiving was primarily job adverts, and each recruiter would describe the same job in very different ways, with most of the content focused on employment branding rather than the actual work being done. We decided to go back to first principles, recognizing that without good people data or work data, AI is not a magician. This led us to focus deeply on the quality of job data across all our customers, and what we found was astounding—no one had any real work data.

No one understood the work being done in their company beyond job titles and job adverts.

Determined to understand this better, I called every business leader I knew and asked them how they described work. What I found was consistent: they talked about outcomes and tasks, how long they would take, and the types of skills needed to achieve those outcomes. Had I gotten it all wrong? Everyone was talking about skills first, but it became clear that no companies knew the actual work being done in their organization beyond job titles and adverts. HR was trying to label work using solely skills, but that’s not how the business talks, which explained the pushback on skills-based workforces.

Bold: Why We Moved Away from the Skills-First Approach

My worry then shifted to why we were all running so fast towards the fire of a skills-first approach. This concern explained the underwhelming response to skills-first transformations. To prove my point, we built out every one of our customers’ jobs with tasks, requirements, and the skills needed to do those tasks. That’s when it finally clicked. Not only did the business leaders validate that this was how they described work, but on average, 80.5% of the tasks we recommended were accurate, with the customer adding localized context to the rest.

• Revolutionary Insight: Realizing that people have skills, but work has tasks—and you need skills to do those tasks—was a turning point.
• Creating a Common Language: We realized that to truly align talent with work, we needed to create a Work Ontology, a common language of work that includes tasks, outcomes, and the necessary skills.
• Industry-Specific Depth: We've now built 23 different industry-specific work ontologies, each tailored to capture the depth and breadth of work and skills context needed for accurate workforce strategy. We've sunsetted our previous skills-only ontology because it simply wasn’t enough.

Responsible: How This Transformed Our Approach

What became crystal clear was that we could no longer rely on our customers' data alone. Now, with every customer, we come in with the Work Ontology to create this common language of work before going live. We even backdated this for our current customers to ensure we could fill in the gaps of work context in their environment.

• Improved Accuracy: Building jobs with a focus on tasks and outcomes, not just skills, dramatically improved the accuracy of our matches.
• Proactive Approach: By developing the Work Ontology before implementation, we ensure that our customers have a solid foundation to build their workforce strategy on.
• Customer-Centric: This approach has not only improved the results for our customers but has also strengthened our relationships, as they see us as true partners in their success.

I truly believe that skills are the currency that should power your marketplace. However, for this to work, the skills themselves need to be connected to the actual work being done. This is the only way to ensure alignment and impact.

I validated this thinking by diving deep into the incredible work of Ravin Jesuthasan, who was onto this before anyone else in the space. I highly recommend his book Reinventing Jobs—this is your playbook for navigating this new world of work.

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