Skills Discovery
Simplifying recruitment for agile teams
Skills Discovery helps HR teams streamline recruitment and build agile, high-performing teams. With intuitive tools for creating role cards, skills portfolios, and automated talent matching, the platform makes recruitment and team building faster and more efficient.
Project overview
Skills Discovery is a web application built for HR to enhance recruitment and team-building processes. The platform enables leaders to create role cards, detailing the necessary hard and soft skills, along with the objectives of each job. Simultaneously, employees can build their own skills portfolio, outlining their capabilities, experience, and achievements. The platform employs a sophisticated algorithm to match roles with the most suitable employees, factoring in skills, tenure, and performance evaluations, offering a dynamic and data-driven approach to internal promotions and recruitment.
Target audience
The primary users of Skills Discovery are HR professionals and team leaders within companies that operate in agile environments. These users often struggle with manual recruitment processes that are time-consuming and prone to human error. The platform is designed to automate and simplify this process, enabling companies to quickly identify the best talent for each role and optimize team-building efforts.
The problem
In many organizations, the process of matching employees with open roles or internal promotions was traditionally done manually using Excel sheets or similar tools. This manual process was not only inefficient, but it also lacked precision, leading to mismatches and overlooked talent. The challenge for Skills Discovery was to replace this outdated approach with a seamless, automated system that could scale with the needs of companies, particularly those in fast-moving, agile environments.
The solution
Skills Discovery provided a solution to these challenges through a combination of innovative features designed to automate and enhance the recruitment process:
Design process
The design process for Skills Discovery was rooted in user-centered design principles, ensuring that the platform addressed the unique needs of HR professionals and team leaders while offering a user-friendly interface. One distinguishing factor of this project was the involvement not only in the design but also in the development of the tool, which allowed for greater control over how the final product aligned with the initial vision.
Challenges
One of the most significant challenges faced during the development of Skills Discovery was transitioning a process that had previously been done manually into a fully unmoderated digital tool. This required balancing automation with flexibility, ensuring the platform could handle a variety of use cases across different industries while maintaining the simplicity and ease of use demanded by users. Additionally, it was crucial to build trust in the matching algorithm, ensuring that users felt confident in the system’s recommendations.
The results
The launch of Skills Discovery was met with strong positive feedback. HR teams and team leaders quickly adopted the platform due to its ease of use and the significant reduction in time spent on manual recruitment processes. Users were particularly impressed with the algorithm’s ability to match candidates to roles in a fraction of the time it took using manual methods.
Key outcomes included:
• Faster decision-making: The platform significantly reduced the time it took to match employees with roles, which previously required manual sorting and comparison.
• Improved accuracy: The matching algorithm provided a more precise match between candidates and roles, leading to higher satisfaction rates among hiring managers and team leaders.
• Increased employee retention: By focusing on internal growth and helping identify high-potential employees for promotions, Skills Discovery played a role in improving employee retention within companies.
Learned lessons
Throughout the development of Skills Discovery, one of the most important lessons was the value of active listening—both to users and stakeholders. The ability to consolidate ideas and transform them into actionable features was essential in ensuring the platform’s success. Additionally, participating directly in the development phase provided unique insights into the technical challenges of building a complex tool like Skills Discovery, reinforcing the importance of close collaboration between design and development teams.
Conclusion
Skills Discovery successfully transformed how companies approach recruitment and team-building, particularly in agile environments. By introducing tools like skills portfolios, role cards, and a team-building feature, the platform streamlined processes that previously took weeks to complete. The addition of an algorithm-driven matching system further enhanced its value, offering HR professionals a powerful tool to optimize their teams and ensure the right talent is matched to the right roles. Skills Discovery not only improved recruitment efficiency but also fostered internal growth by identifying high-potential employees and providing opportunities for promotion.