A decade of Talent Experience Platforms

We covered it in Another publication : having up-to-date and efficient skills frameworks has long been a sea snake, so many companies gave up in the middle of the process: too complicated to create, obsolete as soon as they were released, not used enough.But it was also in the mid-2010s that several visionary entrepreneurs launched themselves with the idea of dusting off skills map.10 years later, what conclusions can be drawn from it? Have HR consultants been “replaced” by Artificial Intelligence, or is there still a place for bio-labelled natural intelligence?

The era of the pioneers

We are in 2014. Bénédicte would like to change careers, and collect data on Linkedin to see what others with his profile were able to do. oliver, on the other hand, is passionate about the collaborative economy and believes that know-how can be shared. Loïc Finally, in his consulting firm, is surprised by the lack of consideration of consultants' skills when staffing them.These three entrepreneurs respectively founded Clustree (bought in 2020 by Cornerstone), eLamp (bought in 2023 by 360 Learning) and 365 Talents which continues its great journey. This may seem paradoxical on the surface: why such a wave of startup creation when the subject of skills seemed to have fallen into disuse? The answer is a soup of letters: ML, GDB, NLP, NLG, LLM.

Numerous technological innovations

ML (Machine Learning), GDB (Graph Database), NLP (Natural Language Processing), NLG (Natural Language Generation), and LLM (Large Language Modeling). All these technologies related to data or word processing by algorithms or AI have one thing in common that they have suddenly made something extremely tedious possible. Indeed, if we go back to the essence of the problem of skills frameworks, these startups have intelligently used technology to get around the inherent problems:

• “It's complicated to create, to consolidate, to maintain”. No wonder, because it's text. The word and the idea are sometimes different and induce a great deal of variability: if I say “JS” or “Javascript”, I mean the same thing with two different formulations. However, consolidating text requires a significant effort. Automating this task therefore saves a HUGE amount of time when the promise is kept;
• “It's obsolete as soon as it came out”. It is also the whole virtue of a digital solution, namely its persistence and the historization that allow monitoring over time. In addition, automation reduces effort, so allows for more regular updates;
• “We don't know what it's for”. The use cases took several years to be clarified, and each company in this niche oriented its product differently, but let's mention Talent Marketplaces, staffing, skills directories, Career Paths... The diversity of uses has led, for example, 365Talents to prefer the term Talent Experience Platform, for example, to avoid locking their product into a single situation.

So we are living in a great time. Thanks to AI, all we have to do is plant skills in autumn and watch them grow until spring, without leaving our sofa and saving on consulting fees? Not quite.

The importance of augmented consultants

However, work on job and skill standards has not disappeared. As sophisticated as they are, these platforms are “just” technological objects. They facilitate the processing of unstructured data, they collect and consolidate, they can offer some analyses, but they are only decision support tools, “sensors”, not “actuators.” And this is where consultants bring added value: by selecting what is strategic for tomorrow. A good repository does not contain 60,000 skills, but a few hundred at most. And a good consultant is a consultant who avoids unnecessary effort: if technology can help him do it, he will.

And the SWP in all of this?

A platform like that of 365 Talents is a great asset for businesses that have it. It makes mobility more fluid, matches development needs with the training offer... All things that we could only dream of 15 years ago. But it cannot - and this is normal - know the company's strategy, its economic or social context, or its future trajectory. However, in the creation of a framework, profession as well as skills, there is an intentionality. As soon as it is created, a message is signed by the way in which one identifies the professions, and by the professions “of tomorrow” that one chooses to incorporate. These jobs, which may not exist today, whose skills do not necessarily exist in the company, but which should nevertheless be framed during a GPEC or Strategic Workforce Planning approach, for example. This is where a SWP solution goes very well with a Talent Experience Platform to give a dynamic and prospective dimension to an already very complete initial photo. For example, many Albert customers also use 365 Talents because the two solutions are technically “interoperable”, and feed off each other. Another way to see this is to say that TXP addresses the subject of jobs and skills through the prism of the employee, while the SWP attacks it through the prism of the business. The two are of course in the middle and increase the effect. Do not hesitate to consult us on this subject.