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Opptly’s Great Leap Into Skills Intelligence: The Foundation of Modern Talent Acquisition

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are increasingly recognizing that traditional hiring approaches are insufficient. Forward-thinking enterprises are pivoting to skills-based hiring—a strategy that focuses on candidates’ actual capabilities and expertise rather than their credentials or work history (or, from a recruitment perspective, the mere superficial “match” between their history/portfolio and job prerequisites).

Skills-based hiring represents a fundamental shift in how companies identify, attract, and retain talent. By prioritizing demonstrable abilities over traditional proxies like education or previous job titles and roles, organizations can access wider talent pools, improve diversity efforts, and build more adaptable and agile workforces. This approach is particularly valuable in technology/IT, healthcare, manufacturing, marketing, and other fast-changing sectors where formal qualifications quickly become outdated, but practical skills remain essential.

At the heart of effective skills-based hiring lies skills intelligence—the comprehensive understanding of the specific capabilities required for success, both now and in the future. Skills intelligence essentially entails the mapping of the current skills landscape within an organization, identifying critical gaps, and developing strategies to address those gaps through targeted recruitment and development initiatives, including (but not limited to) direct sourcing, talent communities, and deeper extended workforce engagement.

Contemporary skills intelligence platforms leverage AI and machine learning to create detailed taxonomies that identify relationships between different skills, predict emerging skill requirements, and match candidates to positions based on capabilities rather than just work history. These platforms can analyze job descriptions, resumes, and performance data to create a dynamic, evolving picture of an organization’s skill needs and assets.

For enterprises implementing direct sourcing strategies—a strategic talent acquisition approach where organizations proactively identify, engage, and hire contingent workers through internal channels and talent pools and an in-house recruitment initiative—skills intelligence provides the critical foundation. It enables talent acquisition teams to clearly articulate requirements, efficiently screen candidates, and make deeper, data-driven hiring decisions. Without comprehensive visibility into workforce capabilities, direct sourcing programs may devolve into simple expense reduction initiatives rather than serving as powerful competitive differentiators that transform talent acquisition and deployment strategies.

Skills intelligence also supports other progressive talent strategies, such as internal mobility programs, reskilling initiatives, and the creation of talent marketplaces. By understanding the skills present in their current workforce, organizations can more effectively deploy their human capital, identify development opportunities, and build succession plans.

As automation and AI continue to transform work, skills intelligence becomes even more crucial. It helps organizations anticipate which roles might be automated, which new skills will become necessary, and how to prepare their workforce for coming changes. In this way, skills intelligence serves not just as a recruitment tool but as a cornerstone of organizational strategy and resilience.

The enterprises that thrive in the coming decade will be those that master skills intelligence and skills-based hiring—building workforces defined not by static qualifications but by adaptable, future-ready capabilities.

Artificial intelligence platform Opptly, which has transcended the arena of direct sourcing and talent acquisition technology to become a true “people intelligence” solution, recently launched its Skills Intelligence tool.

“Skills Intelligence represents a pivotal advancement in talent acquisition technology,” said Lori Hock, CEO of Opptly. “Organizations have long struggled with the complexity of matching talent to roles effectively. By harnessing the power of AI to analyze skills in real-time, we’re not just streamlining the hiring process – we’re fundamentally transforming how companies build and evolve their workforce. This platform empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions that ensure they’re not just filling positions, but building future-ready talent communities.”

A standout feature of the platform is its Job Taxonomy Analyzer, which addresses the complexities of skills data management in talent acquisition. This innovative tool can process multiple job descriptions simultaneously, analyze over 2,000 skills within a comprehensive taxonomy, and achieve up to 99% skills similarity scoring. Its unparalleled precision empowers hiring managers to make data-driven decisions, ensuring the right candidates are matched with the right opportunities.

Skills Intelligence also offers an array of functionalities designed to reshape hiring strategies. From lightning-fast skills analysis and bulk processing capabilities to advanced job family mapping and a robust skills database, the platform is tailored to meet the needs of talent acquisition leaders, contingent workforce program managers, and hiring teams. Its flexible input options allow users to process job descriptions and resumes seamlessly, while detailed reporting provides valuable insights across organizational groups.

Today’s hiring managers don’t have the time to sort through hundreds of resumes, hoping the right skills stand out,” said Craig Coe, SVP of Global Customer Success, Beeline. “With AI, it’s now possible to quickly surface candidates whose skills—both listed and inferred—match the requirements of the role. The result? Significant time savings and stronger engagement outcomes, as managers can focus on a smaller, more curated pool of qualified talent. Hiring managers need both speed and accuracy. AI delivers by quickly identifying candidates with the right skills—both stated and inferred—enabling faster, more precise hiring decisions.”

By incorporating generative AI, Skills Intelligence equips organizations with the tools to evaluate candidates effectively and ensure job descriptions align with current market demands. With features like automated job matching, skill gap identification, and updated job description generation, this platform redefines how companies approach recruitment, delivering a smarter and more strategic way to build their workforce.

Skills Intelligence bridges a crucial gap in talent acquisition, delivering actionable insights and enabling seamless collaboration between HR teams and hiring managers. Its ability to analyze resumes and job descriptions with precision ensures that hiring decisions are based on comprehensive, up-to-date information. By aligning job requirements with market demands and highlighting skills gaps, the platform supports organizations in building stronger, more agile workforces that are equipped to thrive in competitive industries.

Furthermore, Skills Intelligence empowers organizations to streamline hiring initiatives through automation and advanced analytics. Its integration capabilities allow for effortless synchronization with HR systems, reducing redundancies and ensuring consistency across all processes. With tools like the Job Taxonomy Analyzer and customizable job description library, the platform fosters greater efficiency and accuracy, positioning itself as a transformative force in modern recruitment strategies.

Since we started using Opptly Skills Intelligence, our conversations with clients about the value of skills-based hiring have taken on a life of their own,” said Raleen Gagnon, CEO of TalentEdgeAI. “Seeing where roles overlap and diverge based on the skills required creates a new level of understanding that can drive job descriptions, interview questions, and compensation strategy.  Having the ability to quickly compare roles and develop new job profiles makes every conversation as valuable as a white-boarding session!”

As businesses continue to navigate the complexities of a fast-evolving workforce landscape, Opptly’s Skills Intelligence tool emerges as a transformative solution that bridges gaps between talent acquisition, workforce planning, artificial intelligence, and organizational strategy. By leveraging advanced AI capabilities, companies can redefine their hiring processes, align workforce capabilities with future demands, and create agile, resilient teams that drive sustainable growth. Opptly’s great leap into the future represents a strategy that empowers organizations to build competitive, future-ready workforces in an increasingly skills-driven world.

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DEX and the Harnessing of Digital Tools

One of the defining characteristics of the Future of Work is digitization. With the growth of automation, generative AI, and large language models, it’s even clearer how technology is imperative to a cohesive and efficient workforce. What this means for the individual employee is more daily immersion in various technological platforms and solutions. For that to occur, upskilling will be a critical aspect for workers as they harness more advanced technologies to communicate, collaborate, and execute their roles. A term that continues to grow in importance is digital employee experience (DEX).

DEX is a term that describes worker effectiveness in using digital tools. DEX is a growing area as companies adopt more digital tools to augment their dispersed workforces. Companies want to ensure the tools they have integrated into the workplace are intuitive and enhance worker productivity.

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The Incredible Potential of the Modern Talent Tech Ecosystem

There are perhaps dozens of various attributes that sets apart the talent and work technology arena apart from others. Think of the inherent relationships between solutions, staffing suppliers, talent acquisition leaders, hiring managers, and tech platforms. Think of the numerous collaborations between talent management solutions and workforce intelligence providers.

And, now, think of another thing that sets this space apart: the integrations, the coordination, the nuances, and the ultimate power of the talent technology ecosystem.

Many other industries rely on core integrations between integral systems for the sake of operational efficiency; think ERP and financial planning, or maybe spend management and accounts payable. The partnerships in those arenas are certainly robust and provide its millions of users with necessary information, data, and intelligence, as well as contemporary process orientation, to effectively manage hundreds of enterprise tactics.

The difference between these “other” industries and the human capital world is this: there are substantially more expansive outlets of value from the technology ecosystem in talent solutions, ranging from higher-quality candidates, a better overall ROI on talent strategies, deeper visibility into talent intelligence, and, most importantly, the ability to truly transform the realm of innovation within the greater enterprise through next-generation skills and expertise.

So, this is so much more than “Solution A” integrates with “Platform B,” and it’s more expansive than a handful of technology systems working together in such a way to improve processes or drive efficiency.

We’re not talking just cost efficiency or improvements in operations. This is about the total transformation of how we address how work is done. This is about the ways businesses harness the true power of technology, automation, relationships, and innovation to become truly and formally agile.

This is the Future of Work.

What makes this ecosystem truly revolutionary is how…

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To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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2025 Future of Work Trends and the Role of the MSP

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining Atrium and their Chief Revenue Officer, Brad Martin, for an exclusive webcast that not only focused on the trends that will shape the Future of Work and extended workforce in 2025, but also unveiled an “MSP playbook” for those enterprises currently leveraging Managed Service Provider offerings or those businesses seeking their next workforce solution. Check out an on-demand recording of the webinar below.

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The Future of the MSP Model Hinges on Future of Work Innovation

Earlier this year, I wrote a feature on the next generation of Managed Service Providers that focused on how these solutions have evolved over the past several years to meet the dynamic needs of recruitment, contingent workforce, and talent acquisition programs across the globe.

Ordinarily, another feature would take, let’s say, a few months before revisiting the scope of MSPs, right? Well, no. There’s so much more to be said about how the MSP model is becoming a nexus of Future of Work innovation.

“Innovation” in and of itself is an interesting concept; given where we are in the greater Future of Work movement, the talent technology industry is awash in new technology, enhanced functionality, fresh approaches to automation, and a convergence of both old- and new-school hiring strategies.

Late last year, Ardent Partners and the Future of Work Exchange had the opportunity to evaluate and analyze the Managed Service Provider arena. The MSP Solution Advisor provider landscape highlighted the strengths and differentiators of 13 global managed services solutions.

One of the major learnings for me, even after nearly two decades in this industry, revolved around the idea of innovation within the MSP world. Many enterprises that leverage the MSP model for extended workforce management do so with “traditional” outcomes in mind: outsourced CW processes, payroll support, staffing supplier management, with a sprinkle of “next-gen” approaches like direct sourcing and skills-based hiring.

However, the Managed Service Provider structure is a foundational solution for talent engagement, workforce management, and Future of Work-era thinking for a major reason: many of these providers are actively blending their robust features with offerings that drive scalability, talent sustainability, and talent intelligence.

Companies mentioned in this article include Magnit, Airswift Resourcing, HireGenics, and KellyOCG.

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Introducing a New Subscription Model

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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Optimize Your CWM Strategy with AI

Artificial intelligence is becoming a permanent fixture as part of today’s enterprise operations and talent management approaches, serving as an essential technology for contingent workforce management (CWM) strategies that streamline candidate pairings with operational needs while increasing transparency of available skillsets and workforce contributions. Whether shoring up talent gaps or scaling needs, AI provides external workforce insights invaluable to HR and recruitment professionals and business leaders. The evolution of artificial intelligence will mean the emergence of more CWM opportunities.

Enterprises and HR executives who are not at least exploring the possibilities of AI’s impact on CWM will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage when sourcing talent and executing extended workforce strategies. Beeline stated that the “effects of AI in extended workforce management are just beginning and can be seen shaping how jobs are described, how candidates are evaluated, and how contracts are written. AI will soon be employed for more strategic outcomes like workforce planning, workforce optimization, and total workforce management.”

AI Paves Several Paths for CWM 

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Introducing a New Subscription Model

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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Holistic Talent Orchestration: The Future of VMS Technology

When I first began my career in the talent technology industry, Vendor Management Systems (VMS) were considered “eProcurement for staffing” and not the true enterprise behemoths they are today. The truth is that this wasn’t a natural evolution for the world of VMS and extended workforce automation; these systems had to prove their worth through a mix of grit, innovation, and market-shifting functionality.

A little over a decade ago, when enterprise software giant SAP acquired Fieldglass (a VMS pioneer), I was quoted as saying, “By 2020, half of the global workforce will be considered “contingent” or “external.” At that point, upwards of a third (33%-to-34% and growing) of the workforce was considered external. From 2015 to the early weeks of 2020, we were getting closer and closer to that 50% threshold…and then something happened that sparked another spark in contingent workforce growth.

The COVID-19 pandemic was, of course, a watershed moment in both human and business history; it was a global health crisis that sparked an economic crisis that sparked Future of Work accelerants that we all leverage today five years later (like remote and hybrid work, for instance). During the hardest, earliest months of the pandemic, businesses needed to scale up or scale down their workforces based on fluctuating conditions; when cases were down and demand for products/services returned, hiring managers and talent leaders shored up the workforce with contingent labor. When demand waned (especially during the very difficult 2020-2021 winter), it was easier to scale down with a temporary workforce.

It was well before this, though, that the VMS platform more than proved its worth for a simple reason: the external workforce kept growing. No other solutions (technology, that is) were as well-fit and aligned with managing this growth like Vendor Management Systems.

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Introducing a New Subscription Model

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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Reimagining Contingent Workforce Management: A Strategic Imperative for 2025

If I ever want to show my age, all I need to say is this:

I’ve been in the contingent workforce and HR tech space for nearly 20 years.

Now, like most of the folks in our amazing industry, I got here by accident. While I love the CWM space and the many, many friends I’ve made along the way, I didn’t set out to be an in analyst in this arena when I was college. (No, I aspired to be a journalist, a conversation for another day…)

So, I say this seeing so many market-shifting events, including the “perfect storm” of the contingent workforce’s growth spike in 2008-2009, a “reawakening” during the pandemic, and today’s AI-driven, skills-based hiring arena:

The CW programs of today aren’t built for tomorrow….

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Introducing a New Subscription Model

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thods within extended workforce management.

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The New Reality of Total Talent Management

Before you begin to scream, give me a few minutes here. I promise it’s worth it.

There are several phrases that send our industry into huffy-puffy overdrive and cause undue stress. However, no concept, idea, phrase, or whatever draws more scrutiny and frustration than “total talent management.”

Way back in 2012 (which seems like forever ago), I co-authored the industry’s very first paper on total talent management. Back then, with wide eyes and a dreamy attitude, I concluded that “total talent management should not just be a pipe dream for enterprises, but rather an accepted future state that will eventually become the foundation of all recruitment and talent acquisition strategies.”

Yeah, that “eventually” in there…let’s ignore it for a second.

Back then, the extended workforce comprised, on average, 25% of the average company’s total talent pool. Back then, solutions like RPO, MSP, VMS, etc. weren’t evolving or innovating as quickly as they are today. And, back then, we weren’t awash in new and exciting talent acquisition strategies (like skills-based hiring) that are representative of the changing times of a post-pandemic labor market.

So, flash-forward to 2025.

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Introducing a New Subscription Model

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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Future of Work 2025: Predictions for the Year Ahead (Part III)

2024 was another watershed year for the world of work and talent…and 2025 promises to be another transformational period in business history. Ardent Partners and the Future of Work Exchange are excited to unveil a series of predictions over the next few weeks from industry thought leaders.

“In 2025, mid-market companies will increasingly rely on their external workforce to achieve their objectives. This will be the catalyst for staffing’s rebound, with these organizations embracing technology to automate and streamline their processes. For these mid-market companies, speed-to-value is paramount, driving them toward comprehensive technology solutions that offer modern, user-friendly interfaces, and simplified implementation.”

David Barthel, SVP, Global Sales, Beeline

“We’re going to see a demand increase in skilled labor in the early part of 2025. Industries like manufacturing, LI, and similar verticals are going to peak shortly (some have already have due to seasonal attributes). For IT, engineering, and professional skills, we may not see demand increase until the dust settles on a new presidential administration…possibly in Q3 2025.

The rest of this article is available by subscription only.

Introducing a New Subscription Model

To continue providing valuable insights and resources on the future of work and extended workforce management, we’re transitioning our site to a paid subscription model. While some posts will remain free, subscribing will grant you exclusive access to in-depth analysis, market research, expert interviews, and actionable strategies that will help improve your business. Solution providers and practitioners are invited to join today and gain a competitive edge by tracking the industry’s important innovations, emerging trends, and best practices.

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