General

What is the purpose of Skills Design?

Building a skills-based organization is a priority for CHROs. The first step is creating a skills inventory—understanding the skills of your employees.

Eightfold’s Skills Design helps you efficiently manage your skills taxonomy within the Eightfold platform, integrating it seamlessly across the ecosystem. By understanding employees’ skills, organizations can unlock their potential, addressing business challenges beyond their initial roles.

Skills Design also provides skill insights, including prevalence, trends, and distribution by gender, ethnicity, location, job level, and business unit.

What are the downstream benefits of Skills Design?

• Richer analytics and insights for decision-making: Aggregating equivalent skills provides accurate skill prevalence analytics. Data Hub queries enable precise insights, such as employee skill distribution by location or business unit.

• Standardized skills for consistency: Skills from various sources often lack standardization. With Skills Design, skills are extracted and aligned to standardized definitions, eliminating inconsistencies.

• Dynamic, up-to-date taxonomy: Internal and external recommendations ensure your skills taxonomy evolves with emerging trends.

How do customers define a skills taxonomy using Skills Design?

Follow these steps to define your skills taxonomy:

1. Activate the Skills Engine: Discover, unify, and manage skills in your talent pool.
2. Augment skills (optional): Import your own skills via CSV.
3. Leverage AI recommendations: Continuously refine the taxonomy using Eightfold’s AI, informed by your talent pool and market trends.

Output: A dynamic skills inventory aligned with your talent pool and market needs.

What is the benefit of using Eightfold’s skills taxonomy?

Eightfold’s skill taxonomy provides:

• Improved extraction: A broader skill list captures more skills from resumes and profiles.
• Improved user experience: A richer skill set allows users to build comprehensive profiles and calibrate talent searches effectively.
• Analytics: A diverse skill list reveals trends and insights, helping organizations understand their workforce better.
• Internationalization: Eightfold’s skills cover multiple languages, ensuring global applicability.

Why should you not freeze the skills taxonomy?

Skills are dynamic and reflect an evolving talent pool. Freezing the taxonomy risks it becoming outdated, failing to capture emerging skills.

Features like New Skills and Industry Skills suggest additions based on internal trends and external market changes. For example, emerging skills like Generative AI and Prompt Engieering highlight the importance of keeping taxonomies current.

What is the difference between adjacent and equivalent skills?

• Adjacent skills: Related skills within a broader domain. Examples: Python, JavaScript, Java.
• Equivalent skills: Variants of a skill that share the same meaning. Examples: Research, Research Methods, Basic Research (equivalent to "Research & Development").

What is the purpose of defining equivalent skills?

In the Eightfold ecosystem, equivalent skills are combined under a standard skill for consistent insights and reporting.

For example:

• Standard Skill: Research
• Equivalent Skills: Research & Development, Research Methods, Basic research

If four employees have any of these equivalent skills, analytics will display an aggregated count of four employees under the standard skill "Research."

Eightfold’s Standard Taxonomy

Does your platform use a specific proprietary or third-party taxonomy?

Eightfold uses a proprietary standard taxonomy with 60K+ standardized skills and equivalent mappings derived from analyzing 1B+ career trajectories. The taxonomy is updated regularly with market trends to ensure relevance.

What are the governance mechanisms for maintaining Eightfold’s taxonomy?

Eightfold ensures data quality and relevance by:

• Regularly refreshing the taxonomy with data from positions and profiles in the system.
• Using market data to incorporate emerging skills.
• Applying AI algorithms and human reviews to evaluate new skills.

Admin Experience

How can customers build a skills taxonomy?

Customers can create their taxonomy during the setup and post-setup phases:

• During setup:

  • Extract skills from ATS data (applicant resumes).
  • Extract skills from HRIS data (employee resumes).
  • Import an existing taxonomy.
  • Combine all of the above.

• Post-setup:

Use New Skills and Industry Skills features to evolve the taxonomy dynamically: \

* **Auto-Add On**: Automatically adds new standard and equivalent skills.
* **Auto-Add Off**: Review and accept suggestions manually.

How does seeding with employee skills work?

Skills Design uses available employee data, such as resumes or skill fields, to extract and harmonize skills. AI normalizes equivalent skills into a unified taxonomy.

Example: Skills like "HR Admin" and "Human Resources Administration" are standardized as "Human Resources Administration" within the Skills Design UI.

Limitations: Skills not included in resumes or skill fields may require additional input to enhance extraction.