Meet the company that’s revolutionizing talent management through data

In the popular life simulation game The Sims, players have to level up their character’s skills to help them progress in the game and enable them to receive promotions at work or develop new abilities.

The same applies in real life. By upskilling and reskilling, workers are creating new opportunities for themselves in their careers. But unlike the game, there isn’t a handy progress bar floating above people’s heads that tells them what skills they need to pick up to unlock a new achievement or how close they are to achieving that goal.

Photo credit: gmast3r / 123RF

However, thanks to AI and big data analytics firm JobTech, they can come close. Founded in 2016, the company focuses on giving businesses and employees personalized and data-driven recommendations for workforce and career development.

The platform was initially a project under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (ASTAR) until it was spun off as a startup of its own. Wee-Tiong Ang, JobTech’s CEO and founder, saw an opportunity for the work he was doing at ASTAR to play a vital role in driving greater understanding of the labor market, especially in the face of the large shifts in the human resources sector and the way people work.

Wee-Tiong Ang, CEO of JobTech / Photo credit: JobTech

“We saw that the future of work today is disrupted by technological advancements, and rapid adoption of technology will impact jobs and displace people from them,” says Ang. “We wanted to create a way for workers to look at their skills and competencies profile and understand what skills they have that are in-demand and what skills they need in order to stay relevant.”

Using data to create a Talented team

JobTech’s main product is Talented, a talent intelligence platform that helps firms engage and retain both internal and external staff members and develop future talent.

The platform understands global labor market conditions and the competencies of a company’s employees. It does this by extracting and collecting three types of data – labor demand, labor supply, and education data – and compares them to the employee skill information an organization has, which it learns from resumes, job descriptions, and LinkedIn profiles. In doing so, Talented aims to support firms in strategic workforce planning.

This allows companies to understand what skills their employees have and where they stand against the company’s larger goals and the greater labor market.

The value of retention

By providing companies with a bird’s-eye view of what their talent and competencies look like, JobTech aims to play a key role in driving employee retention, something that has become increasingly important in the face of The Great Resignation.

JobTech’s platform / Photo credit: JobTech

According to Ang, there are always “sunsetting roles” in any organization. Instead of displacing employees operating in those positions, companies can train or reskill them or even move them to vacant roles within the business. While internal mobility is JobTech’s main focus, Talented also helps identify gaps in the skills of a company’s employees to help the firm hire talent effectively in situations where reskilling would be challenging.

To help companies improve employee retention rates, Talented recommends personalized upskilling and reskilling opportunities for each employee.

“In organizations that we work with, there are 20 to 30 HR personnel in charge of managing around a thousand employees. It’s almost impossible to manage all these employees,” says Ang. “With our platform, companies can allow an employee to do self-directed learning that’s hyper-personalized to their own profile.”

Besides helping employers and employees understand the current labor market, JobTech also provides educational resources to promote collaborative learning among staff members.

“We’ve always felt that HR is beyond covering payroll, claims processing, and employee benefits because a company’s human capital is their most important asset,” says Ang, “The business performance of every company is inherently tied to the performance of their employees and the skills they have that enable them to do their jobs properly.”

Pivots and possibilities

Today, Ang is proud to say that JobTech is profitable and is one of the few labor data analytics companies in the world that understand labor model economics across 219 geographies. However, getting to this point has not been easy.

When the firm first presented its data models to potential customers, it was met with the question, “So what?” The firm had all these insights on the labor market, but it had to figure out how this applied to its potential customers?

That’s where JobTech had the grand vision of creating a platform that could completely disrupt the talent acquisition and development market, one that would replace recruiters and learning management systems. However, when it tried to bring this product to the market, it faced significant pushback.

“There’s a certain cultural, social, emotional, and relationship part to talent acquisition – we thought our technology, with knowledge of the entire labor market, could be smarter than any recruiter out there, but the human touch remains very important in HR,” says Ang, “We pivoted toward talent intelligence, developing Talented, and here we are today.”

Talented is currently used by companies, institutions, consultancy firms, and governments worldwide, and JobTech has had the opportunity to work with a number of tertiary institutions in Singapore to guide students in their career planning journeys. With the platform, Students are able to identify internship opportunities and modules that would be beneficial to their career aspirations, allowing them to take courses that equip them with the relevant skills instead of just focusing on academic performance.

Looking ahead, Ang hopes to move JobTech beyond its existing B2B model into the B2C space and make the firm’s talent intelligence data available to everyone.

“We hope to be able to truly democratize all this information and the models that we have for everyone, for their own self-directed learning, for them to improve themselves, and to have meaningful careers that align with their aspirations,” he says.

Accreditation@SG Digital was launched in July 2014 to accelerate the growth of promising Singapore-based enterprise tech-product companies. It helps these firms establish credentials, build business traction, grow, and compete in the global market, opening up more opportunities for their solutions to be showcased and adopted.

JobTech is Singapore’s leading AI and big data analytics technology company that provides real-time labor market intelligence and talent management products.

Schedule a demo with JobTech today.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.