Episode 133: How To Take Your Skills-Based Workforce Planning To The Next Level (an interview with Andreas de Neve)
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Andreas de Neve, CEO and Co-Founder of skills intelligence platform software, TechWolf. Helping large organisations such as Booking.com transition towards skills, Andreas shares his insights into the skills-based revolution.
The conversation will cover the following:
The two types of motives companies have for transitioning into a skills-based organisation
The impact skills are having on these organisations
Andreas’ tips on setting the foundations for a skills-based workforce planning strategy
How to take your already established skills approach to the next level
The role of technology in supporting the transition towards a skills-based organisation
So if you are looking for inspiration on navigating your skills-based workforce planning transition, this podcast is worth a listen!
Enjoy!
Support from this podcast comes from TechWolf. You can learn more by visiting: techwolf.ai
David Green: I'm sure that many of you listening, just like me, are fascinated about the current spotlight on the movement towards a skills-based organisation. This is completely disrupting the traditional job-based models that we have always known, and with 98% of organisations surveyed by Deloitte wanting to shift their focus towards skills rather than jobs, I'm curious to learn more about the drivers behind this movement.
So, in today's episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, I'm speaking with Andreas De Neve, Co-founder and CEO of a cutting-edge, modern-day, skills workforce planning technology company called TechWolf, about his insights into the skills-based revolution.
Andreas will share his findings on the two types of motives companies typically have for moving towards a skills-based organisation, and the impact this transition is having on these companies.
Our conversation will also cover how to best get started and the data you should look at to take your skills-based approach to workforce planning to the next level.
So, if you're looking to move towards a skills-based organisation, or in the early stages of doing so, then this conversation is for you. Let's kick off the discussion with Andreas.
Andreas, welcome to the show, it's a pleasure to have you on. Before we dive into the interview, could you share with the listeners a little bit about yourself, and also TechWolf; I believe, for example, you've had some series A funding recently?
Andreas De Neve: I'll start with myself. So, I'm Andreas, a 26-year-old computer science engineer out of Belgium. I started TechWolf together with two friends, classmates, in 2018 while still at uni. I graduated in 2020, raised €1 million in seed funding the same year, and earlier this year, as you mentioned, raised €10 million in series A. Now have a team of almost 50 people spread across Belgium and our first international hub in London as well.
David Green: What made you get into the HR tech space and the skills space specifically?
Andreas De Neve: It's a bit of an interesting story. As a bunch of students, we wanted to make some money on the side next to studying.
We had a lot of skills. Like, if you're a master student in engineering or in IT, we knew how to programme in three or four languages, we know everything about algorithms, data structures. But when we wanted to find a job on the side, we could only work in hospitality. We were like, "How crazy is this?" There's all this news about work for talent, about we can't find IT talent.
Here were three engineers ready for flexible work, but no companies to be found.
So, we developed a matching algorithm to match last year final students to companies. We then started commercialising the idea, making it a little bit broader for general candidates to job-matching. We started pitching it to CHROs. We said, "Hey, look, we've developed this algorithm. It can help you find the best candidates for your jobs based on skills". People really liked the demo, but they told us, "You're not really solving a problem right now, because there's not that many good candidates on the market.
But what would be interesting is, I'm pretty sure there's a couple of people inside my company who might have the perfect skills to fill this role, who might even be browsing job sites to apply for that very role at a different company, but I just can't find them. So, could you help me solve that problem; could you match this position with internal candidates?"
We listened to the market, we pivoted and then we started focusing on the skills problem at hand.
David Green: As CEO and Co-founder of a fast-growing HR technology company focused on skills, how would you define a skills-based organisation?
Andreas De Neve: It's an interesting question, and I think the shape of a skills-based organisation strongly depends on the context at hand. So, it might mean something very different for different businesses. We see two big groups of customers in the market, so one group of customers, they come to us with, I would say, a longer-term view, more of a fundamental belief, and I think Booking.com is a really good example. They're a tech company from The Netherlands, most people probably know Booking. They were founded in 1996, the year I was born, so they're not that old as a business.
David Green: You're making me feel old though!
Andreas De Neve: Apologies, David!
At their inception, they were a very nimble, agile company and they used to disrupt an entire sector. Now, 11,000 employees later, they're a little bit more rigid, they kind of lost some of that agility. And from the CEO, CHRO, the leadership point of view, they want to regain part of that agility, part of that nimbleness.
They realised that many of the people processes that they have in place are designed for a role that no longer exists, for a more static and more rigid world, so they want to retain their entire people strategy, their entire set of people processes, to be more skills-based, to have that extra set of granularity, to improve their speed to market. So, that's kind of a first group of customers, a long-term belief in skills as a primary framework of modelling and understanding talent.
Then, there's a second group of customers that come to us with much more urgent challenges, where their V1 of a skills-based organisation is a more short-term, tactical one. One very prominent example that we see across our customers are big either engineering, technology, financial institutions, companies, that need to undergo that digital transformation. They often face above-average attrition in many of these digital roles. But when you look at the job architecture, when you look at the frameworks that they have in place to service these people from an HR point of view, it's really sub par.
We have one customer that has over 20,000 people with the job title, Developer. This is a very tactical example, but they don't really know, on a centralised level, they don't really know that much about these people. They are leaving the company and the number one reason people give in their exit interview is, "Yeah, there's absolutely no visibility on what else I could be doing in this organisation, there's very little career development".
So, in many of those organisations, there is really a burning platform on attrition in a specific segment, or a big reskilling challenge that needed to be fixed yesterday. And with the current process, they can't solve it, so they need to add that extra level of detail and understanding employees to better service them.
Those are the two groups that we see in moving to skills, or a skills-based organisation, skills as a primary framework of modelling talent, but the time horizon is very different for many companies in the different groups.
David Green: From the organisations that you work with, and you might have a couple of examples that you might want to share, what is the impact and the benefit of transitioning towards a skills-based organisation?
Andreas De Neve: Maybe a small sidestep to that question, I think, the real impact of the companies and the economy moving to a skills-based model will only be visible, or will primarily be visible, in the very long term. If you like, many companies, even the ones that say that they are working skills-based, many of them are still trying to figure it out, the same way that we are still trying to figure it out and that our customers are still trying to figure it out. It's a very emerging market, but it's still a very young market, the technology is very young. So I think we shouldn't try to post and claim, "Hey, we have solved this"; I don't think anyone in the world has really solved it, so be really realistic there.
We have seen a couple of customers who did manage to deliver on specific business cases. I'm thinking of one large financial institution that we work with, that identified a group of, I think it was 2,000 people, who were in roles that according to their transformation roadmap and strategy, would no longer exist two years from now. So, they had this population that they knew, "The roles that these people are currently in, they will no longer exist two years from now, so how can we proactively reskill and potentially proactively redeploy these people into other pockets of the organisation?"
By doing this based on skill data, you kind of see parts that are not obvious compared to the job level, because you might have multiple people in the same role, but not all of them are a good fit for this specific opportunity, or that specific opportunity, but some might because of prior experience, specific skills that they exhibited during that role.
So, they managed to redeploy and reskill towards this new career internally.
They did that for about 300 people so far; and in cases like that, the map's really easy. It's hirings that you save, it's severance payments, it's very good on the brand image, especially as a financial institution. You don't want to have mass layoffs; it's not good for the people, it's not good for the brand, it's not good for the company.
So, those are very, very tactical, easy to quantify, I'd say, as a case.
There's others where you can feel a similar impact on like strategic workforce planning being executed in a better way, but where the impact is not as measurable as some of these other examples.
David Green: There's some straight, real benefits there and as you said, the bigger benefits of a skills-based approach probably won't materialise for several years. But maybe it's stories like that that creates the momentum to invest more in this type of work.
Andreas De Neve: 100% with you on that. I saw reports last week about Twitter, how they started rehiring some of the employees they previously let go, and I think you'll see it with many organisations that were forced to restructure. But if you don't have that clear understanding of which skills are located in which pockets of the organisation, which people, you probably can't do as good of a job in terms of doing your restructuring; and a couple of months later, you might be trying to rehire skills that you accidentally let go.
We shouldn't forget that there are also actual people involved here, not just like an Excel exercise, "We lost a little bit too much of this, let's buy them back in", it's actual people that we're talking about, so I'm 100% on your side.
David Green: This shift is something, as you said, it's a bigger transformation than maybe we've done, certainly in people management, for a long time; I can't think of many, so I guess it's quite big and quite scary for organisations that are thinking of tackling this. But it's one of those things that potentially, there are clear benefits for the company, there's clear benefits for employees, and actually there's clear benefits for HR functions to lead the way in this, because it help make them more strategic and have more impact.
But as we've talked about and we've already said three or four times, and I think it's important to reiterate, being a skills-based organisation isn't something that happens overnight, you need to set foundations from the start. A lot of organisations tend to struggle to get things off the ground. Obviously you're working with some of these companies at the moment. Where should they start so they can get off on the right foot, and what are some of the steps, for instance, that they should take?
Andreas De Neve: If you look at TechWolf, we're a pretty young organisation. I would say that we're probably part of the second-wave of vendors and tech providers that try to help companies move to a skills-based way of working, and that we had the opportunity to learn from the slightly larger companies that I would say are part of the first wave.
What we observed with many of the large companies is that they have taken steps towards that skills-based organisation, but not all of them have the foundation in place. And for me, the foundation is essentially two things: one is the skills taxonomy, a language for skills that is fit for purpose, that is dynamic and synced with the labour markets, but definitely adjusted for your specific organisation and agreed upon with the business, because with skills, the problems that we intend to solve are business problems, not HR problems. So, if there's no alignment with the business or the rest of the organisation, there's no point in building the house.
So, that taxonomy bit, agreeing with the entire organisation on, "This is a framework and a language that we're going to use for skills", and being able to share that language across workforce planning teams, people analytics teams, HR strategy teams, learning function, talent function, TA function, having that common ground is really important. I see a lot of large organisations and multiple of our customers, who use different frameworks and different languages for skills and different tools that don't talk to one another. So, harmonising what you already have and making sure that every piece that you add is also in harmony with what's already there, I think is a principle that not every company adhered to. So, solving for that taxonomy piece is the first big part.
The second big part is what I would call "the inventory of skills". I think companies should have, before you start adding tools or before you start trying to leverage this skills information in many processes, I think organisations should be sure that they have a high-quality dataset on the skills and skill gaps of employees. Companies have to realise that when you all of a sudden move from job titles that are static, it's one or two words. When you move to skills and you start modelling employees with 20 or 30 continuously evolving skills, that you add a lot of complexity to the process.
You have to think about dealing with that complexity upfront. It's what many organisations have today as a situation, that they have skill data, but maybe on 50% or 60% of the people, it's predominantly gathered through self-assessment or manager assessment. We did a scan on the dataset, the manual datasets that we got from some of our customers, where we noticed that men, for example, tend to self-assess more skills than women. So, the underlying dataset that many of these organisations are using in this skills-based model is somewhat crooked, which comes with its own set of businesses risks, like you don't want to use this data for succession planning if you're putting women at a disadvantage.
David Green: I'd love you to talk through the skills inference, because I know it's something that you do at TechWolf, and I know it's something that a lot of people talk about, but I think occasionally it's a little bit misunderstood.
Andreas De Neve: Well, it's at the very core of what we do. And I think the belief that we have at TechWolf is that skills inference, getting to that dataset of what skills do we have across the organisation, who has which skills, that skills inference is not a feature, but it's a whole problem, it's like a separate problem in the tech stack.
The way that we go about it at TechWolf, we believe that many organisations, and this is true for all of our customers, they have a lot of data on employees in their organisation, more than they realise. They know which projects people worked on, they know which files have been shared with you, they know which public chat groups on Teams you are most active in.
For a developer, they know which tickets have been assigned to you as a marketeer, they know which content pieces you commented on, or which Asana or monday.com tasks you are most active on.
So, organisations have a lot of data on their employees at work, and we believe that they should do the hard work, look at the data in those systems, because this is one of my quotes, "Nurses don't treat patients in Cornerstone and developers don't write code in Workday". So, skill data has been created in work systems, not in HR systems, so we should venture out and look into these systems to see what people are actually doing; from that data, infer what skills they have; and then bring that data back to the HR systems that need it, rather than the quick and dirty approach of just in an HR system, asking people, "Hey, can you just tell me what you're capable of [or] can you just tell me what you do?"
At TechWolf, we didn't build a user interface so employees cannot login to our system. I would say it works completely under water. But the way that we do interact with employees is by bringing the skill data to employees, rather than trying to bring employees to our platform. So with some customers, for example, we have a Microsoft Teams integration, where there is a small chatbot that in a very explainable way sends you a message like, "Hey, David, I noticed you started working on this project. We also know that you worked previously in this role for two years and you have been very active in these groups. So, that information combined leads us to believe that you have acquired this skill. Do you want to add it to your profile?"
The thesis of everything I just mentioned is really that we should take as much friction as possible out of the process for employees to get that dataset going. And once we get there, we hand the data over to people analytics practitioners, the HR strategy teams; but also, learning experience platforms, talent marketplaces, because they are the very best in delivering that experience.
David Green: So it's almost like you're feeding these systems basically with consistency. You talked about having a common language, so a common taxonomy of skills within an organisation, an inventory of skills, which is what you obviously helped these companies to collect. And then you're basically surfacing that inventory in all the different applications a company will use across the employee lifecycle, that that actually helps them use that data effectively to deliver value for the employees themselves, through relevant learning opportunities, relevant projects or career mobility options, but also for the organisation because effectively, your data is helping them understand the skills gap they may or may not have, and the extent of it and everything else.
So, very clever and as you said, by doing it the way you do it, you're effectively as close to real-time skills data, whereas the traditional way of doing it in the past, it means it's out-of-date as soon as you've collected the information.
Andreas De Neve: I think that's one of the reasons why we've grown 5X this year.
One of the reasons why our customers come to us is because of the sheer speed. If your acquisition process of skill data is not dependent on adoption or manual interaction, you can get to that real-time view on skills across your organisations as soon as you plug in the cables, which for many organisations, this is something hard to imagine because they are used to multiyear implementation processes for these big tools.
But sometimes, it can be as easy as -- and of course, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. But if you don't depend on adoption, you really shrink the time to value by a very large chunk.
David Green: So you talked earlier about how every organisation is different, and I think that's a really important point to make.
Each has their own operating model, goals and challenges, and despite a tool helping a competitor, it may not actually work for their organisation. So, to help these businesses save time, money and tears maybe, what should they be considering when searching for the right tool or tools for their business?
Andreas De Neve: I think it all comes back to the initial "why" like, "Why are you moving to a skills-based way of working? Which category are you in?" I would say, depending on the urgency, like if it's super-urgent, maybe the skills across the workforce are not that complex, a quick and dirty solution might do. One of our customers is an energy company operating two nuclear plants, and the local government decided to step away from nuclear energy in 2025. So, all of a sudden you have a workforce of 2,500 people and all of a sudden, they need to be reskilled and retrained into dismantling this powerplant. So, they had a very niche group of skills, they had a very niche problem and a very niche use case.
In their case, it was about getting taxonomy right, getting that first inventory of skills. But the platform that they then had to put in place was hybrid learning, to say, "These are the career options that you have within the group, within the company, within the local ecosystem", so they also included external jobs. They really wanted to do well for their employees.
So, it's not a cookie-cutter use case like, "We need to improve attrition in these departments [or] we need to improve learning experience, because we have a big reskilling challenge". So I'd say that different situations require different systems, different strategies.
David Green: Earlier on in our conversation, we talked about that we're still really at the early stages of this kind of shift towards a more skills-based approach. I mean, you mentioned talent marketplaces as well. If we fast-forward time, and I won't come back to you and mark your work in five years' time on this, I promise! But if we fast-forward to 2027 or 2028, where do you predict this whole conversation around skills and talent marketplaces will be?
Andreas De Neve: I think there are multiple ways to look at it. Let's maybe start with the HR or the people process point of view, I think, on that side. I believe that five years from now, we will have figured out collectively which are the quick-win use cases and how to execute on them, as part of this skill-based transformation. I think the general play book that many companies are looking for will be pretty much out there.
What I'm more excited about is the potential business side. So, skills as a framework, they get you a lot closer to measuring and quantifying value, business value. So, I believe that when companies get this dataset on skills and a skills-based transformation going, that HR will be able to communicate in a different way to the business. They will be able to say, "We invested €40 million in big learning programmes in these departments to acquire these skills, and when we look at the evolution of our skill inventory, we see that we have adopted these skillsets at a pace that is three times as high as the market average, or two-and-a-half times as what we see in our specific geo with this names competitors.
Being able to link the expenses, the investments that we make on the people side, link them to a business outcome and business value, I think it will help elevate the role of the CHRO. To transpose your question as to, "How will skills impact the talent process?" I'm working to peek into the future and see, how do the skills and this programming capability of understanding talent and reporting on it, how will it impact the way that the business looks at HR and HR leadership?
David Green: What are some of the main obstacles that HR leaders and professionals really need to overcome to fully transition into a skills-based organisation; or maybe not fully transition, but to make progress?
Andreas De Neve: I would say the speed of organisations moving to skills. There are differences across our customers, and I would say the differences are not necessarily tied to technological maturity or speed of the implementation, but more a general data maturity within HR departments. The skill mindset implies that you have the opportunity to do a lot of things very different.
But up until the point where you get an HRBP or a TA professional to sit at their desk and say, "Yeah, this position has been open for two months, we don't have a lot of candidates. Maybe we can see what other roles we could craft with different job titles that might have more traction in the labour market that might have 70%, 80% similar skills to attract more candidates"; or a line manager who has the instinct to say, "Let's ask my HRBP whether there's other people in the organisation who might jump on this project, rather than putting up a classical job posting".
I think it's relatively easy to get going with skills at the top, like strategic workforce planning, HR strategy, reporting to the Exco, reporting to the board; I think that's the part that doesn't require a lot of change in the organisation, but really making skills propagate into every fibre of that organism, I think that's the real challenge and that's something that will take time.
David Green: And would your advice to companies out there be to start with a pilot, for example? One of the things that you said that I really liked is, "What is the business problem you're trying to solve?"
Find an area of the business where you've got a business problem to solve, just like that company with the nuclear plants, for example, and apply it there, learn from it and then iterate; and then if you're getting value, start to roll it out across other parts of the organisation. Is that something that you're doing at TechWolf, for example?
Andreas De Neve: Yeah, and especially with many of the big, traditional companies that have some pockets of the organisation, like either IT or engineering or R&D, that are a lot more suited to get started with skills right now, or where the use case is a lot more urgent; companies should focus on that predominantly.
I think companies should also really try to, internally we call it "value strikes", like put points on the board for the business. Moving to skills has a big magnitude, and if you do it disconnected from the business or you're not creating business value, then it's just like HR doing HR things.
The most successful companies that I have seen work with skills, they solve a very critical business problem, either like the attrition example or the redeployment example that I gave; or even in the case of the nuclear plant provider, that's a board level topic, "Hey, what are we going to do with this situation?" Solving that local problem with skills, or solving that first big fire for the business, often helps create leverage and momentum to then carry the broader skills-based transformation along, especially in organisations that are not as mature, or where the CHRO doesn't have the broad mandates to move to that skill-based way of working without linking it to a specific urgent business case.
David Green: So, Andreas, this is the question we're asking everyone on this series of the podcast, and you might end up recapping on a little bit that you've already said, which is fine because we'll create a short video out of this one; how can HR identify and prioritise the critical skills it needs for the future?
Andreas De Neve: I see some successful companies rather focusing on a proxy for that question which is, "Which skills could we use more of today?"
Typically the answer's very similar, but it's a lot easier to grasp. I think probably every person in every team can answer this, "If you could clone one person in your team, who would it be? Would you like a second David Green, or would you like a second Person X?"
At one big energy company, they proxied for the skilled amount by just looking at, "Which internal roles from all of our roles, which roles couldn't we backfill internally right now? So, for everybody in the organisation, if this person left, for which of those roles wouldn't we have enough candidates to backfill the entire function?" They just bundled all those skills and said, "This is what we need more of", but I'm not sure if we should focus too much on trying to predict the future and which skills will we need in five years' time; I think we should rather focus on, if we had a shopping budget that we could shop actual skills today, which ones would we be acquiring?
The end goal might be somewhat different, but the direction will definitely be pretty much the same, and it's a lot easier to answer that question.
David Green: Yeah, it's a very practical answer and just to say that my wife would definitely tell you, "Please, no, we don't want another David Green. One is more than enough!" and I think I'd probably have to agree on that! How can listeners get in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about the great work you're doing at TechWolf?
Andreas De Neve: I think the easiest way is probably to just directly shoot me an email.
It's andreas@techwolf.ai, so it's pretty straightforward.
David Green: That's great.
Andreas, it's been a pleasure talking to you, really exciting to hear the progress that TechWolf's made in just a year since I last spoke to Mikaël on the podcast, so keep up the good work and look forward to hearing more in the future. Thank you.
Andreas De Neve: Thanks, David.