Our journey to becoming a Workforce Agility Platform

“I work for one of the biggest and brightest companies in the world, so why do I feel stuck in my career?”

Earlier in my career, this question hounded me until it bubbled into a “need-to-do-something-about-this” problem. HR was long overdue for an upgrade. As engineers versed in the potential of AI, Ben Reuveni, Amichai Schreiber and I developed the concept for a technological solution to change the game. We founded Gloat to bring this idea to life.

Fast-forward through countless brainstorming sessions, conversations with executives, frustrating (but ultimately, enlightening) setbacks, and late-night takeout dinners, and we began building what is known today as the Talent Marketplace. We realized that most people felt trapped in their jobs, and perceived any real opportunity for growth lay outside of their company—in the many open roles on LinkedIn, job boards, and recruiting notes flashing in their inboxes.

A foundation in the Talent Marketplace

We started building technology to solve this problem and connect people to the wealth of career options within their companies. In an organization with hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of people and roles, we knew that breaking down silos and looking beyond career ladders would expand the access employees have to roles in new teams, regions, and functional areas. Our first flagship product in the Talent Marketplace was designed to facilitate internal mobility across jobs, and foster a gig economy to help people lend their skills, expertise, and interests to other areas of the business.

Our marketplace took off, with global business leaders like Unilever, Schneider Electric, Standard Chartered Bank, Pepsico, Seagate, Nestle, and Walmart among the earliest adopters. In a short time, we enabled millions of employees to find their next jobs and tackle new interests within their company. Simultaneously, managers could discover skilled talent to staff critical projects in a fraction of the time it took to hire externally. With this initial success, we rapidly grew to support mentoring and networking connections, learning opportunities, and more ways to connect people and opportunities seamlessly—all with the power of AI.

Building a system of Workforce Intelligence

Seeing the potential of this technology, we couldn’t stop there. Beneath the Talent Marketplace was a robust platform analyzing troves of self-evolving data to analyze, deconstruct, and redesign work, job titles, functions, roles, and experiences into tasks, skills, and interests. Using data collectors known as crawlers, we were constantly pulling in new data from across the internet. As a result, everything from job descriptions, resumes and CVs, compensation data, academic research, and more was automatically captured and indexed to help dynamically connect people to opportunities. This rich and self-evolving data set opened a world of potential, allowing us to push the boundaries and create new career planning tools, succession planning support, solutions for frontline workers, and much more.

In fact, the data itself became a critical asset and tool for action. Marketplaces generate constant data from user engagement, giving a real-time pulse into what employees are interested in, what roles are opening up, and what skills are in demand. And all of this is in addition to the billions of data points collected automatically by our platform. With this insight and an understanding of roles, skills, and interests across our customer network and the market, we had a map of how organizations fit together, along with all of the strengths and gaps in their skillsets and job design. We channeled this into a suite of products that empower customers to make the best decisions for their talent and their business.

Becoming a Workforce Agility Platform

We design all our products to help organizations operate with greater agility, and to date, have described them according to the outcomes they could deliver: Talent Agility, Career Agility, Organizational Agility, and Hiring Agility. But ultimately, we have realized, that Gloat can do more than that. Each of our customers uses the intelligence and marketplace differently to deploy, develop, adapt, and evolve their workforce. Many have even said, “I came to Gloat for a talent marketplace, but I actually got a business transformation tool.”

As a result, we’re changing the way we talk about our platform to reflect what it truly is: a Workforce Agility Platform. Whether you need ways to redeploy and restructure talent, improve career development, or improve skills visibility and workforce planning strategy, our platform enables it.

This platform includes:

• Our full set of Talent Marketplace capabilities for when you need to take action and move fast to activate your talent.
• A suite of Workforce Intelligence products for the insight and planning tools you need for critical business decisions and actions.

While each product set can be used independently, together they work in harmony to support a dynamic and continuous operating model to deliver even better results. You can empower your talent with opportunities, move quickly with the marketplace, and gain real-time insight into what’s happening in your business with intelligence. Finally, you can act on those insights using the marketplace to bridge skill gaps, upskill for priority business needs, fill critical roles, and much more. That’s the power of complete Workforce Agility.

We’re excited to share it with you, and even more excited to be a pioneer with companies around the world in building the future workforce operating model—agile, consumer-grade, and action-oriented—to change the way the world works.