TalentSpotter: Take Control of Your Career

Career development powered by AI and Big Data

A successful, flexible career is driven by two things: the skills we acquire, and the path we follow while using them. But while access to new skills is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, advice on our career paths is limited to a few scarce channels.

Those lucky enough to have a mentor or supportive manager can collect, decide and execute on the options for advancing their career with relative ease. Whether changing roles, moving to a new place of work, or choosing an educational pathway, people with access to direction and guidance can be more confident in making decisions, and more successful in executing them.

But most people lack access to good career advice and the opportunities that come with it. Just 29% of U.S. organizations have a formal mentoring program, and a majority of millennials in Germany, Canada, Australia, and France feel they have no one to turn to for professional development advice.

As increasing numbers of people, across all socio-economic groups, face displacement by technology, we must close this gap preventing people from gaining the skills, education and experience they need to succeed.

We are solving this problem by helping people to discover their unique talents, ideal career path, and the skills required for success through our beta career development platform, TalentSpotter.

Our software collects information from users on their skills, experience, preferences and aspirations, and uses an Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) driven benchmarking framework to give direction and inspire reflection on strengths, gaps and opportunities, helping users to take control of their careers.

Our visually engaging and interactive reporting tool, the Skills Calculator, uses this information to provide professional development and career management guidance, taking users on a journey of self-discovery through both directive and reflective feedback. The tool also provides users with the practical resources they need to succeed: personalized development plans, career roadmaps, and a resume builder are among early use cases.

Although our initial focus is individuals, the TalentSpotter software can be deployed towards other users, most notably employers. After building a great user experience, we will deploy the power of our data for the benefit of enterprises and institutions. Our enterprise product, Talent Architect, will empower managers to become great coaches, and enable organizations to better match, grow and retain people with the skills needed for the future. Moreover, employer demands will be aggregated and fed back to individual users using the Skills Calculator tool.

Our solution is truly positioned to change the world. We will transform the way workers upskill, reskill, and retrain by connecting employees to the needs of current and future employers with unprecedented detail and clarity. And we will deliver insights which employers and policy makers can use to design the best possible interventions for employees and communities.

As technology comes to affect every corner of the labor force, our mission is to keep workers competitive with technology, and to help everyone find fulfilling and rewarding work. Few things have such potential to change the world.

Our approach is innovative because we use activities, or the real-world talents that each user has, as the underlying framework for TalentSpotter. Unlike most talent development solutions, which measure talent through  psychometric testing or self-reported skills, this allows us to provide highly actionable and personalized insight and recommendations to users. Due to the large number of potential activities in the workplace, we have built an algorithm capable of predicting the activities that each user does, creating a seamless user experience and generating exceptionally rich data. 

Technology is, and will increasingly be, at the heart of our solution. Today we use a network of macros and formulas to simulate TalentSpotter’s future capabilities. As we move to pilot TalentSpotter, we will use the 40,000 data points we have gathered as training data for a machine learning approach. This technology will be used to continuously improve both the efficiency and experience of the initial survey, as well as the guidance and insight resulting from it. With our rich data, we also anticipate using artificial intelligence to begin nowcasting and predicting important human capital trends in the labor market.  

Our goals for the next 12 months center on developing a robust pilot product, and ensuring it is providing reliable and actionable career development for our test market. This requires building an automated version of the prototype in use today, developing basic ML and AI capabilities to continuously improve insight and data collection processes, and testing with a significant number of evangelist users who can use the product and provide feedback on its strengths and weaknesses. Critically, we will be seeking seed funding to productize TalentSpotter and associated applications for market launch in mid-2019.

Our five year vision is to provide career blueprints for free to over 5 million users, of which 1 million will become paying users. Our impact will scale through ambitious pursuit of new target markets, beginning with multiple English speaking industry segments, and followed by expansion to international territories most suitable to the professional mix served by our products. In early year 3, we will have deployed our employer focused Talent Architect product, enabling us to acquire a considerable number of enterprise and institutional users which will significantly increase the growth rate of impact from this point forward. 

TalentSpotter and associated products will be self-serve, online or mobile applications for individual users and future enterprise customers. However, new or additional value may be created for users and Tomorrow’s Work (the organization behind TalentSpotter) by working with partners and affiliated organizations to expand product reach. For this reason, we will reach and retain customers through partners and affiliates, as well as traditional marketing channels like social media and web advertising. We expect partners and affiliates to include training and coaching service providers, consulting firms, job sites, public libraries, graduate school careers services, charities, workforce development agencies, and the military. 

As of July 1 we have completed the full product cycle with 30 people. The group was handpicked from friends, colleagues and referrals. Most users fit into one of  customer archetypes, ranging from “Underemployed Labor Market Veterans” to “Mid-career switchers”. Users report using the product in a number of diverse ways. For individuals, reported use cases include career planning, a framework for discussing development needs with supervisors, and a foundation for development of a new resumé. 

In the next 12 months we will provide professional development and career management guidance to 500 - 800 people, of which 15% will be underemployed veterans, 15% will be self-employed workers, and 15% will be working mothers. Most pilot users will fall under “business and professional services” industry classification, which accounts for 21 million workers in the U.S. today. Pilot users will be served by our self-service online application, which is currently in development. In 3 years, we will have served 1m people across primary target markets, which include health and social care, manufacturing, and public administration.

My background in corporate education and business consulting helped me develop transferable skills for building and scaling TalentSpotter. As the second employee of a US organization that grew to 50 people, I learned how to hire, develop and lead talented people. As the account lead responsible for $40mm of sales over 3 years, I developed strong enterprise sales and commercial skills. However, recognizing my need for broader understanding of the challenges facing adult learners, and the imperative for finding a founding team, I will be attending Harvard Graduate School of Education to further develop my skills and network.

TalentSpotter will underpin at least two products – one for individual users, and another for organizations - so our revenue model is multi-sided. With individual users, we will monetize through a freemium model, where individuals pay for certain services. Because the application will link users directly to educational pathways and occupational suggestions, we will also pursue lead generation and licensing revenue models with partners in these spaces. 

For enterprise clients using our Talent Architect product, the revenue model will be a recurring subscription fee model. 

We will also explore partner re-seller channels – for individuals, this could be career and professional coaches or staffing agencies, and for enterprises, this might be training and consulting firms. 

We are positioned for long-term profitability and expansion for three reasons. First, the addressable market for TalentSpotter and associated products is large - we estimate 40 million people sit within one of our eight customer archetypes in the U.S alone. Second, our product range will enable powerful one and two-sided network effects. More users creates a richer benchmark for individual users and enterprise customers, encouraging growth. Finally, we have a multi-sided business model which can create value for and capture value from many market segments.

Our application to Solve is based on three motives which are essential to our progress. 1) To identify communities of like-minded, supportive people who have an interest in advising on the development of our products; 2) to seek out potential partners to identify value adding opportunities shared between organizations; and 3) to publicize our mission and products through credible channels in order to identify early users and create a profile for our organization.

With Solve’s role as a marketplace for connecting innovators with resources, it would facilitate these ambitions exceptionally well.

The key barriers we face today center on laying our foundations quickly and effectively. First, we need support for development of the technology underpinning TalentSpotter, perhaps leveraging MIT’s student or alumni network. Second, we need a founding team of passionate people, who have a range of appropriate skills to drive TalentSpotter and associated products forward. Again, MIT’s network would be invaluable in this. Third, we need access to entrepreneurial advice, to support us in making the right decisions and accessing key resources, such as financing, as we progress.