Skilio

Tertiary students in India and Indonesia are uncertain about the kind of skills needed by employers. Furthermore, for campus recruiters, they are unable to tell apart top-quality candidates that fit their hiring needs due to the lack of work experience that tertiary students have. This results in a widening gap between skills that employers are looking for and the skills that students are building. 

Therefore, Skilio is a campus skills-based hiring platform for campus recruiters to source & attract campus talents. Campus recruiters will set up a campus academy page on Skilio and create skills activities aligned to their hiring positions. These skills activities are shared with students which they can complete to discover the skills needed to work in a particular role for that company. At the same time, recruiters are then able to use the students' responses to understand the skills compatibility of their talent pipeline.

According to the OECD Employment & Skills Strategies report, skills mismatch between what jobseeker is picking up and business needs is one of the biggest factors affecting youth unemployment in developing countries. Tertiary students growing up in these countries might pick up theoretical knowledge in school but they are unsure about the specific skill sets they need to possess to get into a certain company. This is a huge problem. For example, 10.1% of India's youth are unemployed and almost 12.8 million young people enter the labour market every year. ILO reported the 2nd highest youth unemployment rate in ASEAN for Indonesia. Willis Towers Watson study on Talent Management and Rewards, 8 out of 10 companies in Indonesia have difficulty finding college graduates with the skills their companies need.

This shows that there is a skills mismatch between what tertiary education institution teaches students and what companies are looking for. We believe a skills platform to allow students to pick up and demonstrate company-specific skillsets will help solve this problem.

Our target population is tertiary students in colleges or universities that are looking for their first internship or first job after graduation. Tertiary education systems in Indonesia and India are still knowledge-heavy and theoretical. Workplace skillsets are often not taught directly to students. The lack of cooperation between schools and industry further exacerbates the skills mismatch problem negatively affecting tertiary students graduating from these schools.

We have been conducting regular user interview sessions with tertiary students in India and Indonesia. These sessions allowed us to understand the challenges they face in securing employment and at the same time getting their feedback on our prototype for further iteration. We believe that our solution can help these students identify skills needed to work at a specific company of their choice and start building those skills early on in school. This reduces the imperfect information of skills compatibility that students currently face when they are trying to increase their chances of being able to secure employment. 

We believe our solution addresses dimension 2 of the challenge statement. Our solution aims to help Indonesian and Indian tertiary students to discover the skillsets that companies are looking for and start to build these skillsets.

Furthermore, in our solution, campus recruiters are the ones who design these skills activities which ensure that these skillsets are company-specific and relevant for the youth to pick up. We believe this is aligned in helping connect the skills of the Indonesian and Indian workforce with the demands of the employers.

Felix Tan 

We believe that our solution is innovative in the following ways: 
1) We are taking a company-specific approach to dissect skills rather than an industry approach. Many existing research or solution tend to look at skills on an industry level, whereas we believe our company-specific approach help students make a more informed approach when trying to develop their skills. 

2) We are also working on an AI model to help predict the skills gap between an individual and a company. This will enable any students to quickly identify based on their past experiences how they can further enhance their skills to meet the needs of an employer. 

3) Campus recruiting has traditionally been done through first submitting a resume which may not fully encapsulate the skillsets that a student might have since most students lack formal working experience. With our innovative approach to skills-based hiring, students can now discover and build skills companies are looking for. On the other hand, campus recruiters can now better understand the skills compatibility of their campus talent pipeline beyond a simple resume. 

The core technology powering our solution: 

- A platform that aggregates all the company-specific skills requirements in a single location. Currently, most of this information is scattered all over the internet or residing on company websites. We aggregate all of this to reduce the information gap for students. 

- A natural language processing model to pick out skills based on students' textual input on the Skilio software. This helps students understand their skills as they work on the skills activities. 

- An analytics dashboard of the skillsets that students have shown for campus recruiters to identify students that they hope to engage further.

We are tracking our theory of change through these metrics: 

1) Efficacy: Increase in awareness of students’ skills competencies based on their ability to connect their skills to what employers are looking for - this will be measured through a pre- & post-survey to understand the change in awareness.

2) Efficacy: Increase in their ability to demonstrate their skills competencies - this will be measured through the number of students that campus recruiters engage after students completed the skills activities. Furthermore, we will also be conducting focus group discussions with students to understand the change in their ability to demonstrate their skillsets.

3) Equity: Increase the user base of Skilio to lower-income and disadvantaged student populations. This will be tracked by looking at the number of schools that we have onboarded onto our platform that are from poorer neighbourhoods and also the profile of our user base.

For the next year, our goal is to expand our user base and collect feedback to further improvements on our platform. This is done by engaging with our current user base and it will be an iterative process. By having a large user base, we hope to gather the sentiments, identify the pain points and common problems users face with our platform and with applications,  and improve accordingly.  

Additionally, we plan to double down on key markets like Indonesia and India to gather their sentiments on Skilio. Some of these markets are student clubs, training organisations, and educational institutions both locally and overseas. This is done by deploying various email marketing strategies to these institutions and pitch our ideas, recommending existing users to refer our product to others, and by participating in various out-of-house conferences, talks and masterclasses. 

In the next 5 years, we aim to shorten the time students need to get hired, and increase their skills capabilities to secure employment. This is done by finding low-cost solutions and automating operations to free up manpower and time for more time-consuming and high-impact tasks such as user interviews and client engagement. Furthermore, we aim to scale up the number of campus recruiters we engage and find a sustainable business model to sustain our operations.

These are some indicators that we are using: 

1) Number of skills activities completed per student -- this will help us to understand if students find our platform useful and helpful for their skills development. 

2) Number of students engaged by campus recruiters -- this will show that campus recruiters are offering students who complete the skills activities a chance at an interview. This helps us to track if students are indeed gaining employment from using Skilio. 

3) Number of students using our platform -- this helps us to track if we are growing our impact to reach more students. 

4) Number of companies on Skilio -- this helps us to track if we are scaling to more companies to cater to the needs of students. 

In general, the barriers we face hinge on our ability to establish a foothold in target countries to further implement our impact goals. In light of this, our barriers lie mainly in the access to talent, cultural, and financing aspects. As both countries are culturally diverse, to implement and scale our solution in the region we would need to adapt it to the respective countries’ markets in several ways, for example, modifying our platform and algorithms to work with other primary languages. For it to happen, we would need to enlist the services of employees who could understand local contexts better and localise our platforms. That said, we are striving to overcome these barriers by seeking out partnerships with international schools in Indonesia and India as they possess both an understanding of the local markets and conduct lessons in English, which allows us to implement our solution in a manageable context and gain a better understanding of other markets in the region.

For it to happen, we would need to enlist the services of employees who could understand local contexts better and localise our platforms. That said, we are striving to overcome these barriers by seeking out partnerships with international schools in Indonesia and India as they possess both an understanding of the local markets and conduct lessons in English, which allows us to implement our solution in a manageable context and gain a better understanding of other markets in the region.

As we are a young startup, we seek to bolster our finances by exploring freemium models with both our B2B and B2C business models, and apply for funding such as this.  

We also hope to engage mentors from Caterpillar Foundation to advise on our product and business development.

5 full timers staff and 5-7 part-time interns.

Felix and Zhi Hui are certified youth skills trainers, each with more than 3 years of experience equipping youth with employability skills competencies. Whereas Dody helps out with tech and software development to translate the idea into reality. Supporting us are mentors and advisors with years of experience in organisational psychology as well as youth training and development. Dody taught himself programming since he was 18 and have worked at companies like Bytedance. Zhi Hui is a StrengthsFinder certified youth trainer since she was 18, and brings expertise in psychology and education. All 3 of the founders came together because of our common vision in making the transition from education to the workplace better for youth. We believe we are well-positioned to deliver this solution.

For us, we tend to hire college students as our interns to give them the opportunity to learn and build up work experiences. In our hiring process, we do not look at their past grades but rather more at their potential and the skills they have. While, some of our leadership approaches are still nascent, we strive to maintain a diverse and equitable team through our hiring process.

We are partnering with youth training organisations and schools to use our software. We adopt a freemium strategy as a top-down approach to gain entry to the schools we work with. For youth organisations, we combine the use of the Skilio software into their educational programmes. As of now, more than 10 secondary and tertiary educational institutions have implemented Skilio in their programmes. Since January 2021, Skilio has gained almost an eightfold increase in new users and we currently have over 2000 users across Singapore, India, and Indonesia. We are currently forming partnerships with more schools in Indonesia and India.

These are the value we provide to our stakeholder:

1) Tertiary students:
- Understand and discover skills that companies required
- Showcase company-specific skillsets to get fast tracked for hiring.

2) Campus recruiters:
- Understand the skills compatibility of their campus talent pipeline.
- Build employer branding among campus talents to allow students to experience the work they will be doing in the company.

3) Schools and youth organisations:
- Help students develop key employability skills that companies are looking for.

We applied for this challenge because we believe that we have a solution that can be implemented and scaled in India and Indonesia. Currently, we already have some users from both India and Indonesia but not at scale. As we are a small team, we hope to work alongside the Caterpillar Foundation to get this to more youth in these 2 countries. 

Business Model - we need help to understand how to design a business model targeted at campus recruiters in MNC.

Product distribution - we need help to find distribution channels to reach more students with our product. 

Technology support - we hope to have some advice around planning our technology infrastructure