Skyhive Revenue & Funding (2023)

my name is Allison lands I lead strategy at skyhive Technologies we are a series B skills intelligence platform we use Ai and machine learning to synthesize the world's labor market data and we put it to work on behalf of Learners job Seekers governments Fortune 500 and Global 2000 Enterprises as well as post-secondary institutions and Educators so if you work in a startup that employs people this talk is for you if you work in an HR Tech or skills Tech or edtech startup this is especially for you and you'll probably be thinking about a lot of this type of functionality and a lot of these macro issues and megatrends in your day-to-day work I will Echo the previous speaker Andrews sort of Clarion call for sustainability not only in the form of sort of finance and finance Ops but actually in the form of Workforce and labor and you know cost of talent because that really becomes a huge issue for companies at all sizes uh before skyhive I worked for Coursera both pre-ipo and then post exit so I've seen the issues that occur across a variety of startups of different sizes and different stages of growth I'm assuming that this is my mic or my my remote so in the next 20 minutes we're going to talk a little bit about the mega Trends how work is evolving and what that means for startups and why startups actually have a unique Advantage as opposed to like larger Legacy companies particularly larger brands or larger Enterprises we'll then talk a little bit about what is skills agility and how to become skills agile through both your incumbent Workforce through your sourcing of talent through the different ways that you can sort of strategically position your teams to be successful and what what you'll get from that skills agility which is not only lower operating costs and a more competitive return on your investments in people but greater Enterprise resilience for the twists and the turns of a startup's journey as well as better products I will argue that ultimately investing in skills agility and employing diverse staff and cross-training them accordingly is actually going to result in better product design more thoughtful requirements for your Marketplace and also just better alignment across functions so why do skills matter now um if you work in the HR or skills or edtech space you will already be familiar with a book called work without jobs which was a bestseller on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller list last year it was written by a partner Robin Jessie thawson and John Boudreau from University of Southern California labor Economist and it was about how work is evolving and how Enterprises need to think about their talent in light of these larger changes so they're arguing that the way that we currently think about work in the way that we've thought about were to date was largely cultivated in the early 20th century and it was aligned to industrial production so we thought of jobs jobs we thought of Occupational categories there was a much longer time frame in terms of how long employees stayed with a company and what their scope of work was was relatively static During the period of time when they held that title or that role hmm with the digital transformation and the Advent of increasing automation eroding jobs and tasks and activities at the work level we're starting to see a disintegration of work and so as automation takes away uh tasks from a job but doesn't necessarily take the job itself away in total we're seeing a need not only to like hybridize work but to backfill some of those automated responsibilities and to think differently about how digital work is organized it's no longer really around the title or the role or the occupational class it's really more about the skills that that worker brings to the table and there's an increasing need to evolve and transform those skills continuously over time historically employers may not have always seen this as their primary responsibility but increasingly they're seeing a need particularly in startups which have to be agile pivot often and evolve quickly a need to invest in workers so that they can Flex as needed as the business demands we're also seeing the emergence of a new way of Labor Supply or Talent as a service so I'm coming to you from the South by Southwest stage I'll try to weave in as many nuggets from that convening as possible but one of the the breakouts one of the last breakouts I attended was really about um freelancing and Fiverr was hosting this talk and they were talking about how by the year 2030 over half of the U.S Workforce will be self-employed freelance will have its own title of CEO because of its side hustle because of its own work because it's become self-employed because it's launched its own individualized brand and when they pulled the audience uh probably two-thirds of the audience was already working in a freelance capacity the remainder were there to learn how they could work in a freelance capacity so we're not only seeing a disintegration or an atomization of work and an evolution of how work presents itself we're also seeing Evolutions in the labor Supply about how people will supply their labor and how many different types of employers or experiences the have over the course of a working lifetime so what this means for us is that a skills first labor market whether you're ready for it or not whether you think about work this way or not is evolving around us and it's happening with or without us and first mover firms will ultimately have a strategic Advantage this is why I think startups in particular have a unique Advantage because they are not beholden to a lot of the traditional work architecture that larger and more established companies currently subscribe to they don't have big Enterprise HCM systems in place that are aligned you know in a certain way that they have to sort of operate to and they're quite accustomed to needing to slot in talent and work with freelance talent to do that sort of contingent build borrow by decision making on a regular basis as the company grows as quarter by quarter their needs change and evolve recent leaked in report said that of folks who are using LinkedIn as a hiring Channel this year over 40 percent of employers were looking at skills first more than in perfect proxies for experience background degree major as a hiring Criterion that's a 20 increase year over year and of those 40 who are using skills-based evaluations in their hiring and talent decisions they are 60 more likely to find a fit faster than those who are subscribing to a traditional kind of more of a post and pray type of approach or who are holding out for that idealized candidate what this means I think is that skills agility will end up becoming a competitive differentiator in the sauce landscape those who take this agile approach to their talent and how to skill their people and how to Source those skills into their organization will end up being able to operate leaner to avoid paying a premium on skilled Talent when they need it and we'll be able to source that Talent faster and more efficiently close their vacancies faster and result in less churn as well so what is skills agility I'll Define the term it's probably not one that if you Googled it you would find this term but I'm defining it as as an Enterprises of any size capacity to anticipate and contextualize operational and larger market shifts in the context of Workforce Readiness and then to Leverage The transferable skills that are within their organization one to know what those are and then to leverage them strategically and tap hidden sources of talent in order to adapt to those shifts those operational and Market shifts this means really understanding the skills that you currently have the skills that you will need both now immediately and in the near-term future probably not more than three years out because it's hard to evaluate things more than three years out but if you're able to then optimize how you Source Talent from a build borrow or buy perspective and then you're also able to understand where to source that Talent from you know both of the traditional labor pools that are available to you but you're also able to start to tap into non-intuitive or unorthodox labor pools and pull in those skills and upskill and onboard them accordingly this is lending skills agility to the organization and just for purposes of illustrative Sky Hive is you know full disclosure a skills intelligence company and so we help companies do this quite frequently we're aware that most people can upskill or reskill for a new role in less than six months often four to six months with training there's a large amount of transferable skills within sauce that play across functions and we're able to at the individual level not only see what those Pathways look like for a particular person in the role that they possess we're also able to specify you know personalized training Pathways to close those skill gaps efficiently and quickly so how does a company a sauce company become skills agile it's really about three sort of three capabilities being able to understand the future of soft skills for your organization and that is both within the functions of the business as well as within the market that you play so if you're vertical sauce like HR Tech or skills Tech you'll have to have a certain set of capabilities and understanding of how skills in that Marketplace are moving how HR leaders chros you know human capital oriented decision makers think and how they're behaving as well as how a soft startup needs to operate for your particular stage of growth you'll also need to think about how to strategically Source Talent and by that I mean examining skills adjacent pools we know from just the general tightness of the labor market I don't know how many of you read the jobs report every month but I do and I report on it on LinkedIn so what we're seeing is that despite interest rate increases despite you know attempts to adjust through fiscal and monetary policy labor Supply and build some slack into our labor market we're seeing a continued and persistent tightness and there's a reason for this it's actually structural it's demographic in nature even with recent increases to the interest rate we're still seeing several hundred thousand jobs added to the economy each month we're also seeing a really outsized number of new business starts in the form of solopreneur and small person businesses so you can start to see what I had just mentioned about the freelance economy rising up you can see it in our labor data today but it's part of a much much larger shift so being able to strategically Source Talent from pools that you may not have previously considered or channels that you may not have previously considered as well as to look at internal mobility and ways to cultivate the talent that's already under your roof to do the work that you're going to need in the next three years will become a superpower that high performing sauce companies have which will allow them to operate very leanly and also allow them to be super agile in the need if they need to Pivot it if they lose a key higher if there are certain disruptions to the business I would also Advocate if you're not familiar with the term Stars skilled through alternative routes there are 70 million of them they are half of the U.S Workforce they often gain their skills through boot camp certificates military service Community College and by and large have been overlooked and ignored by the labor market Sky Hive works with an organization called opportunity at work which is specifically focuses on this population of stars and ways that you know we can get them meaningfully employed and make the most of their skills so we can combat underemployment lastly I'd say really upskilling and cross-skilling is a key way to develop skills agility within your organization as I said I don't come from a sauce background I don't come from Tech originally I come from Workforce and economic development as my background as well as a background in management consulting but from this I know that you can reskill into a new role pretty quickly with the right training and the skills that you're gaining in the flow of work and on the job are often the stickiest we also know that especially in sauce human and durable skills and AI conversancy are becoming table Stakes for all functions not just the engineering teams not just the ones who are focused on product and so that's a key investment that you can make in all workers to sort of level up the game of the entire organization in parallel to really trying to cross-train folks to fill open vacancies I'd also argue we should exploit cross-functional synergies in order to deepen your bench as much as possible between product Revenue marketing and other functions if we're thinking about where might those untapped sources of talent be there's a whole bunch of different examples here that you'll be able to see you know to reference the slides um in in some cases we see folks who are embracing hybrid work and they're embracing secondary labor markets internationally as well as looking at Rural America or other you know outside of the major Tech capitals where you're able to Source skilled Talent Coursera became a a remote first company my previous employer primarily for this reason it made it easier to tap Talent outside of Mountain View and New York and London where the offices were and we were able to not be able to opt out of some of the bidding wars for talent as a result because there are good content marketers great account Executives good csms and data scientists spread all over the country and so if you have a CEO who feels really adamantly that everybody needs to be in the office all the time you may want to help challenge some of those orthodoxies as a leader in your organization or if you have board members who feel strongly about it to challenge some of their orthodoxies as well I mentioned Stars we also have the Frontline Workforce if you're in a larger sauce organization that happens to have a customer service arm or a technical support arm we found in working with our clients that these are some really good hotbeds of unrealized customer success Talent as well as sales talent that can be tapped into not only do they seek it out it will retain them in your organization longer it'll do so in a way that it's really cost competitive and preserves a lot of intellectual capital for your organization and you can refer to some of these examples for additional sort of hidden sources of talent I'd also say internal Mobility increasingly over 50 percent of hires are now internal hires they're being sourced from other parts of the business but oftentimes within sauce because there's a you know a thin bench or a need to sort of keep a key person on a team folks may feel like workers employees may feel like they don't have as much Mobility as they'd like either because they their manager does not want them to leave their team and go to another or because they are just unaware of what other possibilities might look like within the organization if they sit on the revenue team they might not know enough about what product management or project management looks like to be able to transition into that kind of a role but the the graph that you see on the slide there is an example just for csms of the different Pathways that they can travel oftentimes that can be into management but it could also be into skills it can be into engineering it can be into product and it can be into marketing and it's actually really effective to do some of this cross-training and perhaps even not just encourage it but to require it in some cases because especially for Revenue teams revenue and marketing and product teams there are some symbiotic relationships there that when people have played on more than one side of the transom they're able to better sell into markets to penetrate new markets to develop more compelling marketing positioning and to also work with product to establish better product Market fit if you do all of this what you will gain from skills agility uh and the tldr because there's a lot of text on this slide is that it is all upside so um you know you will not only lower your labor costs you know the cheapest tire is an internal hire but it's also very cost effective to retain talent and with the lifespan of a typical sauce employee being somewhere in the one to two year time frame it certainly was in management consulting where I came from you know increasing your upskilling in incumbent workers actually leads to according to McKinsey a 35 a 34 increase in retention so the ability to keep people in-house longer it's not only better for for their careers because it's rather traumatic for employees to change jobs most people do not want to they do it either because they have a terrible manager or because they want to change something about the way they work and they just don't see a path forward under your roof under within the walls of your organization that's often a misconception we find in data in our sky data that there are often multiple Pathways within an organization but they're either not visible or they're not well understood by either the employee the manager or both so making these types of investments will increase retention it can also help you avoid you know having to get into some of the bidding wars for external Talent we know that there are sort of four key skill sets that just about every region of the world and every industry are competing for in the form of software engineering data and analytics AI machine learning cyber security and Cloud if we're all competing for the same scarce talent and it's currently under supplied in our labor market you will pay a premium for that Talent better to invest in your incumbent Workforce and to take some of those technical skill sets and layer them on to functional and domain skill sets better yet hire from industry I can tell you business analysts consultants and Senior Consultants at the big four consulting firms can do these jobs really well and they will not only see the workload of a sauce as a refreshing break from what they've been doing in management consulting they'll also see the the way pages that are paid in the stock options as a premium that others who are have come from that background might not um let's see I'm gonna breathe for a second um you can also create Enterprise resilience and I say this from one of two perspectives one the past six to 12 months where we've all been sort of rocked the you know the the ecosystem is rather volatile uh companies are being very hesitant about bringing on ftes there needs to be a strong value case for that um and workers in turn are starting to see a little bit of the you know the golden Halo of technology and working in startups sort of start to wear off so this is one way to address some of those concerns while also providing Flex if employees are leaving it often leaves especially in earlier stage companies a big hole this is a way to prevent some of that pain when a key hire leaves is to have cross-trained employees who can sort of flex in um and ideally you're retaining them to begin with and then lastly I think I will argue that I think that cross-training in this way and bringing in diverse sources of talent particularly if you work in edtech HR Tech or skills Tech we are building technology for the future of work and the future of work is everybody's business so having just tech people or just folks who've worked in startups informing product design and developing the marketing and messaging often Falls quite flat when you go out into the verticals and into Industries so I would argue that bringing in a lot of those diverse perspectives and also translating across business and Technical teams will result in better requirements better messaging better product and product that's built for the 80 20 of use cases that you're going to get when you actually take it out into the marketplace and into the world of work particularly if you have a consumer business so companies that lean into a skills-based approach it's not only cost effective it's not only efficient it will actually help better prepare the workforce and I believe that employers are the long pole in the tent of Workforce Development and it's going to help us address some of those talent and skills pain points so over the last 20 minutes I've given you your what Your how and your why of skills agility I hope you will adopt it and please come find me if you want to talk a little bit more later in the conference thank you thanks a lot Allison appreciate that that was great