How Skyhive CEO Sean Hinton grew Skyhive to $18.2M revenue and 17 customers in 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...