Making Skills Count

Simply Get Results: The Rightskilling platform

74% of CEOs are concerned about the availability of basic skills (PwC). Skills shortages are threatening every organization, regardless of industry or geography. It’s now more pressing than ever for businesses to close skills gaps in order to hire and retain the most suitable talent, and to remain a competitive employer. But the language of skills is a challenging one to learn.

Founded in 2016, Simply Get Results, aka Simply, offers a data and machine learning-powered software platform that enables senior business and HR leaders to “rightskill” their workforce. Rightskilling means ensuring that employees have all the right skills they need to succeed in their role and help the company thrive. 

Simply does this by connecting external labour market data with internal data gathered through the HR tools companies use. The process of gathering and presenting the data is automated through machine learning algorithms, so no manual employee data entry is needed and companies can get insights fast. 

Through Simply’s platform, companies can, among others, map out current capabilities to skills, work out their current skills gaps, and define skills-based job profiles through skills taxonomies. Simply clients can also benchmark their capabilities against those of competitors to better understand their market. Then, leaders can build an effective skills and talent strategy that meets the needs and goals of their companies. 

A vital part of delivering a comprehensive skills solution to customers is the use of good quality, current, and truly global labour market data. Plus, this data needs to seamlessly integrate into Simply’s software products to ensure a unified user experience.

This was something that the Simply team lacked, leaving them with two options: start from scratch by scraping the data themselves, which would involve many risks and complications, or partner with a data provider they knew offered trustworthy data they could rely on for years to come. 

“We had a choice. Do we either start scraping this by writing our own algorithm and coming up with it from scratch and it being rubbish? Or do we partner with what we believe and researched to be the best labour market data that is publicly available as in, was accessible to us?” John Guy, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Simply, shared. 

There was also a time factor involved. Simply wanted a fast time to market in delivering its platform to customers, so the team needed to bring the data together quickly. Having researched labour market data providers extensively, the Simply team discovered two world-leading companies: Emsi and Burning Glass - now Lightcast. 

Simply was a client of Emsi and Burning Glass separately, before they merged into Lightcast. They access both job postings and talent profile data across geographies as their core dataset and, using Lightcast’s API, they are able to integrate this dataset into their solutions.

Lightcast dynamically maps skills to over 75,000 normalised job postings and over 1,000 specialised occupations. Our Open Skills Library contains over 32,000 skills organised into different categories, enabling companies like Simply to provide their customers with highly granular insights on skills supply and demand across the world. Plus, Lightcast’s Skills Taxonomy helps businesses understand the common language of skills beyond their own organization, connecting the dots between their internal data and how skills are defined in the real world. 

This ultimately means that Simply customers - large enterprise employers - can get the insights they’re looking for on location strategy and where in the world their resources can be recruited from. “It is all about the right conversations and the right level of detail, striking decisions and actions that lead to outcomes. Outcomes ultimately being your workforce having the skills they need now and in the future,” Simon Haines, Co-Founder and CEO of Simply, says. 

The Simply team also uses Analyst to understand how Lightcast presents and puts context around data. Using Lightcast data as a basis, they deliver a thinner and enriched set of data that is specific to the needs of each client. The team also often enriches Lightcast data with other features and products, such as their own consulting services. 

“Wherever you’re based and whatever job you are trying to do, you need to be able to rely on the quality of the data you use. You need to be able to explain it to people, to interpret it and to trust it. That’s why we started to partner with Emsi and Burning Glass (now Lightcast),” said Haines.

Working with Lightcast means that Simply Get Results can leverage accurate and reliable data to power its software solutions, and that they are able to build on this data to get products to market, innovate applications quickly, and come up with new ideas to expand its services and increase its value to its customers. 

“Lightcast has absolutely accelerated our time to market. The fact that the data is global and consistent is really, really strong and impressive. This global reach and depth are pretty unchallenged when it comes to labour market data. It enables us to innovate applications on top of that data that help us differentiate as a player in this market, ” John says.

It’s not just the quality of our data that Simply praises. In Simon’s words, the effectiveness of the Lightcast team is second to none. Our continuous collaboration is based on transparency and openness, and Simply can rely on Lightcast’s customer service to best support its customers, whether it is through understanding data limitations and opportunities, answering labour market questions, or sharing ideas for product features.