AskFora recently announced AskFora Teams, a new SaaS offering that helps organizations save time and money on recruiting, optimize employee development, and tackle workforce planning. Built with AskFora’s AI-driven skills search platform, AskFora Teams automatically maps workers’ skills to open roles using public and internal data. AskFora Teams enables executives, managers, and HR professionals to quickly match employees and candidates to open positions, identify training programs for new projects, and focus on closing critical strategic skills gaps.
AskFora also recently announced that it has raised a total of $1.5 million in angel and pre-seed funding from venture capital firms. The firms include Firsthand Alliance, Glasswing Ventures, Koa Labs, Ex Ventures, Perkins Cove Partners, and FreshTracks Capital.
Using AskFora Teams to map employees’ skills and proactively identify opportunities, employees can engaged and productive. And employees are encouraged by internal mobility and personal growth. Workers who experience career growth internally are 34% more likely to stay with the organization than those who have not changed roles. Focusing on skills further reduces bias – which increases opportunities for diverse talent.
AI-driven skills mapping gives executive teams, managers, and HR professionals critical insight into the abilities of their employees. HR departments then quickly create skills-based inventories and mappings for virtually any sized company regardless of the complexity and opaqueness of skills. And organizations identify and source talent for the skills they need following the guidance of AskFora’s AI chatbot, named Fora. AskFora’s core data set for the AI model currently spans over 5 million professionals and a quarter million skills.
AskFora learns about employee skills from public and private sources, including LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter/X, news, blogs, employee-submitted data, and organizational data about each employee’s courses, certifications, and experiences. For individual workers who upload their own data, AskFora automatically creates a skills map based on that data and suggests where they can focus on upskilling.
AskFora Teams includes multiple modules that use the automatically generated skills map to:
– Save money on recruiting and hiring by matching employees to open positions
– Increase opportunities for diverse talent retention and recruitment (for DEI)
– Increase employee referrals, reducing hiring costs with a better culture fit
– Focus training, learning, and development on critical skills through gap analysis
– Facilitate workforce planning by mapping employee skills to future roles
– Improve employee productivity and collaboration through better skills matching
On average, businesses lose 15% of their workforce annually. And with onboarding costs starting at $4K or more, on top of recruiter fees, the ability to identify and keep skilled employees can provide significant cost savings, particularly for businesses with many different roles. But sorting, categorizing, and cross-referencing workers’ skills at any scale has often been impossible, especially with today’s accelerated pace of on-the-job learning, upskilling, and ever-changing job requirements.
With real-time, AI-driven access to current skills data provided by AskFora, organizations can grow, upskill, nurture, and keep employees happy across the employee and contractor lifecycle.
Early customers also include organizations in high-end manufacturing, specialized consulting, and direct-to-consumer industries. And AskFora removes the friction in migrating to a skills-based approach to talent management, making it ideal for businesses from 200 to 2,000+ employees.
AskFora Teams is offered on a subscription basis at a list price of $10 per month per employee.
KEY QUOTES:
“AskFora is a game-changer for organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve in the fast-paced world of work. By applying AI to internal open roles matching, AskFora unlocks the true potential of the workforce.”
- Simon Chan, GP at Firsthand Alliance
“Identifying employee skills and matching them with the right internal opportunities has become an outsized challenge in today’s radically transformed workplace. Baby Boomers are leaving full-time employment but not retiring, while Gen Z is bringing entirely new skills to the workforce. Meanwhile, organizations need to proactively pursue opportunities for diverse talent retention, recruitment, and engagement.”
“With AskFora, organizations instantly identify talent based on employees’ skills before they leave, while helping employers create opportunities that challenge their skilled workforces.”
- AskFora founder and CEO Omer Trajman
“Mapping opportunities to individual interests and skills is at the core of modern professional development. AskFora is the tool that managers need to help match talent opportunity quickly and effectively.”
- Andy Palmer, Founder, Koa Labs
“When looking for someone to fill an urgent open rec and discovering that the perfect person is already an employee —- that’s the kind of results that AskFora delivers. It saves time and money on recruiting and onboarding.”
- Jesse Laflamme, former CEO, Pete and Gerry’s
