
Why Skills?
Skills enrichment provides recruiters and other talent management professionals the ability to understand the actual skillset of an individual candidate or employee, your current pipeline, or your talent database.

Organizations can leverage Textkernel’s Skills API to address a number of business challenges including:
Candidate Understanding / Document Enrichment
Go beyond cv or resume parsing to build a comprehensive understanding of the candidate profile. This will help you to better assess candidate capabilities beyond titles which can vary by industry or geography.
Textkernel’s Skills API helps you to enrich your candidate database with skills tags based on the information extracted from a candidate document such as a cv or resume or letter of motivation, recommendations, etc.
Talent Pool or Database Enrichment
You invested significantly in attracting candidates and developing a candidate pool that you can tap into when required. But which skill sets are covered by your previous efforts? Do you have candidates with skills that are required to meet business demand?
With Textkernel’s Skills API, you can process new and older candidate profiles to build an enriched database that allows you to quickly assess current skill availability and potential gaps.
Merger & Acquisition Talent Assessment
Organizational growth by merger and/or acquisition is a business reality. Often, organizations struggle to understand the human capital gains made as a result of these strategic moves.
Time is of the essence in M&As to understand what skillsets are encompassed within an organization and which talents are at risk of being lost in the transition.
With Textkernel’s Skills API, you can assess the skills sets owned by the organization and pinpoint talent that possess business critical skills.
Workforce Planning
For many organizations, building a strong data-driven understanding of the skills encompassed by the employee base is a challenging endeavor.
Outdated cvs/resumes, manager assessments or performance reviews, training certifications and other training mean outsize volumes of data that have been captured to build a holistic understanding but not necessarily easily accessible.
Re-Skilling
Re-skilling is a reality for many organizations looking to maneuver and guarantee their future existence by shifting strategic direction. HR needs to identify the skill sets required to build the capabilities needed to execute the new strategy and mission. Helping both the organization - and employees - weather competitive storms and changing customer demands.
Textkernel’s Skill API helps organizations undertaking re-skilling initiatives to identify employees with skills that are most closely related to new skills required. Segment your employee population to create a tailor-made re-skilling and/or training and development program to meet future talent needs.
Succession planning and internal talent scouting
Looking to identify the next generation of the leadership bench?
Textkernel’s Skills API can help to identify potentially hidden talent with the leadership qualities required to lead the organization into the next wave of growth. Take all HR-related documentation and feedback into account and build a portfolio of talent that has the skills necessary to lead.
Internal Mobility
Many organizations are looking to better utilize the capabilities already possessed by the organization. Better circulating skills individuals within the organization, helps HR avoid long and costly external talent acquisition and simultaneously better engage and challenge current employees.
Textkernel’s Skills API provides organizations that are deploying Internal Mobility initiatives with the ability to surface more internal talent thanks to their skills-enriched database.
Expert Identification
For projects or assignments that require specific expertise, Textkernel’s Skills API helps to identify skills within the organization or your talent pool so you can rapidly pinpoint the right person required to support a strategic initiative.
- Learn more about Skills Demand Analytics
Compensation and Benefits
Organizations competing for the same hard-to-find (and retain!) talent are looking to skill data to create differentiated pay schemes based on skill demand and supply.
Textkernel’s Skill API can help to identify talent that would benefit from such a scheme. Together with Textkernel’s Jobfeed labor market intelligence, talent intelligence and compensation and benefit teams can devise better salary schemes based on both organizational and marketplace demand and supply of talent.
The Textkernel Skills API
Interested to hear more?
Watch our on-demand webinar on:
How skill-based analytics will help you strategize talent
How Textkernel’s Skills API enhances employee understanding for Internal Mobility
Frequently Asked Questions
1) How does Textkernel define a skill?
Textkernel defines a skill as a trait or capacity that could be associated with an individual person in a variety of professional situations or context.
2) How many skill concepts does the Textkernel Skills Classification cover?
The Textkernel Skills classification entails more than 12,000 skill concepts that categorize over 315,000 synonyms across 20+ languages.
3) What process did Textkernel use to collect, assess and classify all concepts and synonyms?
As with building any kind of ontology, we began by taking a wide view on several sources of skill concept information including: CVs/resumes, job vacancies, numerous existing taxonomies, online sources such as wikipedia, training and development descriptions and syllabuses from various educational institutions.
We then used statistical techniques and machine learning and distill our list into the most recurring concepts and create a hierarchy of terminology. We assessed relevancy by analyzing actual occurrence of a skill concept across millions of job vacancies and candidate CVs or resumes. Finally, our dedicated quality assurance teams extensively inspects and improves the system to guarantee that the skill extraction reflects human intuition.
4) How is your skill taxonomy structured?
We distinguish four categories of skills: “Professional skills”, “Soft skills”, “IT skills” and “Languages”. We don’t impose a deeper hierarchy than that, as there is not a single structure that fits all purposes: different usage contexts of skill data require different ways of grouping skills.
5) How frequently will Textkernel add new skills or update the taxonomy?
We generally release updates every two weeks. These updates contain improvements to the skills repository in any the available languages as well as improvements to the extraction method.
6) Can I suggest new skills?
Textkernel welcomes feedback on our skills concepts and we consult closely with several of our key customers on the continued enhancement of our taxonomy. If you are interested in participating in our Ontology Maintenance program, please contact us for more details.
7) How do I get my candidate database to speak your skills language?
Textkernel provides services that parse candidate documents (CVs/resumes, application letters), and can return this data to you in a structured database that includes the latest skill categories. Interested to learn more about our parsing services that include skill categorization? Contact us.
Or learn more about our high-quality parsing solutions.
More questions that haven’t been already answered? Please contact us and we would be pleased to share more information with you.