For 15 years, Alex was the person everyone turned to. The operational strategy expert who always had the answer. The veteran who could solve any process challenge.
But somewhere along the way, his expertise started to define his limits.
He watched colleagues pivot into marketing and customer success — completely different functions. He wanted that kind of move too — real internal mobility, a chance to grow into something new.
But when he looked at job boards, he saw more of the same roles. Even his mentor couldn’t see how to bridge the gap from operations to something different.
Then his organization looked at him differently.
By using the Eightfold Agentic Talent Operating System, the platform didn’t see “Operational Strategy Manager.” It saw transferable skills ready to be reimagined.
When Alex built his profile in Eightfold Talent Management, the AI revealed something unexpected: Customer Enablement Strategist. Compatibility score: 82%.
Suddenly, the connections became clear. His process design translated to customer journey mapping. His stakeholder management became client enablement. His cross-functional leadership mapped directly to team collaboration at scale.
“I would never have applied for this role,” Alex said. “I didn’t think I had the right skills, but Eightfold showed me what I could be.”
Six months into his new role, Alex’s team achieved the highest customer satisfaction scores in the division.
Alex’s story isn’t unique. It’s happening across organizations that have moved beyond traditional recruiting methods that rely on keyword matching and credential screening — methods that miss talented people who don’t fit conventional patterns.
Learn how Eightfold Talent Management helps unlock human potential.
The talent hiding in plain sight
Traditional recruiting systems are built on pattern matching. They look for specific keywords, credentials, job titles, and linear career progressions. If a candidate doesn’t match the expected template, they become invisible — no matter how qualified they actually are.
This creates systematic blind spots. Employees with transferable skills but non-traditional backgrounds get overlooked. Candidates from underrepresented groups in certain industries don’t surface in searches. Government workers with deep expertise get screened out because their job titles don’t translate to private sector language. People ready to reskill are never shown the pathways that already exist within their capabilities.
The cost isn’t just missed hires. It’s lost internal mobility, stagnant careers, and organizations that keep re-hiring externally for skills that already exist inside.
Skills-based talent intelligence changes this. By understanding what people can do — not just what they’ve been called — AI can surface candidates who would otherwise remain unseen.
Learn how Kristine Yamartino turned her career ladder into a career jungle gym.
How skills-based intelligence makes talent visible
Finding the jungle gym: Kristine’s path from recruiting to customer success
Kristine Yamartino had been with her company for just six months as a recruiter when Eightfold Career Hub surfaced something she hadn’t considered: customer success projects that aligned with her skills.
“As a recruiter, I hadn’t really considered being on the customer-facing side before,” Kristine said.
But the platform showed her that her recruiting skills — understanding stakeholder needs, managing complex relationships, guiding people through processes — translated directly to customer success work.
Projects led to mentorship opportunities, also recommended through Career Hub. Those conversations opened her eyes to a different career trajectory. When a Senior Customer Success Manager position opened internally, she applied.
“Traditionally, careers have really been thought of as being on a ladder,” Kristine said. “But for a lot of us, it looks a lot more like a jungle gym. It involves moves up, moves to the side, up again, maybe back a little as you take a step back, but throughout the whole thing you’re gaining a new perspective.”
Career Hub gave Kristine something critical: visibility into how her existing skills could unlock entirely new paths. Without it, she would have stayed in recruiting, never knowing the connection existed.
Learn how Forvia transformed their hiring process to increase applicant quality and diversity.
Breaking industry patterns: How Forvia sourced diverse digital talent
Forvia faced a challenge common to many traditional manufacturing companies: transforming into a technology-driven organization while competing for digital talent in a male-dominated industry.
The automotive technology company needed to find qualified candidates who didn’t fit the typical industry profile, and they needed to do it at scale as they shifted from traditional manufacturing to cutting-edge automotive technology.
By implementing Eightfold Talent Acquisition, Forvia transformed how they source and evaluate candidates. The platform’s skills-based approach helped them identify qualified talent beyond the usual search parameters, dramatically expanding their candidate pool.
The results:
- A 3.5X increase in visitor-to-applicant conversion on their career site.
- 30% productivity gains in sourcing.
- More than €100,000 in savings over two years.
More importantly, they increased both the quality and diversity of their applicant pool.
“This project with Eightfold isn’t a tech project,” said Gaël Barjot, HR Lab Director at Forvia. “It’s about transforming the way we find and recruit people.”
By focusing on skills rather than traditional credentials or industry background, Forvia could finally see and hire talent that keyword-based systems had been filtering out.
Arnaldo Cruz shares Puerto Rico’s story of adopting talent intelligence and how it has transformed the government in its pilot phase.
Transforming an entire government workforce: Puerto Rico’s talent intelligence revolution
When Arnaldo Cruz and his team inventoried skills across Puerto Rico’s government workforce, they discovered something shocking: two-thirds of employees lacked the skills needed for their current positions, despite an average tenure of 23 years.
“It blew our minds that people that had been in the same role for that long didn’t have the skills required for the role that they had,” Cruz said.
The government had been covering these gaps with contractors rather than reskilling their existing workforce. There was virtually no internal mobility — employees spent two-thirds of their tenure in the same role with little incentive or pathway to move.
Puerto Rico needed a solution that could work at a massive scale across 55 government agencies.
They turned to our Talent Intelligence Platform.
Starting with a pilot in just two agencies (under 300 employees), Cruz’s team used AI to create individualized training programs based on each employee’s skills gaps. The results were so compelling that other agencies started requesting access, and it recently earned them a place on Apolitical’s inaugural 50 States, 50 Breakthroughs list.
“Beyond the automation and the reporting, there’s no way humans can do this on a large scale,” Cruz explained.
The platform enabled them to do something unprecedented: they emailed past job applicants — some from years prior — whose skills matched current open roles, inviting them to apply again. Application rates spiked the day those campaigns went out.
For Cruz, the success came down to simple change management: branding the campaign, running workshops, providing video training, sending email newsletters, hosting office hours, and gathering feedback through surveys.
“We have a long way to go,” Cruz said. “The good thing about the pilot is that we’re starting slow, we’re making adjustments, and we’re making the product and the solution better as we go along.”
Puerto Rico is proving that talent intelligence can transform not just individual careers, but entire systems — surfacing the potential that’s been there all along.
Making potential visible
Alex, Kristine, Forvia, and Puerto Rico all faced the same fundamental challenge: qualified talent that traditional systems couldn’t see.
In each case, the barrier wasn’t a lack of capability — it was a lack of visibility.
- Alex had the skills for customer enablement; the system just couldn’t make the connection.
- Kristine was ready for customer success; she just needed to see the pathway.
- Forvia had diverse digital talent applying; they needed better ways to surface it.
- Puerto Rico had a workforce capable of reskilling; they needed the intelligence to match people to opportunities at scale.
Skills-based talent intelligence solves the visibility problem. It looks beyond job titles and keywords to understand what people can actually do — and what they could do next. It reveals the transferable skills that traditional recruiting overlooks. It shows employees pathways they didn’t know existed. It helps organizations find talent in places they weren’t looking.
The candidates who get seen aren’t always the ones who fit the expected pattern. Sometimes they’re the 15-year veteran ready for a complete function change. Sometimes they’re the new hire who could thrive in a completely different department. Sometimes they’re the government employee who’s been in the same role for decades but has untapped potential.
The question isn’t whether that talent exists in your organization or your candidate pool. It’s whether your systems can see it.
Want to see how Eightfold helps surface hidden talent in your organization? Request a demo.