The challenge
In a sector being rapidly redefined by AI, automation, and augmentation, one global financial services organisation discovered that the business was moving faster than its people strategy. A newly launched Talent Marketplace was failing to gain traction, with only 20% of the organisation using the system at least once in the last year (this figure dropping to 16% in the last 6 months).
Adapting meant:
- Expanding HR’s capability and capacity
- Injecting critical new skills and external expertise
- And most importantly, rebuilding the foundation: from job architecture to data to employee experience
The ambition? To become a skills-powered organisation with a Talent Marketplace that worked – one that could unlock internal mobility and fuel workforce agility at scale.
The current state of play
Employee engagement scores were falling, and HR was losing traction with the business. A 13-point drop in employee sentiment revealed deeper issues:
- A lack of visibility into career paths
- Unclear roles and responsibilities
- Poor system adoption
- Growing mistrust in HR data and decisions
At the same time, the organisation’s newly implemented Talent Marketplace was struggling:
Just 34% of 12,000 employees had created a profile
- Some business units had zero engagement
- Incorrect skills were mapped for 94% of users in the sample, resulting in irrelevant matches and undermining trust
Why Skill Collective was brought in
The organisation brought in Skill Collective for our straight-talking, practical approach. No endless frameworks. No fluff. Just focused, hands-on support to untangle the mess and get things moving.
We immediately diagnosed three core issues:
- A static, disconnected job architecture
- A platform without the foundational data to deliver
- A fractured employee experience across multiple systems
Mid-project pivot: from platform fix to experience overhaul
While the original focus was on fixing skills and job data to support the Talent Marketplace, it quickly became clear that the real challenge was employee experience.
The platform wasn’t failing on its own – it was being fed poor data and operating in isolation from other critical HR and business systems. Employees were frustrated not just with one tool, but with the disjointed experience across the entire HR tech stack.
Skill Collective pivoted the project to take a broader, end-to-end view. Instead of trying to optimise one system, we focused on designing a joined-up skills experience that would work across all platforms.
The project
Fixing the foundations
- Overhauled the job architecture for accuracy, granularity, and alignment
- Consolidated skills data across multiple frameworks and sources
- Built governance and validation loops with HR and the business
Restoring trust in the data
- Standardised and cleaned key workforce and role data
- Designed realistic, role-based skills profiles – no more generic templates
- Mapped jobs and skills in ways that worked across multiple platforms, not just the Talent Marketplace
Rebuilding alignment across HR and the business
- Delivered a skills roadmap that connected internal mobility, L&D, workforce planning, and hiring
- Shifted HR from reactive firefighting to strategic, insight-led support
- Rebuilt trust between the business and HR around data quality and decision-making
Initial results
- A fit-for-purpose job architecture integrated across multiple platforms
- Skills data that was clean, reliable and validated with HR – ensuring standardisation
- A relaunch of the Talent Marketplace with real, relevant job and opportunity matches
- A robust skills taxonomy governance framework, enhancing accuracy, relevance, and alignment with business goals to drive agility, better decisions, and continuous improvement
- A clear path forward for broader workforce planning and future AI adoption
- Targeting results of +42% increase in platform engagement following relaunch and 80% reduction in irrelevant job matches, improving user experience and internal mobility uptake
The real outcome
This wasn’t just a project about data or architecture – it was a reset of how HR tools and strategies connect to real people.
What started as a Talent Marketplace fix became a broader, more impactful shift in how employees experienced skills, careers, and opportunity through a focus on truth over theory, building what matters.