Skills Taxonomy API and Skills Profiler Plugin

IYS Skills and Occupations Taxonomy (ISOT) API and IYS Skills Profiler Plugin are a booster to HR Tech applications, the same way as Google Maps is to location based businesses.

What is Skills Taxonomy API and Skills Profiler Plugin

The API gives access to the Skills Taxonomy (through technology). And the Skills Profiler Plugin is a piece of code that can be embedded into an application to render the UI of Skills Profiler in that application. Best example is Google Maps. We see Google Maps in websites and delivery apps. These applications have embedded Google Maps into them.

Purpose

Enabling comprehensive “skills profiling” i.e. mapping of skills. The skills profiling could be that of jobs or people. Job profiles and People are the two fundamental data constructs in the HR or Talent space. All activities on Human Capital revolve around these two constructs. For instance, recruitment is about matching of skills of people vis a vis jobs. Talent Development is about identifying gaps in the skills and focusing on development of these skills. Application providers do not have to worry about skills data, maintaining the database and updating them. IYS is focused on that. The applications can benefit from the effort of IYS and focus on their core business. Taking the example of the delivery apps, these apps do not have to worry about updating maps, Google is taking care of that. The delivery apps focus on their core business process such as application quality, managing delivery people and others.

Problem it is trying to solve In many places or applications where skills are involved or should be involved the data on skills are not captured well.

In job sites, for example, skills information of the job providers and job seekers are important for matching job providers and job seekers from thousands of them. In most job sites, the job seekers and job providers may be asked to add skills to their profile page or to the job posts respectively. However, this vital step could be done in a very crude manner like where users are asked to write free text or in a slightly better manner with auto suggestion on skills (with a skills database in the backend), or with little more sophistication which involves suggesting skills based on the skills the user adds, like is done in Linkedin. But these are still quite limited as there is little insight. And more so maybe useful for keyword based matching but not for cluster based analysis and recommendations.

In the case of HRIS, in today’s world skills is an important dataset of employees. But then mostly, there is no in built skills database or taxonomy which limits the possibilities for adding and using skills of employees.

In all these case ISOT can be a boon.

As these skills centered solutions can leverage on IYS’s rich and constantly updated skills taxonomy, integrate their applications with ISOT through API, obtain skills data of the application users and process this skills data to deliver superior value to their application users.

This is like Google Maps. It maintains (constantly updating) database of geographical data and shares it as API. Applications that rely on location data such as Supply chain companies, delivery businesses, car hailing businesses and others can leverage on Google Maps geo database by integrating Google Maps into their application using the API.

So who is the target audience / persona for ISOT API HR Technology companies providing applications on Recruitment, Applicant Tracking Systems, Workforce Planning, Learning Management, Employee Information Management, Success Planning, Career Planning. The other applications such as those for Payroll Administration, Statutory Compliance, Benefits Administration, Mobility, Employee Feedback will not be relevant for ISOT API There are hundreds of companies in this area. A small percentage are large (say over 100 employees). Most are small companies. To get familiar here are the companies / brands in the HR Tech area that are relevant for ISOT API pitch. Professional Networks – Linkedin, Xing; Job Portals – Monster, Indeed, Dice, Naukri, GulfJobs; LMS – Saba, Skillsoft, Degreed; HRIS – Workday, SAP Successfactors, Oracle HCM, Peoplesoft; Recruitment – Lever, Taleo

Within these companies those who would need or appreciate ISOT API value are Product Managers (the product creators not the product marketers), Data Scientists, AI / ML guys and such. Similarly those that develop custom applications within organizations could be our targets. And here again it is primarily the technical guys who would be interested in knowing more about the API.

Pricing Model

Typically the units of measure in APIs are what are called “API calls” ISOT API is charged on the number of API calls made by the application developer. Upto 1000 API calls is for free. Thereafter companies start paying for the number of API calls they make. And the benchmark unit price i.e. per API call price is 0.02 USD