By Cory Steinle, Head of Growth at Beamery
Key takeaways:
- Shift from roles to skills and tasks: Traditional job titles no longer capture what success requires. Skills and task intelligence provide a real-time, data-driven view of what employees actually do — helping agencies match talent to work with greater precision.
- Integrate intelligence across the talent lifecycle: Using task- and skills-based insights improves hiring accuracy, internal mobility, reskilling, and workforce planning — ensuring employees are deployed where they have the most impact.
- Build agile, future-ready teams: By leveraging AI-driven workforce intelligence, staffing leaders can model future scenarios, anticipate skills gaps, reduce hiring costs, and align talent strategy directly with business growth goals.
By 2030, up to 70% of the skills used in most jobs are expected to change. For staffing leaders, this isn’t a distant trend – it’s an urgent challenge. Traditional talent strategies that focus on job titles and headcount are no longer sufficient to keep up with shifting skill demands. Organizations risk hiring for outdated capabilities, misallocating talent, and failing to develop the skills needed to meet future business priorities.
To navigate this changing landscape, staffing leaders are turning to skills and task intelligence. By providing visibility into the work employees actually perform and the capabilities those tasks require, organizations can make more accurate — and future-focused — workforce decisions.
Key concepts: Understanding skills, tasks, and workforce intelligence
Skills intelligence captures what employees know and can do, inferred from resumes and other talent data.
Task intelligence records the work employees actually perform, including task type, frequency, and complexity.
Together, they form workforce intelligence: a dynamic, data-driven view of organizational capability.
This combined insight allows leaders to see beyond static roles, uncovering overlapping work, underutilized skills, and gaps in critical capabilities. By integrating both skills and tasks into decision-making, hiring teams can design strategies that are adaptive, equitable, and aligned with business priorities.
From hiring to retention: Applying workforce intelligence across the employee lifecycle
Skills and task intelligence reshapes every stage of the employee journey. In talent acquisition, traditional recruitment methods rely on job descriptions and resumes that may not capture the nuance of what success in a role requires. By analyzing task-level data, you can define roles more precisely, identify high-potential internal candidates, and ensure external recruitment focuses on the capabilities that truly matter.
Once employees are in place, workforce intelligence continues to drive talent management. Leaders can identify underutilized skills, overlapping responsibilities, and emerging gaps, enabling targeted reskilling and internal mobility programs. Linking skills to tasks ensures employees are deployed where they have the most impact, while promotions and project assignments are based on demonstrated capability rather than tenure or previous titles.
This approach promotes fairer, more inclusive talent practices — while strengthening organizational agility.
Planning for the future: Scenario modeling and workforce alignment
Workforce planning benefits greatly from task-level insight. Traditional planning focuses on headcount and assumed skill requirements, often failing to anticipate emerging work. Skills and task intelligence powered by AI allows for modeling “what-if” scenarios, such as the impact of a new product launch, market expansion, or M&A activity. Leaders can see which roles will require reskilling, which tasks could be automated, and where employees can be redeployed to fill critical gaps.
By integrating data about people and work, and enriching it with AI, staffing teams have the right foundations to build a future-ready workforce. Teams are aligned with strategic objectives, critical skills are nurtured proactively, and resources are deployed efficiently, enabling organizations to respond quickly to evolving business needs.
The business impact of skills and task intelligence
Applying workforce intelligence across the employee lifecycle has tangible benefits. Organizations can accelerate decision-making, reduce duplication, optimize team performance, and lower hiring costs. Leaders gain evidence-based insight into workforce potential, enabling more effective deployment of talent, faster responses to change, and alignment with strategic goals.
Globally, 53% of HR leaders now prioritize designing talent processes around skills, and 81% of executives report that skills-based strategies drive growth. By leveraging skills and task intelligence, organizations can connect workforce strategy to business outcomes, building teams that are both resilient and adaptable.
Building dynamic, evidence-based talent strategies
Skills and task intelligence empowers staffing teams to move beyond administrative functions and static planning, transforming workforce decisions into strategic, evidence-based actions. By understanding what employees can do and the work that actually needs doing, organizations can deploy talent where it will have the greatest impact, reskill proactively, and create agile, future-ready teams.
Integrating this approach across talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce planning ensures organizations not only keep pace with changing skill demands but build a workforce capable of thriving amid disruption. The result is a dynamic, adaptable organization with the insights needed to make every talent decision count.
Cory is Head of Growth at Beamery, the AI platform for workforce transformation. He looks after all growth initiatives, spending time with customers and prospects, working on some of the most interesting questions facing society.
His areas of expertise include people analytics, workforce planning, org redesign, talent acquisition, talent management, job creation, and AI transformation. As a first-generation graduate, Cory is dedicated to increasing access for underrepresented groups in higher education and in the corporate world.
