If skills-based hiring eventually becomes a real thing, technology will be a big part of the reason, experts predict. Specifically, skills-first optimists point to AI-driven tools that can determine the skills of jobseekers and then help to match them with open jobs that are a good fit.

One company to watch in this emerging field is AdeptID. The Boston-based public benefit corporation was created in 2020 by data science veterans. It seeks to identify the right people for jobs, and the right jobs for people.

“We’ve demonstrated that the way to identify more talent more accurately is to look for transferable skills that more superficial methods would miss,” says Fernando Rodriguez-Villa, AdeptID’s CEO and co-founder. “Looking at skills is a better way to identify talent than looking at degree attainment or even past job titles.”

The fastest way to understand skills is through inference gleaned from real employment experiences and results, he says. This approach beats prolonged, manual, or survey-based skills-mapping exercises. Most people intuitively get this strategy, in part through their own anecdotes of gaining transferable skills on the job.

“We’re building the tech infrastructure that takes that insight beyond anecdotes and lip service and puts it into the codebase of every applicant tracking system, job board, and HRIS out there,” says Rodriguez-Villa.

For example, in its early work with Boston Medical Center, the company learned that cashiers at Dunkin Donuts could transition to working as pharmacy technicians. Common skills in both roles include working with point-of-sale software, customer service, and handling stressful situations—I get anxious just watching Dunkin workers deal with the morning rush of caffeine-deprived commuters.

“The data showed a high degree of skill overlap and that folks made that transition at a higher success rate than the industry overlap would suggest,” Rodriguez-Villa says. “The data is telling a story that the work environment of one is predictive of work in another.”

AdeptID’s play isn’t to create a new layer of hiring tools. Rather, it aims to build a talent-matching infrastructure that can be integrated with any existing tool in the hiring-and-learning space. As a result, AdeptID’s presence is invisible to its end users, in the same way most shoppers don’t know that Stripe works to make sure their credit card transactions are handled securely.

So far this year, 11M+ people have used tools that tapped AdeptID, up from 3.6M people last year. That means the company has made 11M job recommendations. “The more people use our matching, the more accurate and nuanced we become with our recommendations,” says Rodgriguez-Villa.

The feedback loop helps employers to understand job candidates better and fill open roles faster. They also get a bigger pool of jobseekers, including skilled workers without four-year college degrees.

For training providers, Rodriguez-Villa says the technology helps their graduates find jobs faster, and roles that are a better fit for their skills and aspirations.

“The U.S. workforce is about 160M, and we want our recommendations to be serving over 50% of them in the next two years,” he says.