AskFora Unveils Skills-Powered Talent Discovery for Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Veteran-founder-led start-up lowers recruiting costs by finding and mapping the skills of employees and candidates; Backed by $1.5 million of angel & VC funding

NORWICH, VT, UNITED STATES, September 28, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — AskFora Co. today announced AskFora Teams, a new SaaS offering that helps organizations save time and money on recruiting, optimize employee development, and tackle workforce planning. Built on AskFora’s AI-driven skills search platform, AskFora Teams automatically maps workers’ skills to open roles using public and internal data. Executives, managers, and HR professionals can quickly match employees and candidates to open positions, identify training programs for new projects, and focus on closing critical skills gaps.

AskFora also announced that it has raised a total of $1.5 million in angel and pre-seed funding from venture capital firms. These include Firsthand Alliance, Glasswing Ventures, Koa Labs, Ex Ventures, Perkins Cove Partners, and FreshTracks Capital.

“AskFora is a game-changer for organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve in the fast-paced world of work. By applying AI to internal open roles matching, AskFora unlocks the true potential of the workforce,” said Simon Chan, GP at Firsthand Alliance.

“Identifying employee skills and matching them with the right internal opportunities has become an outsized challenge in today’s radically transformed workplace,” said AskFora founder/CEO Omer Trajman. “Baby Boomers are leaving full-time employment but not retiring, while Gen Z is bringing entirely new skills to the workforce. Meanwhile, organizations need to proactively pursue opportunities for diverse talent retention, recruitment, and engagement.”

“With AskFora, organizations instantly identify talent based on employees’ skills before they leave, while helping employers create opportunities that challenge their skilled workforces,” he said.

A Single, Trusted, and Current Source of Employee and Candidate Skills

AskFora Teams supercharges talent management and employee roles within an organization. By using AskFora Teams to map employees’ skills and proactively identify opportunities, employees stay engaged and productive. Employees today are encouraged by internal mobility and personal growth. Workers who experience career growth internally are 34% more likely to stay with the organization compared with those who have not changed roles. Focusing on skills further reduces bias, increasing opportunities for diverse talent.

“Mapping opportunities to individual interests and skills is at the core of modern professional development. AskFora is the tool that managers need to help match talent opportunity quickly and effectively,” said Andy Palmer, Founder, Koa Labs

AI-driven skills-mapping gives executive teams, managers, and HR professionals critical insight into the abilities of their employees. HR departments then quickly create robust, skills-based inventories and mappings for virtually any sized company regardless of the complexity and opaqueness of skills. Organizations identify and source talent for the skills they need following the guidance of AskFora’s AI chatbot, named Fora. AskFora’s core data set for its AI model currently spans more than 5 million professionals and a quarter million skills.

AskFora automatically learns about employee skills from public and private sources, including LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter/X, news, blogs, employee-submitted data, and organizational data about courses, certifications and experiences specific to each employee. For individual workers who upload their own data, AskFora automatically creates a skills-map based on that data, and suggests where they can focus on upskilling.

“When looking for someone to fill an urgent open rec and discovering that the perfect person is already an employee —- that’s the kind of results that AskFora delivers. It saves time and money on recruiting and onboarding,” offered Jesse Laflamme, former CEO, Pete and Gerry’s.

Skills-Based Approach Reduces Costs, Solves Quiet Quitting

AskFora Teams includes multiple modules that use the automatically generated skills-map to:

● Save money on recruiting and hiring by matching employees to open positions

● Increase opportunities for diverse talent retention and recruitment (for DEI)

● Increase employee referrals, reducing hiring costs with a better culture fit

● Focus training, learning, and development on critical skills through gap analysis

● Facilitate workforce planning by mapping employee skills to future roles

● Improve employee productivity and collaboration through better skills matching

On average, businesses lose 15% of their workforces annually. With onboarding costs starting at $4K or more, on top of recruiter fees, the ability to identify and keep skilled employees can provide significant cost savings, particularly for businesses with many different types of roles. However, sorting, categorizing, and cross-referencing workers’ skills at any scale has often been impossible.

With the real-time, AI-driven access to current skills data provided by AskFora, organizations can grow, upskill, nurture and keep employees happy across the employee and contractor lifecycle.

Early customers include organizations in high-end manufacturing, specialized consulting, and direct-to-consumer industries. AskFora removes the friction in migrating to a skills-based approach to talent management, making it ideal for businesses from 200 to 2,000+ employees.

AskFora Teams is offered on a subscription basis at a list price of $10 a month per employee. For a free AskFora skills mapping of your organization, visit https://askfora.com/teams

About Firsthand Alliance

Firsthand Alliance is the “Salesforce mafia” VC fund. We invest in ambitious founders who are building the future of business software from the earliest stage.

About Glasswing Ventures

Glasswing Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to investing in the next generation of AI and frontier technology startups that enable the rise of the intelligent enterprise.

About Koa Labs

Located in the heart of Harvard Square, Koa Labs is a startup fund for under-represented mission-driven founders building independent companies.

About FreshTracks Capital

Founded in 2001, FreshTracks Capital is a Vermont-focused investment firm which has raised more than $70MM across its 6 venture capital funds.

About Perkins Cove Partners

Perkins Cove Partners is a cross-functional team of accomplished technology executives who have a strong penchant for building. We provide ‘committed capital’ along with hands-on support to ambitious founders building top-tier companies.

About AskFora

Founded from Norwich, Vermont, AskFora is an innovative startup bringing AI to the Future of Work, to deliver better outcomes for employers and workers.

David Templeton
DBT Communications
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