The context
Over the course of the last 8 years, we’ve ran hundreds of experiments aiming to understand and support the members of the IT&C community in their professional endeavors.
It’s their desire to understand their current technical level, align their expectations accordingly and further improve their skills, which drives more than 15000 developers worldwide to our websites, on a monthly basis, in order to try one of the tests in our catalog: software development, QA, infrastructure & networks, digital marketing, foreign languages, numerical logic & algorithm thinking.
Furthermore, over 150 companies and educational organizations are performing more than 20.000 technical evaluations via our platforms, yearly. Recently, we’ve on-boarded our first customers from South Africa, Madagascar and New Zeeland. They are joining an exclusive club of businesses across the globe that are using our existing benchmark of 180.000 test results, in order to understand how their own candidates or employees perform in interviews.
WHY the rebranding?
We are launching one trademark to encompass all our services, everywhere: SkillValue. As we move forward, not only will we remain the only providers in the world who offer both types of tests (MCQ and coding) in both English and French, but we are translating our catalog in Spanish (almost done), German and Portuguese. However, we will no longer maintain separate sites with separate branding for each country and activity. We have signed a partnership with the top tier psychometric test provider, CentralTest.com, in order to serve more customers across the globe with a bundle solution. We have also moved forward with a partnership in Brazil, which will open our way to the South American market.
Obviously, we still value the local identity and its impact on tech expertise. We know, for example, that South Americans are traditionally better at UI/UX and we’ll have tests ready for them. And we still adore the #FrenchTech, we feel part of it, since an important percentage of our customer base is in France and we’ve learned a lot there.
Why SkillValue
In the words of Google’s former VP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock: hard skills are the ones that determine whether or not a person is able to actually perform a task or not. Individuals are looking to understand their SKILL VALUE. Companies hire for potential, but they also want to understand the ability to perform the job – so they look at the SKILL VALUE.
As a team, we strongly believe that the future of work will be shaped by our ability to adapt and improve our skills. And we’ve got the data to show it. We have interacted with 300.000 developers and engineers across the globe and their feedback has helped us understand what challenges tomorrow will bring:
- Our skills are valuable as long as we are able to have an impact on society and the community. Can we improve life by means of our skill value?
- Those who are willing to walk the extra mile and constantly push themselves further to learn new things, will shape the way new businesses operate tomorrow.
- We are more than our tech skills, but our tech skills boost our ability to make a meaningful change around us. Digital competencies are at the core of problem solving, nowadays.
The boost that makes a difference
Of course, we would not be able to move forward without the confidence of our shareholders and friends at Pentalog. Not only have they volunteered first and foremost for our HR Tech experiments over the last 8 years, but they have invested confidence and, consequently, a decent amount of money.
On our third round of investment, October of this year, we have received support in the form of 230.000 Euros, which we shall use in order to reach some very ambitious objectives:
- Reach out and help at least 2.000.000 developers and engineers worldwide achieve their full tech potential: provide them free access to a set of tests and tools which will support their continuous improvement efforts.
- Support at least 20.000 companies and organizations across the globe reframe the way they think about technical problem solving, by means of hackathons, software services and events, that will help them find the best solutions for these problems, while boosting their employer brand.
We wish to achieve all this by the end of 2018.
So, if you want to be part of the adventure, don’t hesitate to follow our existing channels. The process to integrate everything under a single trademark shall be a bit long (and a bit tedious), but we’ll keep you posted every step of the way. We might not have every answer to every single challenge this will pose, but… we learn together!
