APRIL 4, 2023
Kelly Cure, Johnson James & Brett Waikart are the team behind Skillful.ly
Meet Kelly Cure, James Johnson and Brett Waikart, who founded Skillful.ly together to create a better way of hiring that opens the door to incredible opportunities for a broader range of driven job seekers. As three seasoned graduate students at University of California at Berkeley with significant corporate experience, they bonded over shared dismay that the best job opportunities are afforded to a narrow group of favored candidates - graduates from the most selective universities, with polished resumes and heavily networked to industry insiders. It seemed to them that these attributes alone seemed to serve as stand-ins for talent and ambition. SHACK15’s Journal spoke with Brett, Kelly and Johnson to learn more about Skillful.ly and the road ahead.
SHACK15: Can you tell us about Skillful.ly and how the three of you founded it together?
Kelly Cure: I started my first business in 2016 and learned in hiring during a critical time of growth that I found me best team members when I threw out the resume and focused on motivation and skills, and I hired the team members who struggled the most when I used academic pedigree, personal network and CV as a proxy for “fit”. This epiphany transformed the trajectory of my business and my life! I started experimenting with skills-based hiring (without having a name for it) and moved back to the US to explore this idea through an MBA at Cal. At Berkeley I met my phenomenal co-founders through Bogdan Cristei, the ultimate connector, who also introduced us to SHACK!
Brett Waikart: I left school and started my career working in the finance industry, but after a few years decided to found a non-profit org to provide easier access to a financial literacy education. The non-profit ended up supporting thousands of students each year by providing them a hands-on, experiential education on the basic skills needed to manage their personal finances and potentially work in the finance industry.
After a year or two we realized that our platform wasn’t just helping our members acquire some really crucial skills, we were also catching the eye of some of the biggest employers in the industry who saw us as a potential source of candidates for their next generation of employees. We began using our skills data as the basis for recruitment at major employers like Citi, Barclays, and others. The demand became too big for us to manage as a non-profit, so we decided to spin out a for-profit Public Benefit Corporation - Skillful.ly - to carry on the same work.
Johnson James: I’ve spent most of my career in product and data roles at early-stage startups. Some of the problem spaces were unknown, complex and exciting and I realized that many of my most skilled colleagues had unique life experiences and non-traditional educational backgrounds.
To me, that demonstrated a disconnect between education-based outcomes and real-world proficiency in the workplace. While working on assessment tech and behavioral science research during my time in grad school, the data pointed to this global talent that goes unrecognized. A better method for skill validation was needed. That’s where I met Brett and Kelly and got cranking on Skillful.ly!
SHACK15: Can you give us a brief summary of what you all did before Skillful.ly?
Kelly: I started my career in management consulting before spinning off as an economic development and renewables independent consultant. Before Skillful.ly I was based in Eswatini (Formerly Swaziland, Southern Africa) for a number of years, liaising between Government and Private Sector developing renewable energy projects and started my first company - a micro-Forestry company, which gave me the idea for Skillful.ly :)
Brett: I worked in finance straight out of school but realized that wasn’t the career I really wanted for myself. I leaned in hard to the non-profit org I founded before signing up for an MBA at Cal to figure out what might come next. I met my co-founders Kelly and Johnson while at Cal and the rest is history!
Johnson: I’ve been working at early-stage startups doing all things data, design and product for a number of years. With a primary focus on enterprise clients across Asia, Middle East and Africa, I got the opportunity to see the impact of building products and solving for problems at scale using data. This eventually led me to pursuing grad school for analytics and machine learning at Cal which led to Brett and Kelly, and that’s how our collective story begins :)
SHACK15: How is Skillful.ly changing the hiring process?
Brett, Kelly and Johnson: Our mission is to transform the jobs market by reshaping the way that talent is identified and hired, and we're doing it by leveraging skills data instead of traditional resumes. By using skills data to evaluate job candidates, our platform has the potential to remove social biases and level the playing field for all applicants. We believe that this approach will revolutionize the way we think about talent and enable organizations to identify and develop top performers from a much broader pool of candidates.
Example: One concrete example of this is helping companies like EY and Deloitte change their 4 year degree requirement and for the first time in their history, hire brilliant Computer Science students from 2 year Associate's Degree programs. Introducing qualified candidates leading companies never would have met through traditional hiring platforms is what we’re uniquely positioned to do.
SHACK15: What are your goals and outlook for the year ahead?
Brett, Kelly and Johnson: We recognize we’re building a company in an uncertain environment with a funding market that may or may not be there for our startup when we need it in the future. We’re lucky to have found some great early customers at Skillful.ly and think we have a real chance to actually grow our business to reach break-even before the end of this year. If we can do that, we’ll be in a great spot!
We’ve also doubled our team and are continuing to grow. Our users also more than doubled from December, and nothing is more important than supporting our people. In times of growth, doubling down on investing extra time in each other and our job seekers has paid off and will be a key focus of this year!