Alignment of workers to work is the cardinal challenge of 21st century corporations. Conventional wisdom is that there is a talent shortage, but the reality is that there is a higher percentage of knowledge workers in the world population today than at any time in human history. The reality is that talent is in abundance. What is not in abundance is a mechanism to accurately align that talent to work.

For corporations, the costs of this misalignment are staggering – both in dollars and lost opportunity. Billions of dollars are spent every year on recruitment, training, retention, and restructuring to address it. However the decision-making tools being used are fundamentally intuitive, whether database search engines, psychometric analysis, or competency approaches. This is because they are essentially descriptive rather than functional. They describe what people are, their innate traits and characteristics, not what they can do, the kinds of skills they exhibit in carrying out their work effectively.

For the individual worker, alignment is equally inefficient because the resume is the required document of record. Again, resumes are essentially descriptive documents. They run the gamut from poorly written work histories to formulaic pages loaded with search engine terms. The resume rarely tells what a person can specifically do – their skills. This hurts both the job seeker and the hiring company, making it difficult for job seekers to differentiate themselves while hiring companies are challenged in identifying qualified candidates that truly have the skills to perform in the position.

WingSpread has invested 30 years of research in the fields of executive search and corporate strategy to create an approach that addresses the misalignment challenge. WingSpread is the first Human Capital Optimization technology solution with a truly robust quantitative basis that leverages the web to facilitate rapid and flexible analysis across all levels of an organization. By adopting our skills- based methodology, organizations have a measurable, quantitative, and consistent approach to evaluating talent and taking decisive action. Through WingSpread, our clients are equipped to overcome challenges across recruitment and workforce planning to corporate acquisitions and restructuring, and therefore achieve better returns on their investment in human capital.