The Problem
Hiring on proxies is expensive.
Most vacancies still screen on degrees, years of experience, and tool names — proxies for the work, not the work itself. They attract identical CVs, filter out capable people, and make mis-hires more likely. The bill lands twice: once to recruit, and again when it doesn't work out.
Average cost to fill a single vacancy in the UK — rising to ~£19,000 for a manager.
SOURCE: CIPDThe cost of a bad hire. On a £42,000 role that is up to £132,000 once recruitment, training and lost productivity are counted.
SOURCE: RECOf UK organisations that tried to fill vacancies struggled to attract suitable candidates.
SOURCE: CIPD 2024How It Helps · 01
Skills-based hiring, made practical.
The market is already moving — UK employers have steadily stripped degree requirements out of job adverts. But "skills-based hiring" only works if everyone agrees what a skill is. MySkillGap gives you a shared definition: a skill is an observable action someone performs repeatedly under real constraints. From there, the work gets concrete.
Write the real job
Translate a vacancy into the handful of actions the role genuinely requires — so candidates self-select on capability, not keywords.
Widen the pool
Surface adjacent roles whose people already perform those actions. Reach capable applicants a credential filter would silently exclude.
Interview on evidence
Build structured questions and tasks around observable skills, giving every panellist the same yardstick instead of gut feel.
Cut the mis-hire
Accurate role descriptions set correct expectations on both sides — the single biggest lever on early attrition and wasted recruitment spend.
See It In Action
Two ways employers use the same map.
Define a role by the actions it requires — then meet the early-careers talent already exploring your sector. Neither view profiles, scores, or ranks an individual person.
The dashboards above use illustrative data for a fictional employer. They are not live pilot results — first pilot outcomes are expected from Q4 2026.
How It Helps · 02
Build the pipeline before you need it.
The hardest roles to fill are the ones young people never knew existed. MySkillGap is already used in schools and colleges for structured career exploration. As an employer, you can shape what that next generation understands about your sector — years before they ever fill in an application.
Raise sector awareness
See, at cohort level, how often your sector is explored versus others — and sponsor guided exploration where awareness is lowest.
Contribute real roles
Add an accurate, observable-skill profile of a role you actually hire for, so students explore the real job, not a stereotype.
Feed the apprenticeship funnel
Connect low-awareness, high-need roles to apprenticeships, T-Levels, and site visits — widening participation as you go.
Measure reach honestly
Track interest and exposure across cohorts and trends. You never see, store, or target a named young person.
Who It's For
From first hire to whole-workforce planning.
Hiring & Talent Acquisition
Rewrite vacancies around the observable actions a role actually requires. Widen the candidate pool beyond credentials and reduce the cost of mis-hires.
Early-Careers & Apprenticeships
Become the employer young people understand and aspire to. Sponsor structured sector exploration in schools and colleges — and feed a healthier apprenticeship funnel.
People & L&D Teams
A shared, observable-action vocabulary for what each role involves — so job specs, onboarding, and progression conversations all describe the same thing.
Founders & Growing SMEs
Hiring your first 5–50 people sets your culture and your cost base. Define roles by what people do, not by titles inherited from larger companies.
Labour Market Intelligence
CachedRecruit where the demand actually is.
The same labour-market data your workforce planning should run on — pulled live from the LMI for All API. Where employment is growing, where skill shortages bite hardest, and how hard each occupation is to hire into.
Most shortages are structural, not seasonal. Defining roles by observable skills — instead of credentials — is one of the few levers that widens the pool you are hiring from.
% of vacancies that are skill-shortage vacancies (SSV) by occupation · ESS 2022 Fig. 2-6
What this means for employers: in the hardest-hit occupations, roughly half of all vacancies go unfilled for lack of the right skills. Hiring on demonstrable skills — not proxies for them — is how you compete for that talent.
Commitments
What this is not.
"Good for recruitment" has limits we hold on purpose. MySkillGap helps you understand work and define roles — it does not make hiring decisions, and it never turns a person into a score. That boundary protects candidates, and it is part of what makes the underlying skills data defensible.
No candidate profiling
We never build a profile of an individual applicant or employee, or track a named person's behaviour.
No scoring or ranking
The platform does not rate, rank, or "best-fit" candidates against each other. Your team decides; we inform the language.
No outcome prediction
We don't predict who will succeed or fail in a role. Skills describe the work, not a verdict on a person.
No selling of data
Candidate and cohort data is never monetised, sold, or handed to third parties. There is no data product behind the curtain.
Questions
Common questions.
Is this an applicant tracking system or screening tool?
No. MySkillGap doesn't receive applications, screen CVs, or sit in your hiring pipeline. It is a map of roles and the observable skills they require — a shared language you use to write better vacancies and run fairer interviews. Your ATS and your judgement stay exactly where they are.
Do you score, rank, or match candidates?
Never. There is no candidate scoring, ranking, or “best-fit” output. The platform describes work, not people. It is not a matching or recommendation engine, and it deliberately does not predict who will succeed in a role.
How does this actually reduce cost-per-hire?
Two ways. First, observable-skill specs widen your candidate pool and reduce reliance on agencies for hard-to-fill, credential-gated roles. Second, accurate role descriptions cut mis-hires — the most expensive recruitment failure there is, at three to four times salary (REC). We measure both with pilot partners rather than promising a fixed figure.
What data do you hold about our candidates?
None at the individual level. Early-careers insight is aggregate and cohort-level only — you see trends across groups, never a named young person. We don't profile applicants and we don't monetise data.
How does the early-careers side work?
MySkillGap is already used in schools and colleges for structured career exploration. As an employer you can contribute accurate role profiles, sponsor guided exploration of your sector, and connect low-awareness roles to apprenticeships — building recognition years before anyone applies.
Can we run a pilot before committing?
Yes. We're taking on a small number of business pilot partners through 2026. Pilots get hands-on support to rewrite a real set of roles, and preferential terms at launch. We want your hiring data to shape what we build next.
BUSINESS PILOT PROGRAMME · 2026
Hire on skills.
Build the pipeline.
We're partnering with a small number of companies who want to recruit on what people can do — and help shape the talent coming up behind them. Tell us one role you find hard to fill, and we'll start there.