HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Bridging the $11 Trillion Skills Gap with Dan Benveniste, SkillWaze
Imagine a world where job candidates arrive with an ironclad guarantee that they can apply the skills listed on their resumes. That's the vision shared by Dan Benveniste, Founder and CEO of SkillWaze, a company that’s redefining career readiness through AI-powered, skill-based learning.
Dan and his team just announced the acquisition of tilr.com, a leading learning management and credentialing platform. Together, they’re building what they call the first guaranteed career-readiness solution for both learners and employers.
The pandemic created a perfect storm for today's young job seekers. Cut off from crucial workplace socialization during formative years and now facing entry-level positions being automated away, Gen Z faces unprecedented barriers to meaningful employment. When 60% of recent college graduates get fired within 90-120 days due to skills mismatches, something fundamental needs to change.
Dan explains how SkillWaze's acquisition of learning platform Tiller creates what he calls "the first guaranteed career readiness solution." Their approach solves the critical difference between knowledge acquisition and skill application: "You can learn hockey, but that doesn't mean you can play it." By combining AI-powered learning pathways with virtual apprenticeships where skills are observed and validated in real contexts, SkillWaze creates verifiable talent profiles employers can trust.
What makes this especially compelling is the "Waze for careers" navigation system that lets users explore different paths, earn micro-rewards (including Bitcoin, which drives 2-3x engagement), and recalculate their journey as interests evolve. For employers, it builds custom talent "farm teams" based on specific skill requirements, making skills-first hiring practical rather than theoretical.
With the World Economic Forum identifying an $11 trillion global skills gap, solutions that bridge learning and earning couldn't be more urgent. As Benvenisti puts it: "If we don't have Gen Z meaningfully engaged in employment and highly productive mode in a couple of years, that's like having a fuel gap on an airplane." Connect with Dan on LinkedIn or email dan@skillwaze.com to learn more about this revolutionary approach to guaranteed career readiness.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, Bill Bannam, and in this episode we're going to dive into one of the biggest announcements at SHRM 2025 in San Diego, a major move that could reshape how Gen Zers enter the workforce and how employers access truly job-ready talent. Joining me on the show today is Dan Benvenisti, founder and CEO over at Skillways, a company that's redefining career readiness for Gen Zers through AI-powered skills-based learning. Dan and his team just announced the acquisition of Tiller. You may remember Tiller listeners. We featured them on the show in the past. They're a leading learning management and credentialing platform. Together, they're building what they call the first guaranteed career readiness solution for both learners and employers. I hope you enjoy this conversation that I had with Dan. Dan, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. How are you doing Doing?
Speaker 3:well. Thanks for having me, Bill. I look forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2:So, dan, let's start with the big news. Why was acquiring Tiller and congratulations, by the way, uh the right move for skills ways, and why, particularly at this time? Why at this juncture in your journey?
Speaker 3:yeah, and great question I. I received that question, uh, both from some of my current investors as well as some of the new perspective investors. It's like wait a minute, but as soon as you tell the story it makes a lot of sense. So the company Skillways, for the last four and a half five years, has really operated as a virtual internship, virtual apprenticeship, innovation challenge platform where we would skill and score the actual application of skills being utilized in real work programs for employers and for some nonprofits over statewide types of initiatives. And what we found was that it was a partial solution, that the journey for the youth and for the underrepresented or supposedly unskilled was just not complete right. It was like you're giving them that full work experience but you're not tying it together with the learning side of it.
Speaker 3:So Tiller for us represented the ability to bring together a full learning management system marketplace, much like you see in large enterprise systems today, where you can upskill a workforce within your company and keep them, as you know, progressively learning through their career. But what about those who are not skilled, that don't have a career path or that need to reenter or second chance? So we looked at it and said why can't we apply really good existing technology to those populations that aren't in a career, that need to be in a career, and same, you know, put it all together. So we created the first AI powered learn and earn platform, allowing for all those you know, right now unemployed populations, to tie it all together, where we guarantee their outcome as a result of our observation engine. And so Tiller really represents something that is in place today on its own with large companies, but just does not exist for those that are not employed. And how do you bring them into employment? So pretty excited about it.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. Okay, thank you, dan. I love it when we get a guest on and they make some bold claims, because then I can try and pull them apart. In the interview and one you just mentioned, there is that the results are guaranteed. So, for those who may not be familiar with your platform, what does guaranteed career readiness actually mean and how does AI power that guarantee? If you can go into a bit more detail around that, Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I love the fastball pitch straight down the middle, it's good. Um. So we look at it and say anybody can go learn, pick up a credential. We pull together all the skills from that learning process. We verify and validate the skills learned through all the various taxonomies and we normalize that and then put it together in a curated form for each individual. So it's personalized learning for each individual in a real-time basis. But more importantly is we tie it together for a employer.
Speaker 3:So an employer says, hey, here's our job specs, we need these skills that we extract out of that job spec and we say, great, we can curate the skills required through our marketplace. Bring the participants in, bring the kids in, give them the credentials through our virtual internships, our virtual apprenticeships on Skillways and our innovation challenges, where our AI observes the skills that have been applied. So we do all that, we put it together and we guarantee the resume of those participants. Here's the skills they learned, here's the skills that have been applied in a real work context. We write the resume for them and back up the skills that are present on that resume for the employers as well as the youth. So in essence, we're saying if they're here, they do the work in our platform.
Speaker 3:Here's the skills that we've observed. We'll write the resume so that they don't have to. Here's the skills that we've observed. We'll write the resume so that they don't have to. And also, more importantly, a self-authored resume. You might as well have ChatGPT write it because it's self-authored. And we saw this quite a bit last year, where college graduates are coming out, they see a job spec. They say, hey, chatgpt, write a resume that matches this job spec. They go interview, get the job. 90 days later it's like wow, none of that was present. So we want to be the intermediary and guarantee the data that they've learned these skills, that they can apply these skills and they're ready.
Speaker 2:Okay, just a quick follow-up on that then, in terms of learning those skills and being able to apply those skills, being able to demonstrate that they can apply those skills. So we'll talk later about the idea of micro-internships. I love this. I love this term, by the way, it's something that's all over your website, but before we get there, I'm guessing, then, by adding those two components being able to help folks uh, identify and label what skills they have on their resumes, but also within their cover letters, which are also that's important for the passing technologies and all the rest of it isn't it to get through to, to, um, the stage where maybe you might get interviewed? Uh, in in their cover, they can actually also point to real-world examples Is that one of the unique powers of the technology that you offer?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean in the cover letter piece of it. I think that is one of the unique scenarios is we will collate and offer to those participants. You know one. Here are the skills that you learned on our platform. Here are the skills that have been applied and to what proficiency. You have that ability learned and have been applied Two different things.
Speaker 3:I have a lot of friends who like hockey, ice hockey and, like your football fans, they are Monday morning quarterbacks, so they know hockey. You can learn hockey. You can learn football, either American football or real world football. You can learn it, but that doesn't mean you can play it. That doesn't mean you can do it right.
Speaker 3:So the difference of knowledge acquisition and learning is one thing, and that's important, but the ability to apply the skill required to play is different, and so what we really aim to do is to put them together and to be able to verify. Easy to say I've got a credential. I learned this, I took a test, I watched a video, I answered questions, click, click, click. Great Knowledge acquisition is one level of it. The ability to play ice hockey is very different, and so when you think about it, for an employer it's the same thing right. They're saying I want to hire this person to put them on our hockey team, but I don't know if they can play hockey. They went through four years of school. Ostensibly the brand of the school says that they can start and finish something of deep rigor academics, but when they show up, can they actually use it and apply it? And we're seeing less and less of that capability. So we really intend to bring those two together the learning and the earning in application, in a side-by-side parallel run scenario.
Speaker 2:Another follow-up question, if you don't mind, if you'd indulge me.
Speaker 3:We're here for it yeah, the pandemic.
Speaker 2:What did the pandemic do for young folks in terms of putting away an opportunity for them to get experience, and how are they catching up in 2025?
Speaker 3:did a disservice to this Gen Z population in particular and we'll see the impact of Gen A and their abilities too, in a career-minded mindset coming up. Unfortunately, I think, as we all know, the pandemic put a lot more emphasis online and took kids out of the real world context and for that they are at a little bit of a disadvantage and they just don't have that real world exposure to how to deal with circumstances and how to deal with things. They didn't get that growing potential. Most of them had a very formidable time right around puberty and you know that during process of entering puberty and coming through puberty is the most emotional learning opportunity the human skills of reading social, emotional cues on facial expressions, words, how to dialogue, how to understand what's expected of you, without the full rubric that you get in an academic environment and understanding what that means. And so they're at a big disadvantage.
Speaker 3:And we hear this from employers all over. It's yeah, we hire them, they come in, you know they just don't know what to do. And you're right, they don't know what to do because the training mechanisms for many and most employers were built for Gen X. And then the millennials come in and like, oh, we need to tweak it for them and they did a little tweak and it took a few years for them to catch up and kind of blend their way in. But Gen Z is woefully different than the millennials and how they operate.
Speaker 3:The same fundamentals apply. They will work for money. You have to respect them and pay them and that is key and you have to lead them into understanding what their role is, what's expected of them, and they expect a lot more feedback than Gen X or the millennials in any context of day-to-day feedback and information flow and the ability to have a voice and most of those infrastructures are semi-present in most work contexts. So fortunately, I think we'll have the opportunity with. What we can do at scale with hundreds of thousands and millions in a concurrent scenario, is to bridge that opportunity for both employers as well as the next generation, to help them understand the learning and the earning combination left foot, foot right, foot right of how to put it all together very good.
Speaker 2:Just to add another sport in there. Uh, we're recording this episode. On canada day, I took off my uh, my blue jays baseball cap before I hit record today, just for dan. Um, okay, you, you mentioned a moment ago hundreds of thousands. You also mentioned millions here. Here are some other numbers for you. Let's talk about trillions. You mentioned at SHRM that this acquisition helps close the $11 trillion skills gap. That's a big number, dan. How did you get there? Can you break that number down for us and explain what it means?
Speaker 3:Oh, that wasn't my number. World Economic Forum and Accenture did some research before and during COVID and the widening of this skills gap is even larger than that. I think by many in the economics view the next generation to participate meaningfully in an engaged, productive economy workforce is tragic, right? We're at a point now with what you just mentioned earlier with the pandemic, and now what you're seeing with AI taking out some of those entry-level jobs, and you saw what we saw last year was many something like 60% or more college graduates that were hired were fired in 90 days to 120 days last year. For that mismatch, mishire misfired combination. When you think about it from a GDP perspective, if we don't have Gen Z meaningfully engaged in employment and on a productivity you know, in a highly productive mode, in a couple of years, that's like having a, you know, a fuel gap on an airplane. We start to decline broadly, we start to, you know our GDP starts to drop, you know you fast forward five, seven, 10 years and if it's a slow rise to bring them into the economy, okay, ai is going to bring some productivity into some of those you know early roles, but we really need Gen Z to participate and to take over flying the plane of our. You know our journey as a nation and Western society overall. Right, it's not just the US, it's Canada, it's Europe, you know, it's many economies all the way around. So from my perspective, it is a critical imperative of and it's sort of you know, we hear this all the way along from prior administrations, current administrations alike.
Speaker 3:Manufacturing is key, absolutely, and so is healthcare, right, you think of those two key industry sectors. We have to get our story together and we have to meaningfully engage Gen Z into various aspects of manufacturing, not pulling cranks. But in the new 21st era model, we can't talk about the word manufacturing because that's like trying to sell a Oldsmobile to an 18-year-old. It's not going to work for them. You have to use the language that is meaningful to them and it's about the subcategories, the solutions.
Speaker 3:If you're a shipbuilder, you got to talk about the drones and undersea activity and you know lots of different things you're doing. If you're an airplane builder in space technology, you can't come in and say, yeah, you're going to layer wire inside of an aluminum hole and manufacture planes. You got to talk about the delivery and the value of what that plane's going to do. You know and that's one of our challenges as a nation is how we bring the next generation in to solve the problems. So I'm excited to start dealing with some of those bigger issues as we put the whole system together now.
Speaker 2:So, as you do put the system together, how does Tiller's learning management marketplace and the credentialing system enhance the learner journey on Skillsways? Can you explain the additional benefits for folks who are looking at Skillways as an option for them, say, in the next three to six months, when all of these new components are being added and they've been rolled out?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we intend to deliver the brand promise of the Waze navigation app, but for your career, right. So for the youth, it's a concept that says I want to come in and I want to explore all these different careers and we will curate a personalized journey and map it out in a Waze-like graphical interface. You're interested in healthcare? Here's your degree or non-degree, or here's your interest, here's the courses and the credentials and here's the job spec and here's the internships and apprenticeships, all built into the platform. So you start that journey and you start going.
Speaker 3:Here's the sponsorship, scholarship dollars from some of the big nonprofits and the foundations that will support your journey, and here's the earned income and or Bitcoin you can earn through these internships and apprenticeships, and I'll tell you, bitcoin is a high motivator, more than the US dollar for youth. So when we offer Bitcoin up as part of your journey, we see a two to three X engagement level for that participation. It doesn't have to be a lot. It's micro, micro dollars, micro pieces, but it's part of their journey. It's gamified all the way through. So in a true ways, like navigation experience, and if they decide, you know they're two months into a you know couple of credentials and they, you know, they've done one or two of those pieces and they're like you know I'm not into.
Speaker 3:You know data mining for healthcare stuff, but I do like graphical interface for healthcare things. Or I want to be an x-ray technician. Go down that path. Great, we've already got those skills we've identified. Now apply over to this side as well. So we just reroute you, just like you're mapping your car route, recalculating in real time. And so now you know, here's all these other 10 jobs and 10 career paths you can go to.
Speaker 3:For the employer side, same thing. All we say is look, we're going to curate for you a program to build that talent pool so you can bring your Toronto Blue Jays hat back out. We want to create a farm team for those employers. So really, what we're saying is you need the double A's, you need the triple A's, you need the college teams. We'll build that entire team for you.
Speaker 3:So your recruiting isn't transactional. You're building a relationship and the skills required for your next generation and they are there for you to pull up in real time. So we do it through the employer brand, through those virtual innovation challenges, the virtual internships, the micro internships and the virtual apprenticeships, and that allows for the combination of the employer to participate. They just give us the job specs. We'll extract the skills required. We'll send those back and say you approve, these are the skills you're looking for. We curate the programs for them and we go bring the kids in and deliver them through the program, and then the employers now have a farm team that they can pull from all right, very good.
Speaker 2:Uh, I've got so many more questions for you. However, I'm conscious that you've got a lot on today because this is day three of SHERP, so I'm just going to throw two more questions at you, if I may, before we wrap up for today. The next one, my penultimate question, then, is skills-based hiring is, of course, gaining momentum. We talk about skills-based hiring all the time on this pod. I'm a big. I'm a big proponent of it, because I believe that changing that mindset reduces traditional barriers around what expectations were in terms of what a candidate needed from the credential side of things. Anyway, sorry, this is an interview with you. My question is what advice do you have for HR leaders who want to embrace this shift, but they just don't know where to start?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're trying to bring the solution together for talent acquisition leaders to actually apply and utilize and execute a skills-first hiring approach. That's what we're trying to deliver. There's been a lot of talk about skills-first for 15 years and in the last couple of years much more predominant. There's frameworks everywhere there's. You know CTE has some really great frameworks. We're utilizing a lot of that for our model to normalize the. You know taxonomies all the way through in different sectors Each state has done you know their academic models of you know credentialing and you know skills-based learning principles.
Speaker 3:What we're trying to offer is a point-click solution for the delivery of a skills hiring approach and that's where almost similar to an outsourced model is. We run the programs, we curate the skills populations for the employers that they need. So it's business as usual for them. Create the hiring spec, the job spec. We'll curate the skills required for that spec and we'll build and run the farm team for you so that you can hire the skills. And if you're okay with the variation of not being from top 10 pedigree school, we'll build the credential programs for them. We'll build the experiential programs and we'll guarantee those skills are present.
Speaker 2:Okay, and just finally for today, as we always like to do on this show, I'd like to give you an opportunity just to let folks know how they can connect with you. So, whether that's LinkedIn, your email address, I bet you're one of these super cool guys who's all over TikTok, andok and instagram and all those places and, of course, look, looking, looking ahead. What's next for skillways? How do you see the platform evolving over the next 12 to 24 months and how can folks keep an eye and monitor all of the latest developments there?
Speaker 3:yeah, I'll take the last question first. You know 12, you know six, 12 months. We're working now and in conversations with many trade associations, on how to put together industry sector comprehensive learn and earn programs in order to bring forward the populations on behalf of their member employers In the manufacturing sector is a national need for that. We're also in early conversations with the Department of Education and Department of Labor on how to get their participation into this as well so that at a mass level we have unification on how to deliver, not just talk about these types of programs. So the next six to nine months will be about pulling those partnerships and the coalition together so that we can turn on our system and machine and deliver on the populations that are needed, and to me that's absolutely critical.
Speaker 3:So from a technological perspective, tiller and Skillway's teams have been working together before the close of the acquisition in concert to really pull this together. So couldn't be happier about the technological opportunities that are really there for us and to deliver. It's going to be really interesting, so pretty excited about that. There's a lot we're going to do in our own proprietary AI development. We probably will partner with a couple of the already existing agentic large language model programs to integrate as well. Not necessary, but we do want to offer those capabilities.
Speaker 3:But we're really most importantly that we're saying, hey, you can fly your career based on our data and an employer hey, you can make a hiring decision and we're can fly your career based on our data and an employer hey, you can make a hiring decision and we're going to guarantee it based on our data. So our data much like an equity transaction or stockbroker scenario it's got to be perfect. You have to be able to rely on it and that's what we've been deep diving on is to make sure that that data is accurate. It's reflective, it's true, and our endorsement stamp and our financial guarantees and our contracts with the big employers are there to back it up. So you know, that's the most important is that you know we have accurate data for them and for us in that context. So we're going to continue to work on that.
Speaker 3:Now, how to get a hold of us LinkedIn is perfect. You can see Daniel Benvenisti I think there's maybe only one or two of us with that name on LinkedIn At Skillways. So danatskillwayscom is an email. You can get to me on that one as well, and we're happy to set up calls, share what we're doing and see how we can partner for both the credentialing LMS providers in addition to employers and or trade associations.
Speaker 2:Excellent. I will be sending you a LinkedIn connection pretty shortly after this, I would imagine, and then I better get on with the editing, because this episode is going to go out pretty soon. Everybody, but for today, dan, that just leaves me to say thank you very much for being my guest. Thank you, and we'd love to meet up with you in Vegas. Okay, you're going to hear more from me on that one, and listeners, as always.
Speaker 1:until next time, happy working thanks for listening to the HR chat show. If you this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work. Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
