In 2024, 70% of business executives say employee skills gaps are an obstacle to company performance.
If you’re addressing skills gaps with on-demand talent, but want a more structured and strategic way to source, hire, manage and pay — check out Fiverr Enterprise, a Freelancer Management System (FMS) built for exactly that.
If you’d like to know more about how to assess and uncover skills gaps in your organization, you’re in the right place!
This is part of a series of guides about skill gap.
What is a Skills Gap Assessment?
A skills gap assessment is a formal way to uncover exactly which skills are missing in your organization, and what gaps you’ll be facing over the next few years. Instead of each manager recognizing what talent gaps they have in their department in silos, or relying on subjective opinions, a skills gap assessment underlines exactly what new hires you need to be making, and what areas you need specific talent.
The Importance of Analyzing Skill Gaps
It’s not hard to understand why analyzing skills gaps is so critical for any enterprise. If you ignore skills gaps, or don’t know they exist, you can directly see the impact on business outcomes.
Let’s say you don’t have enough customer care reps. That means that customers will sit on hold getting frustrated while they wait for support. If you don’t have enough app developers, or the right people to develop the items on the roadmap, then the team will be stuck in firefighting mode fixing bugs instead of releasing new features. Without a cybersecurity expert on board, your business could be open to compliance risk or a data breach. The list goes on.
The Process of Conducting a Skills Gap Assessment
There is a set process to follow when conducting a skills gap assessment, which can help you uncover and address needed talent and close the gaps ahead of time, before you see the impact on business metrics. Each business may need to tweak the process to fit their specific organizational context, but generally speaking you will need to go through these stages:
- Identifying Business Goals and Objectives: What is on the roadmap for the next 12-18 months? For example, you may be planning to launch a new app, open a bricks and mortar store, move into leveraging AI, or land in a new geographic footprint. Understanding your business goals is the first step to recognizing your skills gaps.
- Defining Required Skills and Competencies: To meet these goals, what skills and competencies will be needed? A new location might require native speakers or those who understand the culture. The launch of an app may require mobile UX expertise. An emergent marketing campaign might require video editors, social media gurus, or content writers.
- Assessing Current Workforce Skills: Before you jump to hire, what skills do you already have in-house or in your existing talent pool? Some of your needs will be met by the people you already love and work with. Make a thorough list of all the talent you already have in place, so that you’ll be able to match those with the skills and competencies you’re looking to fill.
- Analyzing Data and Identifying Gaps: With a list of needed skills, and a list of available talent — you have everything you need to identify skills gaps. Think about what projects will be ending and leave employees or freelancers ready for a new challenge, and also what skills your people may have that you don’t currently leverage. For example, your content writer may offer SEO services, a cybersecurity team lead might be able to handle compliance mandates, and managers may be able to coach or train.
- Develop a Plan to Address Skills Gaps: Once you know what skills gaps you have, it’s time to fill them ahead of time. In some cases you might need to hire full time employees, while in other situations you could get more value and experience by looking at on-demand freelance talent. A lot of skilled and knowledgeable talent now work as freelancers and consultants to get more autonomy and control over their working life, and they can be the perfect fit if you need a short-term skills infusion or you want to scale up and down their projects to meet demand.
- Implement and Monitor the Plan: Now’s the time to fill those gaps! Using your roadmap, identify when you will need talent onboarded, and create a plan to fill roles ahead of time. Remember, employees can take weeks or even months to find and onboard, while a freelancer management system can get talented on-demand talent working on your projects in a few days. Monitor the success of whatever strategy you use, and make sure that you review and iterate it at a regular cadence.
Using Fiverr Enterprise to Fill Skills Gaps
Fiverr Enterprise is a SaaS solution that gives you full visibility and control over your entire freelance workforce by allowing you to source, hire, onboard, manage and pay, all while ensuring compliance, so your teams can work faster and maximize business growth.
When it comes to filling skills gaps, Fiverr Enterprise lets you work in a more agile way, sourcing and hiring freelance talent on the fly, even if you identify skills gaps with an urgent deadline in place. You can simply post a job on the platform, and receive 2-6 fully-vetted freelancers in up to 72 hours or less. Pre-selected candidates are verified and available even quicker.
With Fiverr Enterprise, by the time you have your first conversation, you already know the candidates are compliant, you already know they fit your budget, and you already know they are available to work. All that’s left to do is ask where they got that awesome Zoom background.
Interested in learning more about sourcing for skills gaps and automating the onboarding process to get talent to work in the quickest time frame possible? Schedule 30 minutes with one of our workforce experts.