Meet the AI Agents for Employees: The End of the One-Time Skills Profile

If the goal of a skills strategy is to know your workforce enough to grow it from within, then most organizations are sitting on exactly the data they need and doing almost nothing with it. Employee profiles built at onboarding go stale within months. Skills frameworks get populated once and rarely updated, and high performers who stop finding growth internally start looking elsewhere. This is not a motivation problem or a question of employee willingness. It is a challenge rooted in a mismatch between how HR teams think about skills and how employees experience their own work.

On a recent episode of Talent Experience Live, Jesus Latorre-Socas, Director of Product Management at Phenom, broke down why the traditional approach to skills data collection was built on a flawed assumption, and how Phenom’s agents, Career Coach and Profile Builder, are designed to fix it from the ground up.

Why Employees Stop Updating Their Skills Profiles 

Skills data collection often assumes that employees know what skills they have and are willing to describe them in structured terms. When someone talks about what they do for a living, they reach for experiences, projects, problems they solved, and teams they led, not a list of competencies. Skills are HR language. Experiences are human language, and the gap between the two is where most skills initiatives quietly stall.

"Employees do not talk about skills the way HR does. The way people approach their jobs and describe their experiences is conversational by nature, and that is where the real information lives," Latorre-Socas explained. 

An equally deep problem sits underneath that one. Employees who have been with an organization for five or seven years have already provided enormous amounts of data through their work history, performance reviews, project involvement, and manager interactions. Asking a tenured employee to fill out another form feels redundant, as they reasonably expect the organization to already know what they have done, which turns the form into friction rather than insight.

A skills database built this way stays perpetually incomplete, capturing only what employees thought to mention, in the language they happened to use, at the single moment they were asked. Phenom Profile Builder fixes that.

How Phenom Profile Builder and Career Coach Build a Skills Picture 

Profile Builder holds a conversation with employees, drawing out experiences, projects, and context in the natural way people actually talk about their work. It then extracts and structures the skills from what was shared without requiring the employee to think in HR terms at all. What makes this meaningful is that a conversation can bring out things a form never could, and the difference lives in the details of how they describe the work.  

"These are exactly the kinds of details that agents can now surface and structure, with no natural way to capture them before," Latorre-Socas said. 

Profile Builder works across 3 distinct scenarios that represent the full range of an organization's workforce: 

1. For someone new to the company, it extends what was captured during the application process, discovering interests, capabilities, and project experience that a resume would never catch. 

2. For someone already in the organization, it runs on an ongoing basis, checking in after performance cycles, one-on-one conversations, and project completions to update the profile as the employee's work evolves.

3. For complex roles where depth of experience matters as much as category of skill, it surfaces the contextual detail that separates someone who has done something from someone who has done it at scale, in a different country, under genuine operational pressure.

Feature Spotlight: Profile Builder also operates in any language, handling real-time conversation in French, German, Spanish, or any other language a global workforce brings.

How Profile Builder Gives Employees Ownership of Their Career Story

Collecting this depth of information about employees only works if employees trust it, and trust requires that they feel genuinely in control of what gets shared and with whom. Profile Builder keeps that dynamic at the center of how it operates. 

"The information we gather is not just collected for the organization's benefit,” Latorre-Socas said. It is built for the employee first, giving them a clearer picture of what they have done and what they are capable of." 

Employees receive the skills profile that Profile Builder assembled on their behalf and can review, edit, or remove anything before it becomes part of their official record. If someone mentioned an interest in moving to a different function during a conversation, they can choose not to share that with their manager. If the proficiency level assigned to a skill does not reflect where they believe they are heading, they can flag that and add context. As a result, Profile Builder builds a richer picture of what an employee has accomplished and brings that picture back to them as something actionable. 

Employees also receive development and opportunity recommendations immediately, grounded in a more complete understanding of who they are and what they bring. Over time, the profile stays current without requiring anyone to remember to update it, with Profile Builder continuously handling that in the background.

Surfacing the Right Opportunities at the Right Moment

When Profile Builder has built an accurate, continuously updated picture of an employee, Career Coach puts that picture to work on the employee's behalf without waiting for them to initiate a search. Internal career development has historically placed the entire burden of initiative on the employee, requiring them to figure out on their own how their current skills map to where they want to go. Most employees never complete that journey because of how much initiation the process demands at a moment when they are already fully occupied with their current role.

"Career Coach operates on a proactive model, surfacing opportunities to employees rather than waiting for them to go looking,” Latorre-Socas said. “By the time someone is actively searching and cannot find what they want internally, the likelihood of them looking externally has already increased significantly." 

Career Coach finds roles, development pathways, mentorship connections, and learning opportunities based on what the profile already shows about the employee, without requiring them to articulate what they are looking for or manually navigate the internal landscape. For a talent management function that has historically struggled to demonstrate organizational investment in employee growth, that proactive outreach changes what the relationship feels like from the inside.

Strengthening the Skills Strategy You Already Have

For talent management professionals who have spent years building skills frameworks, conducting assessments, and working toward manager validation of skills data, the question of whether these agents make the prior work obsolete is a reasonable one, and the answer is that they do not. 

"This is not about replacing the work that talent management teams have already done or starting over from scratch. It is about using agents to validate that work and keep it current at a scale that was never previously achievable," Latorre-Socas said.

The skills frameworks and assessment criteria that talent management teams have built become the baseline against which Career Coach and Profile Builder validate and update. Instead of asking a manager to manually confirm whether hundreds of employees have a given skill, Profile Builder can hold a targeted conversation with each employee about their experience with that skill and produce a validated assessment with the context to support it. Replacing the comprehensive manual effort of individual conversations across an entire workforce, the manager review becomes a focused look at flagged exceptions, freeing talent management capacity for the higher-order work of interpreting what the data shows and deciding what to do about it.

For organizations still early in their skills journey, Career Coach and Profile Builder provide an accessible entry point that does not require a fully built framework before meaningful data collection can begin. Starting with a specific population, piloting the approach, and iterating based on the feedback are exactly how the capability was intended to scale. That loop, between what the agents surface and what the talent team learns, becomes its own engine for refining the skills strategy over time.

Explore how Career Coach and Profile Builder can work for your workforce. Book a demo to see both in action.