Swedish Work Lab
- the Future of Work

 In the spring of 2019, we embarked on an adventure with TRR – an organisation helping white collar workers to transition from one job to the next through offering counselling, upskilling & reskilling. Together, we explored the future of work and after an inspiring and successful hackathon in September 2019, we started prototyping a digital tool that was going to match job seekers with employers based on soft skills. 

After several interviews with managers and people within HR in different organisations, we realised that soft skills such as “entrepreneurial spirit”, “self-disciplined” and “development driven” were gaining more and more importance. The problem was that there’s no common language for these soft skills, and by extension no objective way of validating them. 

Simultaneously, there are many job seekers who have years of experience and have gained several soft skills throughout their work-life but find it hard to convey them and their value in a clear and simple way. 

Based on a taxonomy developed by the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen), we developed a prototype with different purposes. First of all, job seekers could test what soft skills they already had and got suggestions on how to describe those in e.g. a CV or during a job interview. Secondly, employers could fill in a questionnaire regarding what soft skills they’re looking for and then prioritise them in order to boil it down to the most important skills that are needed for the role. 

We would then match the job seeker with the best-suited vacancies based on their soft skills profile, and vice versa; employers with the best-suited candidates. Our ambition was that this might provide a wider spectrum of potential candidates and job possibilities, opening both parties’ eyes to options they may not otherwise have considered. But also that a match made would be more long-term and sustainable, given that more thought and weight was given to the informal skills and personal approach required in the vacant role, team, and place of work. An area that (as mentioned above) often lacks formal process, but tends to be crucial in shaping how well the recruitment works over time.