For years, we’ve operated on the frontlines of the talent market. We began by building a leading job board in SEA, equipped with a database of over 600,000 candidates and a straightforward goal: Connecting people with jobs. But a strange thing kept happening.
Companies were flooded with applications, yet complained they couldn’t find qualified candidates. Talented people grew frustrated, sending résumés into a void. We were stuck in the middle, and we realized a hard truth that the problem wasn’t the people. It was the process. The systems for hiring talent were completely disconnected from the systems for developing it.
This realization sent us on a journey from a job board to a recruitment agency, and from there to building TalentsForce. This is the story of why we had to evolve.
Flying blind isn't a strategy
To gain a closer understanding of the problem, we established a recruitment agency. We sat in thousands of interviews and listened to hiring managers detail their needs. One insight rose to the surface again and again: everything comes down to skills. Not degrees. Not past job titles. The simple, powerful ability to learn, adapt, and create. Yet, almost no one was hiring that way.
The problem deepened as we saw companies trying to navigate digital transformation. The pivotal moment occurred while working with a large enterprise undergoing a massive restructuring. They were laying off staff in one department while desperately hiring for new digital roles in another. It didn't make sense. We knew they had people internally who, with the right support, could grow into those future-facing roles.
But they couldn't see it.
Without a map of their workforce's capabilities, a skill graph, they were flying blind. That's when we saw the real challenge, the one that holds nearly every organization back: Talent is not lacking. Visibility is.
In fast-moving markets, this challenge is amplified. Traditional "Talent Management" systems function as passive systems of record. They can tell you who you have, but not what they’re capable of or what you need next. In today's fast-paced world, this is no longer sufficient.
A new architecture for work: The Talent Intelligence Platform
This journey is why we had to become something more. Our original name, Hireforce, represented where we started, focused on the crucial, but singular, act of hiring. But our experience taught us that solving the hiring problem alone wasn't enough.
The real opportunity was to build a system that sees the full potential of a workforce.
TalentsForce represents that evolution. It’s the name for a strategic Talent Intelligence Platform built not from theory, but from the frontlines of hiring and the trenches of transformation. It reflects our expanded mission: To move beyond fixing workflows and start empowering workforce agility.
At its core, our platform is built on a simple but powerful philosophy that skills are the universal language of opportunity. To bring this to life, we created a Skills Foundation, the central intelligence layer that organizes and understands skills data. For the Japanese market, for example, this is powered by a proprietary, 70,000-item skill taxonomy, ensuring our AI-driven insights are not just global best practices but are deeply relevant to local business needs.
This allows us to provide a unified, Two-Sided Ecosystem:
Empowering Workforce Agility
As our Co-founder & COO, James Nguyen, states, “For too long, companies have been forced to make critical talent decisions with an incomplete picture. The future of work demands a completely new Talent Intelligence Platform built on the universal language of skills. TalentsForce is that system.”
Our rebrand is more than a new name. It's a commitment to solving the core challenge of workforce agility. It’s our answer to the challenges we witnessed firsthand, a solution that helps companies not just hire, but also see, reskill, and transform from within.
Because we believe the future of work isn’t about where you’ve been. It’s about what you’re capable of becoming. And we’re here to make sure no talent is left behind.
Explore the platform: https://talentsforce.io/
