Merita Consulting

Skills First

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one truth remains constant: a company is only as strong as its workforce. This is where skills-first hiring and promoting come to the forefront, offering a means to fill positions and a catalyst for driving your company’s growth. When you strategically hire for skills, you open doors to enhanced innovation, heightened productivity, and an overall surge in business success.

Skill Definitions

Determining the skills for each role is a critical first step in building an adaptive workforce. These definitions are the foundation for your job descriptions, job postings, career pathways, and workforce development programs, all of which provide the platform for implementing a skills-first hiring and promotion program.



Skills Assessments

Skills assessments are crucial to the skills-based hiring process. They are the litmus test that helps employers determine if a candidate’s abilities align with the role’s requirements. Yet evaluating technical skills alone is not enough.

You must embrace a holistic approach to skills assessments to find the perfect fit for your team.


Apple’s Topsy turvy deal

Posted on by Dwayne Nesmith

sydneyThe speculation about Apple’s motives in the Topsy deal started as soon as Apple announced they were buying the self-proclaimed realtime search engine for the social web. So why did Apple buy them? Or better yet, why isn’t it clear why Apple bought them? If Twitter had bought Topsy, there would be little of this speculation.

So first of all, let’s discuss Topsy’s assets and capabilities and then talk about how Apple may use each of them. First of all, Topsy is one of four “certified data resellers” for Twitter. The other three are Boulder’s Gnip, DataSift and NTT Data. This means that Topsy not only has access to the full twitter “fire hose”, but they are able to license that stream of tweets to other companies. So Topsy has access to use and resell the full Twitter stream.

Topsy doesn’t just pass this stream along to it’s clients. Topsy provides social search, analytics, and trends capabilities that help their clients use the Twitter feeds to better understand how customers perceive the clients’ brands.

According to Elizabeth Dwoskin, Topsy is “at heart, a trendspotter” and has helped Hollywood executives predict box office success, as well as supporting government agencies as they monitor emergency responses and track the effectiveness of aid deliveries.

Now let’s turn our attention to Apple. From music, to movies, to apps, Apple sits near the center of the consumer’s entertainment sphere. Topsy certainly helps Apple analyze customer trends and desires. That can only be a good thing for iTunes and Apple’s marketing teams. However, Apple’s 2010 social music play, Ping, was a social networking play. Topsy does not seem to help Apple compete in this space.

Apple is also on the outside looking in when it comes to search. Does Apple need to compete in the search space? Does Apple want to compete in the search space? Apple maps was their first attempt – as in one of many attempts – to wrestle some of the search power away from Google.

Search seems to be the strongest argument for Apple’s move. Yes, the other areas may add a bit of icing on the cake, but search as described by Azeem Azhar, The Real Reason Apple Bought Topsy and John Battelle’s, APPLE+TOPSY: IT’S NOT ABOUT TWITTER (AND TWITTER IS PROBABLY COOL WITH THAT) is the real value Apple looks to gain from Topsy.