Skills-Based HR in Practice: Unilever, IBM, and BMO

How Are Global Companies Putting Skills-Based HR into Practice?

Our previous article covered why skills-based HR is spreading, the core shifts behind it, and the key challenges for 2025. As markets change faster, companies are doubling down on strategies that assess and manage talent through the lens of skills. This approach helps them manage, develop, and redeploy internal talent more effectively, raising both productivity and organizational agility. Leading global companies have already put skills-based HR to work and are reinventing their talent strategies as a result. This article looks at how Unilever, IBM, and BMO (Bank of Montreal) actually run skills-based HR.

Want the background first: why skills-based HR is spreading, what is changing, and the challenges organizations face? Start with the article below.

HR’s 2025 Megatrend: The Rise of Skills-Based HR

Skills-Based HR in Action at Global Companies

1. Unilever: Skills-Based Internal Mobility

Skills-Based Internal Mobility (Internal Mobility & Career Paths)

Unilever, the company behind brands like Dove and Vaseline, is one of the organizations that weathered the COVID-19 crisis most effectively, thanks in part to a skills-based career mobility program. Its internal mobility and project-sharing platform, Flex Experiences, encourages employees to build new skills, and the flexible deployment of talent it enables has lifted productivity across the company.

Unilever applies a skills-based approach to most areas of HR, from hiring to internal mobility to development. The result is a more flexible and comprehensive talent management system that matches what employees want with where HR needs people.

How It Works

• Profile Setup
  Employees enter their career goals, the experiences they want, and the skills and interests they need into their profiles.

• Future-Fit Plan
  AI helps employees identify and build the skills they need not only for their current role but also for their future careers and roles.

• Personalized Learning
  An AI-powered LMS recommends courses tailored to close the gap between the skills a role requires and the skills an employee has.

• Project-Based Matching
  Through an internal talent marketplace, employees can apply for and flexibly join projects across the company based on the skills they have. They typically spend about 20% of their working hours on these projects, gaining new experience and expanding their capabilities.

Results

• After Unilever introduced Flex Experiences, productivity across the workforce rose 41%, making the organization more efficient.
• Cross-functional collaboration increased 20%, establishing a more flexible culture of collaboration.
• About 95% of employees rated the Flex Experiences platform positively, and overall employee satisfaction improved.

(Source: Unilever official website and blog, press search, major consulting firm reports, CLASSUM analysis)

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2. IBM: Skills-Based HR

Skills Across Hiring, Development, and Rewards (Total Rewards)

IBM, which provides IT infrastructure and consulting services, uses work redesign to free up employee time, and encourages people to invest that time in their careers and skills. To support this, IBM applies a skills-based approach across HR and combines it with AI to raise organizational productivity and efficiency. Examples include skills-based hiring, personalized learning recommendations, and digital badges.

How It Works

• Skills Classification and Structure
  IBM defines the skills each role requires and assesses employees’ skill levels to build a skill map. This defines the competencies and technical skills the company’s talent strategy depends on.

• Skills-Based Hiring and Assessment
  Building on that skills structure, IBM infers candidates’ capabilities from their employment history and education to select the right people, and it monitors twice-yearly skill self-assessments and how consistently employees follow through on development.

• Skills-Focused Learning and Development
  An internal online learning portal recommends personalized courses. Linked to a digital badge system, it records employees’ learning outcomes visually, while Watson Talent provides talent development solutions covering talent acquisition, training, and career development support.

• Skills-Based Performance and Pay
  Under its “Skills as the New Currency” strategy, IBM uses the skills employees hold and how they apply them as performance metrics. Upward reviews of leaders reflect how well they support their team members’ development, and the value of an employee’s skills is tied to base pay increases.

Results

• Adopting skills-based HR cut the time spent on HR processes overall by 75%.
• Automating the promotion process with AI saved more than 12,000 hours of work a year.
• By tying learning more closely to day-to-day work, IBM saw employees who actively engage in learning become 40% more likely to be promoted, expanding opportunities for growth.

(Source: IBM official website and blog, press search, major consulting firm reports, CLASSUM analysis, Managing Uncertainty - Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage, Martin Reeves & Mike Deimler, Harvard Business Review, 2011)

3. BMO (Bank of Montreal): Skills-Focused Hiring and Talent Management

Skills-Focused Hiring and Talent Management (Learning Management, Talent Acquisition)

BMO, the eighth-largest bank in North America, focuses on hiring people who are not yet “ready-made” on paper, for example by educational credentials, and developing them. Its skills-based HR strategy strengthens efficiency and competitiveness across hiring, internal mobility, career development, learning management, and compensation, driving innovation in talent management from sourcing talent in local communities to building digital capabilities. By introducing an AI-powered, skills-focused hiring and talent management system, BMO reports that it has broadened workforce diversity, improved retention, and accelerated employee development, all of which strengthen its competitive position.

How It Works

• Building a skills-based talent management system
  
  • Using the external solution Phenom AI, BMO analyzes employees’ skills, interests, and career goals in real time and matches employee skills to roles in real time, opening up internal mobility opportunities.
  • Its Career Hub platform uses machine learning to offer tailored skill development and personalized role recommendations.
  • Employees receive personalized skill development and role recommendations.
• Creating a culture of continuous skill development through learning
  • BMO Forward, a skill development program centered on digital capabilities, offers tailored paths for learning core skills such as cloud and AI.
  • BMO’s corporate university, the BMO Institute for Learning, provides leadership training and role-specific skill development that ties learning to organizational goals.

Results

• About 4,000 employees have joined skill programs in advanced technologies, strengthening the company’s technical capabilities.
• People hired through skills-based hiring stay 9% longer on average than those hired through conventional channels, pointing to better role fit and a more stable workforce.

(Source: BMO official website and blog, press search, major consulting firm reports, CLASSUM analysis)

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Skills-Based HR: A Core Strategy for Competitive Advantage

Skills-based HR is not just a new way to administer people processes. It is a strategy companies need to adopt to sustain growth. Global companies are applying a skills-centered approach across internal mobility, L&D, hiring, and other areas of HR, and building more flexible, agile organizations as a result.

‍As these cases show, running skills-based HR well requires three things: a data-driven system that can analyze employee skills systematically, hiring and internal mobility processes designed around skills, and stronger programs that support continuous development. How well a company adopts and runs skills-based HR will be a major factor in its future competitiveness.

Related Reading

• Skills-Based HR Success Stories: Mastercard, Blizzard, and Sephora
• A 4-Step Guide to Becoming a Skills-Based Organization

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