Digital Credentials Impacts Hiring For Employers And Employees

It’s remarkable to think how many of our life’s accomplishments are memorialized on nothing more than a piece of paper. From our perfect attendance awards to our high school or college diplomas, we are to some degree reliant upon pointing to various printed certificates to communicate our level of skill and knowledge to others.

That model doesn’t really work in an age when everything is digital and every person is switching jobs far more often than they might have in decades past. Having qualifications collected in one place is a useful tool for any company hiring for certain skills, and Credly is facilitating businesses’ ability to view those certifications across all the jobs by person. I recently spoke with Credly CEO Jonathan Finkelstein about how his NYC-based company is looking to change hiring and credentialing for years to come.  

Mary Juetten: When did you start?

Jonathan Finkelstein: Credly was founded in November of 2012. It was the natural evolution from the previous companies I’d co-founded in the workforce and learning space – LearningTimes and before that HorizonLive, which was acquired by Blackboard in 2010.  Credly has helped catalyze a global movement to recognize and verify people’s skills in digital form, wherever they are learned or demonstrated, and digital credentials have rapidly gained momentum in widespread awareness and adoption. 

Juetten: What problem are you solving?

Finkelstein: Credly helps organizations make better decisions based on trusted information about what people know and can do. 

Before Credly, professionals had to physically keep track of their certifications, usually in paper form, if they were even lucky enough to have verified evidence of their achievements. And in many contexts, evidence of your skills and accomplishments are locked up in systems that you don’t have access to, or that are left behind when you move into another role or organization. 

Today, certifications and achievements are in digital form, not just hanging on the wall or shoved into a filing cabinet. We’re helping individuals put their credentials to work, and empowering organizations to better understand what to do with the verified skills their employees possess.

Juetten: Who are your customers and how do you find them?

Finkelstein: We work with employers, training organizations, associations, certification programs, and academic-based workforce development initiatives. Just a few of those organizations include Oracle, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), ForgeRock, Project Management Institute (PMI), Griffith University, even the National Honor Society.  

The common objective among our customers is filling the skills gap and the communications gap — that is, how people communicate what skills they have to those that would value them. We’re making a lot of progress against those objectives – Credly issues digital badges for the most in-demand hard and soft skills of 2020. And survey data tells us that our combined efforts are yielding exciting results. We found that 91% of Autodesk badge earners consider their digital credential to be valuable, with some reporting tangible benefits including up to a $10,000 increase in their income. 

Juetten: How did past projects and/or experience help with this new project?

Finkelstein: My past experience illuminated for me that the same investment in improving how people learn wasn’t extended to the outcomes of that learning. Learning for the sake of learning is valuable, but if you can’t connect those outcomes to a measurable impact on a professional path, then a significant opportunity is missed. The reality for many individuals is that their learning achievements are not their own; they’re siloed and locked up in proprietary systems that effectively wipe the slate clean every time they move from one organization to another. Bringing together a network of learning and certification providers through digital credentials – and placing ownership of those learning outcomes with the individual – ensures a vibrant, functioning ecosystem that helps everyone achieve their goals. 

Juetten: Who is on your team?

Finkelstein: Credly has the largest number of experts in digital credentials, certification, skills-based hiring and talent management under one roof. Our in-house expertise effectively doubled overnight in 2018 when Credly acquired Acclaim, the digital credentialing business, from Pearson. The combination created the world’s largest network of verified professional credentials, skills and certifications. We help our customers leverage the network to engage a global population of skilled professionals. And we’ve continued adding teammates across every part of the organization, having again almost doubled the size of the team since the acquisition.

Juetten: Did you raise money?

Finkelstein: From our founding, we grew organically — the good old fashioned way, by making products customers love, that they get value from and for which they’re willing to pay. In 2016, we brought on a group of partners as investors to help us further accelerate our growth and the ability to fulfill demand for what we were doing. 

Credly’s investors include leading social impact and venture firms that focus on workforce and learning transformation, large public companies and strategic partners, and even non-profit organizations — including two which made their first ever investments in a for-profit organization on the strength of Credly’s alignment with their mission and ability to bring about the kind of change they, too, seek in the world of work. From our first round in 2016 through our Series A last year, we raised about $20M.

Juetten: Startups are an adventure — what’s your favorite startup story?

Finkelstein: I spent the first few years of business trying to find the best way to explain what we do and why it’s significant, and inviting organizations to join in on our journey. I think most entrepreneurs can relate to that. And then on one particular day, I hopped into an Uber whose driver told me that his new CompTIA certifications were helping him get interviews for his first full-time job in the tech industry. He dropped me off at a meeting where I met with a business leader who held the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouts, which is now in digital form. There, I also spoke with a project manager who was just assigned to an exciting new marketing project thanks to her Project Management Professional certification

I realized, wait, it’s happening. All this hard work and the vision the whole team is united behind, it’s becoming a reality. Nearly everyone I interacted with — including complete strangers — had earned an achievement managed on our network. Individuals really are getting closer to achieving their full potential on the basis of their verified skills. 

Juetten: How do you measure success and what is your favorite success story?

Finkelstein: We have a few ways of tracking our success. One of them is the growth of our network – the number of organizations that have joined the movement, and ultimately the number of individuals whose lives have been positively impacted by the work we’re all doing. We also use an OKR process across the company, where the organization as a whole and each team within it identifies and executes against “objectives and key results” that help us stay focused on and measure what matters most. The most direct indicator of success to me is whether we are solving real problems for our customers and whether they are happy with the service we provide. We’ve got a renewal rate that’s pretty darned close to 100%, and our NPS score is amazing — in the highest tier for tech companies. 

Juetten: Any tips to add for early-stage founders?

Finkelstein: Here are a few that I’ve learned to lean on over the years. 

  • Love what you do, the problem you are solving and your mission. You’re going to be working on it for a long time.
  • Listen and learn, every day. Listen to customers — the ones you have and the ones you don’t yet have. Be humble and be curious. You rarely know as much as you think you know.
  • Build a team that you can learn from every day. Hire people who are smarter than you, and empower them to make decisions and take action. If the vision and company-wide priorities are clear, the values you care about are shared, and your team has the right skills — and the curiosity and eagerness to keep learning — your company will grow faster and you will trust people to do what’s in the best interests of the customer and the company.
  • Foster a culture of appreciation, one which recognizes skills, achievements and outcomes. Avoid unreliable proxies like degrees, pedigree, or years of experience when making people decisions. Cast the net wide and to unexpected places when looking for new talent. Many of our hires were not doing previously what they now do for us. Their skills, though developed in different environments, were transferrable and make them excellent at what they now do. We’ve hired actors into customer support, retail sportswear salespeople into SaaS sales, and public school teachers as coders. 

Juetten: What’s the long-term vision for your company?

Finkelstein: We envision a world where every person can achieve their full potential based on verified skills. Credly is leading the digital credential movement by making talent more visible and opportunity more accessible. As the workforce and learning ecosystem continues to embrace a culture of recognition, we’re bringing the focus to helping organizations use this new, real-time and robust data about people and their verified skills to make everyday and mission-critical people decisions. Digital credentials are becoming the universal standard for knowing what people actually know and can do, and Credly is the universal and trusted partner for bringing digital credentials to the global workforce.

Thank you to Jonathan for sharing his story with me. Anyone who is building a company and wants to share their tips and learnings, please reach out on Linkedin. #onwards.

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