How S&P Global is using Talent Intelligence to build a connected workforce

The Challenge

1. Global hiring at scale, with no consistent signal

S&P Global was screening 700k–800k unique candidates annually across the U.S., U.K., India and other markets, but lacked a unified, skills-led way to assess them fairly and consistently. Leaders needed reliable, comparable data on candidates’ skills, not just CVs and inferred profiles.

2. Talent blind spots and unvalidated skills

Thousands of employees had skills that were inferred but never formally assessed, creating blind spots for internal mobility, succession, and career pathing. This made it hard to confidently decide who was ready for future roles, where to invest in development, and how to reduce bias in movement decisions.

3. Fragmented platforms and insight

Workday ATS and Eightfold AI were running in parallel, but skills data was not joined up across hiring, workforce planning, and talent management platforms. Valuable information gathered during recruitment wasn’t reused to inform wider talent decisions, limiting the impact of S&P’s HR technology investments. 

The Solution: SHL helps turns skills into a strategic advantage

S&P Global needed a partner that could match its scale, complexity, and appetite for evidence-based decisions. SHL stood out as the only assessment provider that could meet these demands providing:

• Global scale with local precision
  SHL could support S&P Global’s hiring needs across major markets, offering a consistent approach across languages and regions, helping to embed fairness and comparability in assessments worldwide.
• Rich, reusable skills data per employee
  SHL’s Global Skills Assessment quickly evaluates 96 validated workplace skills that could be aligned to S&P Global’s skills framework and create reusable data to help improve accuracy and confidence in decision-making, accelerating targeted learning, and internal moves.
• Fairness and legal defensibility
  Built on decades of psychometric research, SHL’s assessments provide robust validity evidence and defensible data for critical decisions and regulatory environments. This gave S&P Global transparent, explainable insight instead of opaque “black box” AI outputs or unvalidated inferred skills.
• Deep integration with Eightfold and HR tech
  SHL was the only major assessment provider natively integrated with Eightfold, enabling assessed skills data to flow straight into S&P Global’s internal talent marketplace from day one. This meant skills insights gathered in hiring could immediately inform mobility, workforce planning, and development decisions rather than sitting in silos.

The Result: Circular skills journey powers hiring, mobility and learning

As roles continue to evolve, S&P Global now have a holistic view of skills data combining everything from resumes and AI-inferred skills to assessments and interviews. When a new role or project arises, leaders can see if the right skills exist within the organization first, and if anyone can be mobilized or upskilled quickly before turning to external hiring.

To ensure consistency from right at the top of the funnel, even job adverts focus more on skills requirements that SHL’s assessments can evaluate at scale. The resulting skills data is all fed back into the internal talent marketplace, and new hires and employees alike can look at their career paths and see what skills they want to develop from day one. The learning management system is also interlinked so recommendations can be made for appropriate courses, mentorships and learning routes, or even further assessments to help identify growth areas.

With this skills transformation, powered by a data-driven talent ecosystem, S&P are building a more effective and engaged workforce providing flexibility to adapt quickly, while keeping governance, defensibility, and business relevance at the core of its talent strategy.