Employees need a quick way to identify colleagues with specific knowledge or skills, especially in large or distributed organizations. This use case makes the Staffbase platform where your employees can easily discover in-house experts by enriching user profiles with custom fields and enabling skill-based search. The result is a searchable talent pool that breaks down silos, improves problem-solving, and fosters collaboration across all departments.

In this article:

Key Facts | Steps | Measure Success | Best Practices | How Finding Topic Experts Looks for Users

Problem Statement: Employees often spend time looking for expertise through email chains or by turning to external consultants because they lack visibility into their colleagues’ skills.

Business Objective: Save time, reduce costs, and encourage cross-team collaboration by making internal expertise searchable.

Staffbase Features: 

• Profile Fields: Capture structured expertise data like skills, certifications, or languages.
• Search: Indexes expertise fields, allowing employees to find colleagues by specific terms.
• Employee Directory: Enables filtering and browsing by skills, departments, and locations.

Audience: Employees who need to quickly find the right colleague with the right expertise.

Outcome: Employees can self-serve when seeking expertise. This leads to faster problem resolution, better innovation, and stronger connections across the company.

You can use this step-by-step guide to set up this use case in Staffbase.

Manually Add New Profile Fields

1. In the Studio, navigate to Settings > Profile Fields.
2. Click Add Field.
3. Enter a title for the field. For example, Skills.
4. Under Input Type, keep the default Text selection.
5. Activate the following toggles:
   -Display in User Profile 
   -Display in Employee Directory and Search Results
   -Make Accessible for Search
   -Enable User Editing
6. Click Save.

Learn more about profile fields or automating profile field creations via SCIM, CSV, or User API.

Populate Fields

1. In the App or Intranet, navigate to your profile menu > your profile.
2. Click Edit Profile.
3. Fill in the relevant skill-related fields.
4. Click Save Changes.

Learn more about editing your profile.

Search for Skills

1. In the App or Intranet, navigate to the global search.
2. Enter the skill you are looking for.
3. On the search results page, navigate to People to see coworkers with the skill listed on their profile.
4. Click on the name to open their profile.

These are different ways you can track the success of this use case.

Profile Completion

• Export user data to calculate the percentage of employees who filled out skill fields.
• High completion rates indicate strong adoption of the feature.

Search Usage

• Use the Search tab in the Analytics dashboard to monitor how often employees search for skill keywords.
• Identify common queries entered in the Search to add or refine skill fields.

Connection & Feedback

• Check for an increase in cross-department contacts.
• Create a survey to collect employee feedback about their experience.

Staffbase has a few recommendations to ensure the best experience for your users.

Define Clear and Consistent Fields

• Use predefined skill lists to standardize entries for free-text fields to encourage consistency.
• Regularly monitor search data to refine keywords and ensure users are using consistent terms.

 

Encourage Complete and Up-to-Date Profiles

• Offer incentives to motivate employees to fill out and update their profiles.
• Send periodic reminders to ensure profile information stays current.

 

Promote a Knowledge Sharing Culture

• Integrate expert discovery into company culture by sharing success stories and leadership reminders.
• Leverage the employee directory and other knowledge tools, like Q&A forums or intranet blogs, to support ongoing knowledge sharing and expert connections.

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How Finding Experts Looks for Users

Additional Helpful Information

• Overview of Profile Fields
• Overview of SCIM Attribute for a Profile Field