Reading a skills profile

Open any profile in ProFinda and you see a name, a photo, and a wall of skills. The skill wall is where new resourcing leads go wrong, because they read it as a flat list. It is not. Every skill on a profile carries a source and a date, and both change what the skill is worth.

The three sources

Declared skills are self-reported. They tell you what someone believes about themselves, which is useful but unweighted. Inferred skills come from work history: ProFinda saw this person staffed on three restructuring engagements and inferred restructuring capability. Verified skills have been confirmed by a manager, an assessment, or a credential feed.

When you hover over a skill, the tooltip shows its source and the most recent evidence date. A verified skill exercised last quarter outranks a declared skill from 2023, and the match score already reflects this. Your job when reviewing a shortlist is to sanity-check the same thing by eye.

The recency check

Before you put someone forward, scan the evidence dates on the two or three skills the request actually hinges on. A consultant whose “IFRS 17” experience last shows up in early 2024 may still be strong, but the conversation with the engagement lead should mention it. Thirty seconds of checking prevents an awkward week three.

Thin profiles

You will meet profiles with eight skills where a peer has forty. Do not read thin as junior. It usually means the person joined recently, came through an acquisition, or simply has not updated anything since onboarding. The work history feed fills profiles automatically over time, but a quick message asking someone to spend ten minutes on their profile is often the highest value action you take all week. Point them at the profile setup guide rather than writing instructions yourself.

What the profile does not tell you

Availability lives on a different tab, and aspiration lives in the development goals section. A perfect skills match who has flagged that they want to move away from that work is a match you make sparingly. Read the whole profile, not just the wall.