August WorkerTech Round-Up

August is generally thought of as a slower month. And while we hope everyone is taking a well-deserved break before the end of summer as we are, we have some exciting announcements this month.

The first of which is our investment into Clu, a company fixing the broken recruitment system by making skills-based hiring practical for employers, and fairer for jobseekers. We then take a deeper dive into skills-based hiring, looking at findings from early research and adoption within firms. Finally, we unpack the Resolution Foundation’s Labour Market Outlook for Q3 of 2025, and consider its implications for founders building in the WorkerTech sector.

We’re also very excited about the next edition of our WorkerTech Network Drinks! If you are someone building in, investing in or interested in the sector, join us on September 30th at 5:30 pm for drinks at the Resolution Foundation offices. Find details and tickets at the end of the email.

Until next month,
Aish Moothan
Ventures Manager, Resolution Ventures 

Announcing our investment in Clu and a new approach to hiring

This month, we’re pleased to announce our investment into Clu, a Cardiff-based company helping employers make more strategic, skills-based decisions about work, people and hiring.

Clu was founded on the belief that traditional hiring processes fail too many people. Jobseekers without degrees, gaps on their CVs or the right networks are often shut out of roles they could do well. Clu’s platform takes a different approach. It helps candidates build a profile based on what they can do, and helps employers design jobs and match people based on skills, not assumptions.

Since relaunching earlier this year, Clu has repositioned itself as a workforce intelligence platform. It now supports leaders to make hiring and restructuring decisions with greater clarity, using transparent, skills-based data models. The product is already being adopted across government, financial services and other regulated sectors, where the appetite for AI tools is growing but off-the-shelf GenAI solutions often fall short on explainability and risk.

Clu’s growth reflects this shift. In just three months, the team has more than quadrupled revenue. Employers using Clu report faster hiring cycles, clearer job design, and better candidate fit. On the candidate side, Clu continues to reach users typically excluded from higher-paying work: of 7,000 active users, 18% have a disability, 7% are neurodivergent and nearly half did not attend university. Among those placed in work through the platform, 88% remain in-role after a year.

We’re excited to back Joseph, Cayelan and the team as they build a platform fit for how work is changing. Find out more about Clu on their website here or read their latest publication, SkillsLiteracy™, a skills strategy playbook for employers.

Understanding the Rise of Skills-Based Hiring

Hiring based on skills, rather than formal qualifications or previous job titles, has gained significant momentum over the past few years. A growing body of research suggests that this shift is not just a change in employer preferences, but a necessary adaptation to the changing nature of work and the limitations of traditional recruitment models.

Analysis from researchers at the University of Oxford, drawing on more than ten million UK job adverts from 2018 to 2024, offers a comprehensive picture (relative to the information we’ve had to date). The study finds that demand for specific technical and cognitive skills, specifically those relating to AI and net zero tech, has grown rapidly. Mentions of AI-related skills, for example, rose by 21% over the period. At the same time, references to university degrees in job postings for these roles fell by 15%.

This decline in ‘traditional’ credential requirements is not uniform across the job market. It appears to be concentrated in sectors where skills are evolving quickly and university degrees or other formal qualifications are struggling to keep up.

But employers seem to be re-evaluating what makes a jobseeker “qualified” for a given role. More emphasis is being placed on demonstrated competencies than on signals like degrees or years of experience. Survey data from Indeed which found that 51% of hiring managers believe that skills are more important than degrees, job titles or years of experience when evaluating candidates.

There is, however, a gap between this change in perception and implementation within hiring. Many companies are continuing to use hiring systems run by algorithms that are attuned to university degrees and years of experience, often as arbitrary filters for role fitment. Often, these two aspects of a CV are used as a first-round filter, even when they’re not essential to the role, and relatively few have systems in place to assess candidate skills effectively.

At the same time, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs estimates that 39% of the core skills workers will need by 2030 are changing. This includes not just technical skills, but also cognitive, interpersonal, and self-management capabilities. As job content evolves and new roles emerge, traditional credentials will become a less reliable signal of suitability.

In practice, hiring managers often lack tools to map skills to job requirements, and many candidates don’t know how to translate their experience into skills-based language that employers can recognise. So while increasingly important, skills-based hiring is not yet accessible to a large number of sectors.

Companies like Clu are trying to change that. As the jobs market evolves and new skills and industries start to dominate, the systems that connect people to jobs will also need to catch up.

Latest insights from the Resolution Foundation 

Labour Market Outlook – Q3 2025

Hiring based on skills, rather than formal qualifications or previous job titles, has gained significant momentum over the past few years. A growing body of research suggests that this shift is not just a change in employer preferences, but a necessary adaptation to the changing nature of work and the limitations of traditional recruitment models.

The Resolution Foundation’s latest Labour Market Outlook points to a cooler labour market. Our economists’ ‘nowcasting’ suggests that:
(i) Unemployment has moved up toward 5 per cent through June and July
(ii) Redundancies remain relatively low
(iii) Nominal pay growth is easing rather than collapsing.

While hiring conditions are looser than a year ago and looser than in 2019, they are nowhere near the slack seen after the financial crisis or during the pandemic.

Slack, in the context of the labour market, refers to the spare capacity in the jobs market; the supply of workers exceeds the demand for them. More slack means the labour market is looser, and it is easier for employers to hire. As a result, wage pressure tends to fade. Less slack means the market is tight, and employers may struggle to fill roles.

Payroll records show around 165,000 fewer payrolled employees since the October 2024 peak. With the working-age population growing quickly, RF estimates the employment rate has slipped faster than headline surveys imply. On RF’s triangulation, inactivity has likely risen by roughly one percentage point over the past two years. In recent months, the drop in the employment rate reflects both population growth and an outright fall in jobs, a combination that is unusual outside recessions.

A read across vacancies, quits, employer hiring difficulties and other indicators shows slack has increased. Vacancies are down, reported hiring frictions have eased, and job-to-job moves are lower. The redundancy rate sits close to 2019 levels, which helps explain why pay growth has decelerated but is still firmer than we might expect in a softer market.

Cooling is sharpest in lower-pay sectors that also faced recent cost shifts, including the higher National Living Wage and changes to employer National Insurance thresholds. However, RF economists caution that it is too early to pin causality on any single factor.

Implications for WorkerTech founders & investors

Hiring may be slower and more selective, so technology that improves matching efficiency and helps employers design roles around skills and internal redeployment will see stronger demand. Skills-based tools like Clu fit this need.

Redundancies are not spiking, which may signal a higher emphasis on retention and progression rather than constant replacement. Technology that supports fair work conditions, particularly in low-paid or shift-based work, could help firms hardest hit by rising costs retain staff and decrease turnover-related costs.

Demand is also likely to grow for return-to-work pathways, health and disability support, and flexible options for carers. Founders building benefits navigation, occupational health and flexible work infrastructure may benefit from these conditions.

Get involved

WorkerTech Network Drinks
We’ve had a few exciting things in the works over the past year, and we would like to get our network together to celebrate. If you’re a founder, an investor or just someone interested in the sector, do come along! Find details like date/time/location and secure a (free) ticket here.

Resolution Ventures team at the BVCA Summit
Are you planning on attending the BVCA Summit on September 9th & 10th? Louise Marston (Director of Ventures) & Martin Carruthers (Investment Advisor) from the Resolution Ventures team will be there too. Get in touch at ventures@resolutionfoundation.org if you would like to grab time with either of them at the Summit.

✨ Apply for direct investment from Resolution Ventures 
We accept applications from WorkerTech ventures on a rolling basis and expect to make new investments from autumn this year onwards. You can book a slot in our office hours for an initial conversation.