Business
Efficient networks
Improving tech in the workplace can boost productivity, sustainability and the bottom line.
25 November 2024
This article first appeared in our World Environment Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 05 June 2026. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Main image: Kevin Chan, CEO of Epitome Global
Algorithmic bias, blanket rejections, torrents of AI-generated CVs and applications – these are just some of the issues that have given AI in recruitment a bad reputation.
For Kevin Chan, CEO of Epitome Global, they are simply examples of AI used badly; he argues that when done right, AI can align talent with the purpose-driven roles they seek and give recruiters the tools to hire candidates who stay.
‘Most coverage of AI in recruitment focuses on speed’, Kevin explains; ‘faster screening, faster rejection, faster matching. Instead, HR teams should use AI to look deeper at each candidate – not to screen CVs faster, but to better understand the people behind them.’
For Kevin, when used well AI can enable a hiring manager to genuinely consider 500 people rather than reflexively reject 450 of them. ‘That’s a different role for AI’, he says, ‘and it’s the one we’re built around.’
Epitome’s founding conviction is simple: most workforce technology reduces a human being to a row on a spreadsheet – little more than a list of skills and experiences on a CV.
‘Most companies know more about their stock than they know about their people’, Kevin shares. ‘They can tell you what’s in the warehouse, but they can’t tell you which employees are most likely to leave in the next six months, or who could best step up to a role if given the chance.’
Rather than just viewing a candidate as a simple set of credentials and experiences, Epitome empowers HR teams to understand both prospective and existing employees as rounded individuals – something it calls ‘whole-person intelligence’.
‘Our platform’s default is to understand the person first, then match the role’, Kevin explains. ‘Epitome began as a psychometric and competency platform, and only later moved into career matching, job posting and workforce analytics. That’s the opposite of the path most HR-tech vendors have walked.’
Over the last 10 years, Epitome has grown into a workforce intelligence layer that is used by governments, enterprises and education systems across Asia-Pacific and Europe.
The platform focuses on eight sectors – finance, professional services, healthcare, construction, energy, technology, government and education – but the size of each organisation varies hugely.
‘Our customers run from 30-person companies to government organisations covering more than 145,000 employees’, Kevin says. ‘The common thread isn’t sector or scale; it’s that they have reached the point where intuition no longer suffices. They need a system that understands the potential of their workforce and can help them to make informed decisions about it.’
When used intelligently, AI enables HR to look at existing employees and ask questions – such as: who’s at risk of leaving? who’s underused? who’d succeed in a stretch role? – and get answers based on hard data rather than gut feel.
At the heart of Epitome is a proprietary database of employee profiles: 1.3 million individual profiles collected over a decade, plus over 330,000 skill-occupation records.
Each candidate – whether internal or external – is guided through a 45-minute assessment which collects in-depth psychometric data on the individual, including interests, values, motivations and skills.
The platform’s AI cross-references these data against Epitome’s database of employee profiles and skills records to identify what a person can do, how they’d thrive and where they’d be wasted. The output is a profile that an HR manager can actually act on.
‘AI gives organisations the power to really understand their people – and workforce sustainability starts with knowing who you have and making the best use of them’, Kevin says.
Instead of assessing candidates based purely on what they’ve done in the past, Epitome’s platform also enables HR teams to accurately predict who’ll be most suitable for roles based on the entire spectrum of their personality, including their motivations, values, personal qualities, ability to adapt and learning agility.
In a world where jobseekers are increasingly avoiding companies whose values don’t match their own ethics, this is a crucial benefit for HR teams.
‘Across our 1.3 million profiles, one of the strongest predictors of someone staying in a role isn’t compensation, but the alignment between what they value and what the organisation does’, Kevin tells us. ‘People are voting with their feet on values, and employers are starting to take notice.’
Epitome’s psychometric profile includes a values dimension – 16 distinct work values, ranging from autonomy to social impact, scored against both the person and the role. When a recruiter compares a candidate with a role they don’t just see a skills match, but also a values alignment.
‘Hiring someone who doesn’t share your organisation’s values is expensive’, Kevin says; ‘you’ll pay them, train them and lose them within 18 months. Aligning values is sustainability at the employment level.’
Staff values can make or break a company’s broader sustainability strategy; policies around waste reduction, energy saving, recycling and greener commuting can only succeed with employee buy-in
The appointment of ‘sustainability champions’ throughout the workforce can (and very often does) help to make these policies a meaningful part of a company’s culture, but the challenge is finding the right people to take up these roles.
‘Epitome can help organisations identify those people who not only have an abiding commitment to sustainability, but have the right combination of values, communication skills and influence to implement policies and encourage fellow employees to follow them’, Kevin explains. ‘But employees are the entire sustainability story. The best carbon reduction plan in the world fails if the people implementing it don’t believe in it.’
Workforce sustainability in a broader sense – as the ability to retain, develop and redeploy people rather than constantly hiring externally – is itself a sustainability metric.
Every external hire that should have been an internal promotion is preventable churn; a redundancy that could have been a redeployment is wasted human capability.
‘Across our customer base, the organisations with the strongest environmental credentials tend also to be the ones with the lowest rates of attrition’, Kevin shares. ‘This isn’t a coincidence; the culture that respects the planet usually also respects its people.’
Kevin has observed that most retention failures aren’t pay-related, they’re potential-related – people leave when they can’t see a future inside the organisation. Epitome addresses this issue by revealing alternatives for every individual.
‘Our platform enables HR teams to move people more intelligently within the organisation, identifying roles and assignments that match their values and capabilities. By helping companies to rethink traditional expectations of which employees are appropriate for which roles, Epitome opens the way for them to become data-driven meritocracies.’
Over the next 12 months, one of the goals at Epitome is to scale its government work. ‘The case for countries understanding their workforce at the same depth that a single company does is becoming impossible to ignore’, Kevin reveals.
Another area of focus will involve opening the profiling experience up to individuals. ‘Right now, you can only access Epitome through an employer’, Kevin explains. ‘We’re building a version where a jobseeker can assess themselves, understand their profile and use it to find roles where they’d genuinely thrive. That’s where the consumer-facing version of workforce sustainability starts.’
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