How Fides assessed and upskilled 300+ tech professionals and reduced hiring time by 80%

Fides, founded in 2005, is a technology partner for businesses undergoing digital transformation with a strong focus on the cloud-native world. With over 20 years of experience, Fides offers end-to-end tech solutions tailored to diverse business needs. Their services include custom software development, development of cloud-native applications, cloud migrations and management of existing installations. Fides, a well known AWS Partner, works with companies in several industries, from technology to pharma.

Fides’s human-centric model emphasizes continuous training and professional growth, ensuring that their team remains agile and responsive to evolving market demands. As a rapidly expanding company, Fides needed scalable solutions to maintain their culture of excellence while managing growth and meeting increasingly stringent audit requirements.

Fides faced five critical challenges as they scaled their operations and expanded their technical team:

1) Create a standardized skill mapping and onboarding process

They needed to create and consolidate an onboarding process that would support both management and new hires in sharing Fides culture and client management practices. As a rapidly growing company, Fides required a centralized approach that would introduce new hires to company values, working methods, and client relationship standards from day one. Traditional onboarding processes were time-consuming and inconsistent across different teams.

2) Deliver career paths to assess current skills and build new ones

With most team members working on diverse client projects, employees needed highly personalized content to tackle the unique challenges they faced daily. The training had to cover both hard skills for developers and soft skills for customer-facing roles, such as sales or marketing teams.

3) Deliver tech and non-tech certifications with a simple system

As Fides expanded into more regulated industries, they needed to ensure all employees could certify their competencies and satisfy audit requirements efficiently. The company until now has been managing certifications across multiple tools and was looking for a centralized solution to streamline the certification delivery and tracking across hundreds of employees and programs.

4) Go beyond the traditional training approach

The engagement challenge that often plagues corporate training was another critical issue to address. Fides recognized that traditional training methods often fail to keep employees engaged long-term. They needed innovative events and communication strategies to maintain continuous learning momentum across their organization.

5) Accelerate their recruiting process and reduce bad hires

Fides wanted to improve their hiring process by making candidate screening faster and more effective. Beyond verifying technical proficiency in languages like Java, React, Node.js, and Vue.js, Fides needed to assess cultural fit and help candidates understand the types of projects they would work on once hired.

These are the most important outcomes Fides achieved after their first year adopting Anthropos:

Antonio Caccioppoli | Chief Technology Officer, Fides

Fides’s first priority was building a comprehensive onboarding system that could efficiently manage new hires while providing them with essential company information and cultural context.

The solution began with intelligent skills mapping during the onboarding process. New employees complete a brief 5-minute process that maps their skills automatically from their CV or LinkedIn profile. The platform recognizes over 60,000 skills distributed across 38 categories and mapped to 18,000 roles, giving management complete visibility into each employee’s capabilities and background.

Learn more about our Management Dashboard

New hires explore curated onboarding content that explains Fides’s values, culture, and best practices for client management. AI Simulations allow new employees to practice real client scenarios they’ll encounter, helping them understand Fides’s standards for service delivery and relationship management from day one.

Using the initial skills mapping, Fides identified specific development opportunities for each employee based on their daily work requirements.

Anthropos authoring tool, Studio, lets Fides create completely personalized learning paths.

The content mix included videos, articles, podcasts, and AI Simulations, providing diverse learning experiences that catered to different learning styles. This variety ensured that employees not only learned new concepts but could practice applying them in realistic scenarios.

For developers, the training combined technical hard skills with essential soft skills, covering everything from coding best practices to client communication.

For customer-facing roles, including sales and marketing teams, the focus shifted to communication skills, stakeholder management, and relationship building.

The AI Simulations proved particularly valuable, allowing employees to practice real situations they would encounter with clients.

Team members could make mistakes safely, receive instant feedback, and rapidly improve their performance without real-world consequences.

In recent months, beyond continuous training, all technical employees complete simulations to certify their competencies and satisfy audit requirements. This systematic approach ensures that Fides can demonstrate compliance with industry standards while maintaining high-quality service delivery.

Martina Russo | IT Recruiter, Fides

To maintain high engagement levels, Fides implemented several gamification initiatives, with the most successful being the “Fides Skills Cup” competition.

The Fides Skills Cup engaged 100 employees in a company-wide skills competition. Participants completed specially designed AI Simulations, competing for prizes while developing crucial professional skills. The competition ran for three weeks, with employees completing both mandatory challenges and optional bonus simulations.

The competition format included:

• 3 mandatory AI Simulations covering core competencies like influence, project management, and conflict resolution
• 1 optional simulation chosen from the full catalog for bonus points
• Transparent scoring system based on simulation performance
• Team-based discussions and knowledge sharing throughout the event

Beyond the prizes, the competition fostered new relationships among colleagues, created healthy competition, and provided valuable learning experiences in realistic scenarios.

Fides’s expansion required continuously growing their technical team. However, finding developers who could not only write code but also demonstrate problem-solving abilities, soft skills, and cultural alignment required a more sophisticated approach than traditional technical interviews.

Fides implemented Anthropos Hiring to evaluate candidates through realistic scenarios where they had to resolve technical problems while dealing with challenging clients, tight deadlines, and complex project requirements.

Candidates particularly appreciate completing these simulations because they gain immediate insight into the types of projects they’ll work on once hired. This transparency helps candidates make more informed decisions about joining Fides while allowing the company to attract talent that’s genuinely interested in their work environment.

The simulations reveal both technical capabilities and soft skills through comprehensive feedback, giving hiring managers insight into how candidates would perform in actual work situations. This approach immediately qualifies candidates who demonstrate both technical proficiency and cultural alignment.

The process helped Fides identify candidates who not only had technical capabilities but could also collaborate effectively, communicate clearly, and adapt to the dynamic environment that characterizes modern software development.

By implementing Anthropos, Fides transformed their workforce development approach and achieved measurable results across all key areas:

Platform Utilization:

• 79 custom AI Simulations created (51 for training, 18 for assessment, 10 for hiring)
• 19 personalized Skill Paths tailored to specific roles and certifications
• 329 active users across the organization
• 1,576 simulations started with 819 completed
• 309 Skill Paths completed by employees
• 128 candidates evaluated through Anthropos Hiring

Certifications:

Key paths for the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliance, GDPR implementation for developers focusing on Privacy by Design, cybersecurity fundamentals, secure development, and OWASP security standards.

Skills Development:

New critical skills developed include Negotiation, Problem Solving, Stakeholder Communication, Technical Project Management, Client Relationship Management, Leadership and Influence, Conflict Management and Team Coordination.

Business Impact:

The gamification initiatives, particularly the Fides Skills Cup, achieved unprecedented engagement levels with 100 employees actively participating in competitive learning experiences.

New talent:

The hiring process became more efficient and effective, with better cultural fit and technical capability assessment. Fides placed 4 new hires in Italy and is looking to expand the team in Spain.

Ilaria Magistrelli | Junior Communication Manager, Fides

Fides has just completed their first year on the Anthropos platform and they are expanding its usage making it the default platform inside the company for onboarding, skills mapping, assessment and training. In the last year Fides has been able to save more than 400 hours of manual work for the training and communication team.

The company is also adopting AI Simulations to assess and train their sales force and make sure they can train them to enter new verticals and markets.