Curate your own skills catalogue and rename the term to suit members.
Custom skills let you build your own skills catalogue alongside the standard one, organise it into categories and control which skills trigger match emails. The term itself is renameable, so a tutoring board can call them subjects. Niche communities get matching that runs on the words they actually use.
What custom skills now does
Generic taxonomies work until your community is specific. A tutoring provider does not think in skills, it thinks in subjects and key stages. A construction body thinks in tickets and certifications. Matching on a borrowed vocabulary produces matches nobody recognises.
- Curate your own catalogue alongside the standard skills, using the terms your members would use.
- Organise skills into categories including certifications, domain, technical, soft, physical and behavioural, visible everywhere skills appear.
- Rename the skill terminology itself to suit the community.
- Control which skills trigger talent match notification emails, so members are not alerted on everything.
- See how many roles and profiles use each skill before you change anything.
- Skills already in use are archived rather than deleted, and archiving is reversible.
Creating a skill happens in a focused window, new skills are highlighted so they are easy to find afterwards, and every column explains what it is for.
What it means for your community
Members get matched on things they would recognise on their own CV. That sounds small and it decides whether the match emails get opened after week two.
Take a talent pool of tutors. A brief needs someone who can teach A-level further maths on Tuesday evenings. Matched against a generic technology taxonomy that produces nothing useful, because the vocabulary has no concept of a subject or a level. With a curated catalogue built from the subjects the organisation actually teaches, briefs reach the handful of tutors who can genuinely take them, which is why brief-matching customers report placements happening in minutes rather than days.
A skills bootcamp has the mirror problem. Learners finish with a specific stack, and the roles worth sending them are the ones that name it. Curating the catalogue around what each cohort was taught means the match emails select rather than broadcast, and notification control means a learner is alerted on the skills that define their cohort instead of every tangential mention.
What it means for your team
The catalogue becomes something you can maintain rather than something you inherited. Usage counts on every skill mean you can see what is doing work before deciding, and archiving instead of deleting means a tidy-up cannot quietly break historic roles and profiles.
Renaming a skill does not rewrite existing roles or profiles, so tidying vocabulary is safe. Custom skills also feed the wider matching, which runs across both the roles you post yourself and those arriving through the automated job stream, so a curated catalogue improves matching on supply you never touched. You can then see the effect in member analytics rather than guessing.
Notification control is the setting most teams underuse. Every skill that triggers a match email is a claim on a member's attention, and a catalogue where everything triggers produces the same result as a catalogue where nothing does. Marking the ten or fifteen skills that genuinely define your community, and leaving the long tail silent, is usually the difference between an email members open and one they filter.
Categories do quiet work as well. Because they show wherever skills appear, an admin scanning applicants can tell at a glance whether a match came from a certification, a technical skill or something behavioural, which are not equally decisive and should not look identical on screen.
What happens to a skill already used on roles and profiles?
It is archived rather than deleted, and it can be restored. Removing a term from your working catalogue does not strip it from roles and profiles that already carry it, and it does not orphan historic records. Renaming behaves the same way, changing the label you and your members see without rewriting what already exists underneath.
Getting started
Custom skills are managed under Manage Company in the Skills area, where you add skills, assign categories and set which ones trigger match emails. The marketplace admin guide shows the add skill window and the knowledge base covers archiving. The upgrade is recorded in the custom skills changelog entry.
If your community runs on a specialist vocabulary, the job board for tutoring providers and job board for skills academies pages show how matching works in practice. Spacewalk runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.