Eightfold

What its figures measure

Most of the figures Eightfold publishes are about hiring rather than skills, so it helps to know what each one measures before any of them goes into a business case.

None of these figures measures how often a skill Eightfold fills in turns out to be right, so ask for that number on the demo.

Who it suits

Where it stops

Most of these limits matter only for particular uses, so read them against what you plan to do with Eightfold.

What it costs, and what leaving costs

Eightfold does not publish a price. Its listing on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace carries a single plan marked “for illustrative purposes only”, and every sale is a private offer, so the first number you see will come from a sales conversation.

One public contract gives a sense of scale. The US Department of the Air Force paid $329,925.63, at a firm fixed price, for one year from 24 September 2025 to 23 September 2026, with no value put on extending it. It pays for a talent management system that matches its people, whom the contract calls “Airmen and Guardians”, to jobs, assignments and training based on their skills. One buyer’s price for one year says nothing about what a company of your size would be quoted.

If you already buy from Oracle or Microsoft, you have two other ways to pay. Oracle customers can pay for Eightfold’s AI Interviewer with Oracle Universal Credits, the cloud credits Oracle sells, and Eightfold’s platform has been on the Azure Marketplace since June 2025. Both change how you pay, but neither puts a price in front of you any sooner.

Eightfold publishes no minimum company size, seat count or contract value. It counts Fortune 500 companies among its customers, and more than 100 organisations in 155 countries used it by June 2025. Eightfold ran a pilot in two Puerto Rican government agencies with under 300 employees, as the first stage of a system for 55 agencies. If you employ a few hundred to a few thousand people, ask on the first call whether Eightfold sells to companies your size, before you invest time in a demo.

If you are signing for more than a year, the company matters as well. Eightfold is independent, with no parent company, and no acquisition or layoffs have been reported. Its last announced funding round was a $220 million Series E in June 2021, at a $2.1 billion valuation, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, so ask how it is funded today.

What leaving costs depends on what Eightfold sits beside. It works alongside Workday rather than replacing it, and it is not a learning or HR system. It has had its own applicant tracking system since May 2024 and works with whichever one you use. If Eightfold sits on top of your HR system, your core employee records stay there, and what you would lose is what Eightfold builds on top of them: the filled-in skills, the ratings, the role levels and the match scores.

Eightfold’s contract gives you 30 days after termination to request your data electronically, after which Eightfold may delete it. Eightfold owns the “Anonymized Learnings” it creates from your data and may use them to train its models, and it owns what it calls “Services Generated Data”, so ask whether the filled-in skills, the ratings and the match scores count as your data.

What to ask on the demo

1. Open one employee’s profile and show us where each skill came from: the CV, our HR system, a skill inferred from similar careers, something the employee added, a rating, or the Digital Twin. Can the employee see which is which, and delete an inferred skill?
2. Your Digital Twin captures skills from email, work apps and tasks. Do we buy it from you or from Viven, what does it read, and how do the skills it captures reach a person’s profile?
3. Are skill ratings used anywhere in matching employees to internal jobs, and will you put the answer in the contract?
4. Skill levels do not change match scores in recruiting. If an expert and a beginner in a required skill can get the same star rating, how should our recruiters read it?
5. Do skills assessed during hiring now carry into a new starter’s employee profile?
6. How often does a skill Eightfold fills in turn out to be right, and how do you measure it?
7. Can gathering information from LinkedIn, GitHub and similar sites be switched off, for candidates and for employees, and written into the contract?
8. Your contract gives us 30 days after termination to ask for our data, and says you own “Services Generated Data”. Which of the filled-in skills, the ratings, the role levels and the match scores do we get back, and in what format?
9. Your contract makes us solely responsible for employment decisions. If the court in the Kistler case decides your match scores count as consumer reports, what changes for us, and who pays?
10. Which customer of around our size can we speak to?

Alternatives to Eightfold, including buying nothing

Alternatives to Eightfold come in three kinds: Gloat for an internal talent marketplace, TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills for skills worked out from people’s work, and, if you already run Workday, SAP or Oracle, that suite’s own skills module: Workday Skills Cloud, SAP Talent Intelligence Hub or Oracle Dynamic Skills. Holding off on any purchase is the other route.

If what you want is an internal talent marketplace, put Gloat next to Eightfold. Gloat’s marketplace brings career growth, project work, learning, mentoring and internal hiring together in one place, and Eightfold offers employees a hub of jobs, projects, gigs and mentors. Both sell to large enterprises and no single difference settles the choice, so choose on how each connects to your HR system, what each will commit to in the contract, and how each answers the questions you would put to Eightfold.

TechWolf is a different kind of purchase. It works out skills from people’s work and writes them into Workday, SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM, leaving the decisions to the talent tools you already have, while Eightfold brings its own matching, hiring and mobility tools. Choosing between them means choosing between new tools for those decisions and better skills data inside the systems you already run. Our TechWolf review sets out what it does.

If your people work mainly in Microsoft 365, Microsoft People Skills reads that work for $0 extra, so far, on top of a Copilot or Viva licence. It reads what happens in Microsoft 365 only, and Microsoft says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, but it will show you what your own systems already know before you spend time in anyone’s sales process. Our Microsoft People Skills review sets out what it costs you in practice.

If you run Workday, SAP or Oracle, find out what your suite vendor already sells for skills before adding a platform beside it, and read the licence terms closely: SAP’s skills inference needs a separately purchased AI units licence.

Buying nothing yet is a real option too. If your CVs, HR records and role levels are thin, Eightfold has little to work with, and getting them in order is work you would do before it could help. Our guide to skills intelligence software sets out when that work, rather than a purchase, is the right answer.