Platform Concepts
To get the most out of Illumera, it is important to understand the fundamental concepts that drive the federated marketplace.
This page explains the ideas behind Illumera. For concise definitions of individual terms, see the Glossary; to get up and running, see Getting Started.
The Federated Talent Marketplace
Illumera is a federated talent marketplace: it connects many independent organizations into a single network while letting each retain control of its own data and visibility. Talent can be sourced three ways — from your own organization, from partner companies on the platform, or from independent professionals — and every candidate is scored by the same engine on a level playing field.
Each organization operates inside its own tenant, an isolated boundary that keeps data from leaking across organizations. This is what lets competing contractors safely operate on the same platform. Within the network, entities are represented as profiles — person profiles for individuals and company profiles for organizations — and visibility levels govern exactly what each viewer can see.
/marketplaceThe Five Operating Questions
Illumera's architecture is designed to answer five critical questions for every organization in the network:
Inventory — "Who do we have?" A real-time ledger of all personnel within your organization and across partner networks, with full profile and skill data.
Capability — "What can they do?" A granular, standardized taxonomy maps the exact skills, certifications, and proficiency levels of every individual.
Capacity — "When are they available?" Availability status and committed hours per week for each individual, keeping the network informed of who can take on new work.
Allocation — "Where should they go?" Intelligent matching connects capabilities and capacity to specific project requirements and open slots across six scoring dimensions.
Execution — "How do we execute?" End-to-end management of engagements — from invitation through active work to completion — with full audit trail and notification history.
The Talent Network
Illumera uses a relational data model connecting people, skills, projects, project slots, and companies. This structure allows the matching engine to evaluate candidates against multi-dimensional slot requirements, combining deterministic scoring with AI-assisted signal calibration.
The "federated" aspect means talent can be sourced from your own organization, from partner companies on the platform, or from independent professionals — all scored through the same engine on a level playing field.
The Capability Catalogue
Illumera maintains a single, standardized capability catalogue so that capabilities are comparable across the entire network — "React" or "PMP" always means the same thing no matter which organization entered it. The catalogue spans:
- 1,153 skills
- 369 certifications
- 1,217 cert↔skill correlations
- across 6 industries
How correlations work
A cert↔skill correlation is a defined link between a certification and the skills it implies. When a person records a certification, the correlated skills can be inferred or weighted in matching — so holding a credential automatically strengthens the relevant parts of a profile without forcing the person to re-enter every implied skill by hand. This makes profiles richer and matching more accurate with less manual data entry.
/admin/catalogueSkill Taxonomy
Illumera maintains a standardized skill taxonomy to eliminate ambiguity. Each person selects skills from this shared set and self-rates their proficiency. Slots define required skills, and matching compares person skills directly against slot requirements using proficiency-weighted scoring.
Five Proficiency Levels:
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Aware | Familiarity with the concept; aware of its existence and use cases. |
| Beginner | Can apply with guidance; learning through practice. |
| Intermediate | Independent practical application; regularly uses in work. |
| Advanced | Deep applied knowledge; solves complex problems with this skill. |
| Expert | Recognized authority; designs systems, teaches others, sets standards. |
The Spider Match Score
When you view a candidate or a project, you will see a Spider match score (0–100%) — visualized as a radar ("spider") chart. This score is computed across six independent dimensions:
- Skill Match — Proficiency-weighted overlap between the person's skills and the slot's required skills.
- Culture Fit — Alignment between work-style preferences using CVF archetype scoring (Collaborative, Innovative, Results-Driven, Structured).
- Cost Efficiency — Person's target rate relative to the slot's budget ceiling.
- Experience — Seniority level and domain depth relevant to the role.
- Availability — Person's available hours per week versus slot requirements.
- Domain Depth — Specialization in the project's primary technology domain.
Each dimension produces a 0–1 score. A deterministic baseline is computed first; for the AI-assisted dimensions (culture fit, experience, domain depth), Anthropic Claude provides a calibration delta that accounts for signal quality and profile completeness.
Why it's explainable, not a black box
The Spider score is deliberately not a single opaque number produced by an LLM. Every dimension contributes a visible, separately computed sub-score, so you can see why a candidate ranks where they do — strong skill match but limited availability, say, or excellent culture fit at a higher cost. The deterministic baseline does the bulk of the work; AI is used only to calibrate a few dimensions, never to render the final verdict on its own. This keeps the score auditable and defensible, which matters wherever a hiring decision has to be justified.
/marketplace/candidateSeniority Levels
Talent profiles and project slots use a six-level seniority scale:
| Level | Typical profile |
|---|---|
| Junior | Early career; learning under guidance. |
| Mid | Independent contributor; 3–5 years practical experience. |
| Senior | Leads delivery; deep domain expertise. |
| Lead | Technical or team leadership; cross-functional influence. |
| Principal | Organization-wide technical authority. |
| Fellow | Recognized industry expert; sets long-term direction. Note: the experience scoring engine does not yet have a dedicated rank entry for fellow; it currently falls back to the mid-equivalent rank in match score computation. |
Work Environment Compatibility
The Culture Fit dimension uses the Competing Values Framework (CVF) — a validated organizational culture model — to measure work environment alignment between candidates and companies.
Both candidates and companies complete a structured questionnaire. The resulting archetype vectors (Collaborative / Innovative / Results-Driven / Structured) are compared using a weighted dot-product alignment: the person's CVF scores are multiplied by the reference (slot or company) archetype weights, summed, and scaled to a [0.25, 0.95] range. Constraint penalties are then applied for mismatches in work mode, travel tolerance, clearance level, and schedule preferences.
This is a key differentiator for Illumera: culture fit is explainable, structured, and based on validated frameworks — not keyword tags or gut instinct. In the gig economy, where contractors move between multiple organizations, work environment compatibility is often the difference between a successful engagement and an early termination.
/profile/cultureThe Availability Model
Capacity is a first-class signal in Illumera, not an afterthought. Each person carries an availability state that communicates whether they can take on new work, combined with the number of committed hours per week they can offer.
- Available — open to new engagements; full committed hours are offered to matching.
- Limited — partially booked; only the remaining hours are available.
- Booked — fully committed to current engagements.
- Not looking — off the market and not seeking new engagements.
The availability dimension of the Spider score compares a person's available hours against the hours a slot requires, so a strong technical match that cannot meet the time commitment is scored honestly rather than over-promised. Keeping availability current is the single most effective way for talent to surface in the right searches.
/availabilityThe Engagement Lifecycle
An engagement is the relationship between a person and a project slot once work is initiated. It carries the full history of the placement — every state change, notification, and audit entry — so both sides share a single source of truth. Engagements move through a defined set of stages:
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Invited | A company has invited a candidate to a slot, or a candidate has expressed interest. |
| Proposed / Pending | Terms are under review; the placement is not yet confirmed. |
| Active | The engagement is confirmed and work is underway. |
| Completed | Work has finished successfully. |
| Declined / Cancelled | The engagement ended before becoming active. |
Each transition is recorded in the audit trail and can trigger notifications to the relevant parties. This end-to-end record is what answers the fifth operating question — "How do we execute?" — and gives administrators the compliance history that regulated contracting requires.
/engagementsFor per-term definitions of every stage and signal mentioned here, see the Glossary.