Established in 2021, Skillvue is on a mission to provide the tools needed to allow organizations to adopt a truly skills-first approach. The Milan-based startup counts Carrefour, Nova Coop and Unicredit among its clients.

In September 2024, Skillvue announced a successful $2.8 million pre-seed funding round, led by Italian Founders Fund and 14peaks Capital, and also including Kfund, Orbita Verticale, and Ithaca 3.

John Brazier: What is Skillvue’s unique selling point? What makes your proposition special?

Nicolò Mazzocchi: We are making HR interviews scalable, thanks to our AI models. We use the structured behavioral interview to assess skills – both for candidates and employees – and this gives us a comprehensive view of the skill matching between what the company is looking for and what the candidate actually has in terms of soft skills.

We also do hard and transversal skills, but we see on the market that soft skills are the most required at the moment. Employers want to understand this from the beginning of the recruitment funnel to ensure higher success in talent acquisition and a better development path of employees inside the company further down the line too.

We don’t use ‘Big Five’ models, we are really focusing on the structured behavioral interview – it’s what HR traditionally does to understand skills in an in-person interview, but it’s a long and complicated process. We are doing the same thing but with a product and scalable methodology.

We focus on what the person is saying – we don’t use any analysis of emotions but focus on understanding how the person behaved or will behave in the future.

JB: How is Skillvue trying to change the world?

NM: What we are really trying to do is make the skill-based approach simple and reliable. We become a skills partner for enterprise organizations and help them put skills at the center of any HR process, from recruitment to internal mobility.

This will give a specific view to any candidate or employee of their skills; this data can enable better recruiting, internal mobility, people development, and basically change the entire HR strategy, from job-based to a skill-based view.

JB: What is your key message to HR leaders?

NM: Taking a skills-based approach is something that has to be done now, in order to stay ahead of the curve and make the company competitive in the market.

Putting skills at the center of any HR process is something that really makes the company competitive in the near future, so you have to do it now.

We have so much talent scarcity right now and if we think about how talent has been viewed in the past – job titles or education – we have to rethink how we assess people, how we recruit people, how we promote people.

The only solution is doing this through skill analysis, generating data that companies are currently lacking around skills.

JB:  What are the next strategic goals for Skillvue?

NM: It’s all about really investing in the skill technologies. We have started from developing a method to  measure skills in a scalable way and now we are assessing people to provide skills data.

Further down the line we will use the recently acquired funds to consolidate our technology even more on our three verticals (recruitment, talent development and internal mobility).

We will also work on expanding our team, especially in the AI department, in order to have more structure for our upcoming expansion to international markets.

JB: What one trend will be top of mind for HR leaders in the next 12 months?

NM: For me, it will be being able to implement a skill-based approach that’s less about buzzwords and more about an actual awareness of how to implement a skill-based organization, how to strategically think about the skill-based organization across all processes.

It really will be less a red or blue view of what a skill-based approach is and more an actual planning of how to implement it, how to create a real strategy and which tools to use to support it.

UNLEASH Startup | Spotlight is a monthly Editorial interview series where we speak to and profile the best and brightest technology startups the HR world has to offer. Want to feature in the series? Get in touch with john@unleash.ai to find out more.

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