How Skillvue Plans To Transform Hiring With AI

Is artificial intelligence (AI) the future of recruitment? Italian start-up Skillvue thinks the technology certainly has a huge role to play in helping companies hire with greater efficiency and professionalism. The Milan-based business, which is today announcing it has completed a $2.8 million fundraising, also believes AI can help large enterprises with talent development and staff retention.

Skillvue was born out of the experience of its founders Nicolò Mazzocchi and Simone Patera at previous businesses. “We both made our fair share of hiring mistakes, often related to imperfect skills assessments and to the lack of objective methods for evaluating the full potential of candidates,” says Mazzocchi, now Skillvue’s CEO. “We found a common interest in creating a better solution – and realized that was actually a market need.”

Skillvue’s approach is based on behavioral event interviews, widely used by HR professionals to assess candidate’s skills, including soft skills such as problem solving and teamwork. Traditionally, such interviews have been conducted by an HR manager, who then assesses and scores the candidates they have seen. Skillvue replaces this with an AI technology – candidates are sent a link through which they can take their interview automatically, with the software analyzing their answers in minutes to provide recruiters with a detailed evaluation of their skills.

“The HR professional then has the opportunity to make more informed and quicker decisions,” Mazzocchi explains. “The candidate gets a smoother, simpler and more engaging experience; this fosters talent attraction and support’s the employer branding effort.”

The advantages of this approach are numerous. Employers can interview many more candidates than in a traditional process, where interviewers’ time is limited. Candidates can take the interview online at a time of their choosing. And the assessment is a standardized, objective approach; the AI ​​makes no judgments and carries no bias, conscious or unconscious.

The result of this objectivity, Skillvue claims, is that its approach will increase by five times the ability of an interview to predict what someone’s performance in a role will actually be like. “We’re building a much fairer approach to recruitment,” argues Mazzocchi.

Indeed, Skillvue is so convinced of the merits of its technology that it has expanded its remit, with some clients now using it a “skills partner” to assess their existing employees’ competencies on an ongoing basis. The idea is to use the AI ​​to build a much more detailed understanding of employees’ skills, both individually and collectively, so that organizations can tailor learning and development – ​​as well as further recruitment – ​​accordingly.

Skillvue clients appear to be getting good results, with 1 million interviews already conducted using the software. The company has so far signed more than 30 customers, including large enterprises such as the French supermarket group Carrefour and the Italian bank Credem. Sales have grown six-fold over the past year and Mazzocchi predicts revenues will break through the €1 million mark for 2024.

Today’s seed round should help the company to accelerate its growth, with the cash raised earmarked for further investment in Skillvue’s AI technology and to support the development of a sales and marketing function. Rivals such as Test Gorilla and Maki People provide competition, but Skillvue believes its move to expand its focus into talent development as well as recruitment can help it secure advantage.

The round was led by Italian Founders Fund (IFF) and 14Peaks Capital, with participation from Orbita Verticale, Ithaca 3, Kfund and several business angels. The company’s investors believe Skillvue is in the right market with the right product at the right time.

“Putting skills at the center of business strategies is now a key element to ensure competitiveness both in the short and long term,” argues IFF founding partner Lorenzo Franzi. “The data speaks for itself: as stressed by the World Economic Forum the skills crisis is one of the biggest of our time, second only to climate change, at a total cost of about $11.5 trillion.”

At 14Peaks Capital, founder and general partner Edoardo Ermotti adds: “We strongly believe AI can play a major role in transforming the way HR teams and departments operate, particularly in the realms of recruitment and employee progression – through AI, HR departments can now uncover unseen potential at scale in both new candidates and the existing workforce.”