Interview With Nicolò Mazzocchi, CEO and Co-Founder of Skillvue
Welcome to another edition of the founder spotlight interview with Nicolò Mazzocchi, the CEO and Co-founder of Skillvue, an innovative AI-based skills analysis platform based in Milan that utilizes AI for skills assessment. Together with Simone Patera, Nicolò founded Skillvue in 2021.
The demand for AI-related skills is surging, with a reported 866% year-on-year increase in the demand for learning AI skills as of early 2025. Companies increasingly invest in AI-driven solutions to address skills gaps and enhance talent management. Skillvue recently secured USD 2.8 million in funding to expand its platform, highlighting investor confidence in the potential of AI-based skills assessment tools, which is a great example of this.
Skillvue helps companies adopt a skills-based approach to recruitment, talent development, and internal mobility. Niccolò Mazzocchi’s goal with Skillvue is to implement new AI technologies to help companies develop their human capital and adopt a skills-based approach in their HR activities.
Let’s hear about the exciting Journey of Skillvue from Nicolò Mazzocchi through Eqvista’s Founder spotlight.
What led you to focus on the “Structured Behavioral Interview methodology” to Skillvue’s approach, and how does it enhance the accuracy of skills analysis?
We decided to focus on this method after analyzing lots of different studies and researches in the field of behavioural psychology that confirmed the higher predictivity and accuracy of this method in comparison to other commonly used ones such as cognitive models. The common belief of the last century was that cognitive tests were the most effective method for skills analysis, but they have increasingly revealed deficiencies from the point of view of accuracy and objectivity. The structured behavioral interview (also known as BEI) involves asking a person questions aimed at making them provide a detailed report on how they behaved in certain situations in order to achieve certain objectives. The aim is to push the person to explicit the sequence of actions, thoughts and words they had during the key moments of each of the analyzed situations. The theoretical concept behind this type of interview is that studying a person’s actions, thoughts and words in certain key situations will reveal underlying skills much more accurately than other methods such as cognitive or personality tests.
Skillvue emphasizes the importance of soft skills in recruitment and talent development. Can you explain how Skillvue’s AI-driven technology assesses these skills more effectively compared to traditional methods
Traditional methods such as in-person assessments are way too long and expensive to be carried out on a regular basis on all candidates or employees. HR teams, however, need to have specific and objective insights about candidates’ or employees’ skills from the beginning of the recruitment funnel and all along the employee’s lifecycle in order to ensure higher success in talent acquisition and a better development path for employees inside the company. This is where AI-based technologies such as ours make a world of a difference in comparison to traditional models. Skillvue makes HR interviews scalable, allowing even a small HR team to assess as many as 1000, even 3000 candidates or employees per week. You can imagine how this not only speeds up HR processes, but also helps create a “skills database” that can be shared throughout the whole HR department to make more coordinated decisions.
Soft skills are often challenging to evaluate. How does Skillvue’s use of AI help objectively measure these skills and deliver reliable results?
The platform allows HR professionals to simply select the most important skill tests for a specific role and to create a customized assessment test for candidates or employees. The invitation to the test consists of a direct link that can be sent via email or message. Once the candidate or employee has completed the test by answering a series of situational questions based on the BEI method through audio or video, Skillvue creates a transcript of the answers and starts analyzing each of them in order to identify the presence of specific Behavioural Indicators linked to the selected soft skills. Then it produces a comprehensive and in-depth skills analysis within minutes, providing an overall rating of the person’s fit for the role (Skill matching) and a rating of each analyzed skill on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. We collaborate with top university researchers and occupational psychologists to ensure maximum reliability and objectivity of the skills evaluation, and recently we also added a Senior AI Psychometrician to our team to further validate Skillvue’s output.
Given the growing competition in the HR tech space, what are your long-term strategies for staying competitive?
We are going to keep working on the validation of our technology in order to keep offering best-quality results to our clients and to stay ahead of the curve in this ever-changing labour market. We are also going to consolidate our offer on the three verticals of recruitment, talent development and internal mobility, having seen more and more frequently how this is a real need within our client portfolio that originally was more heavily focused just on the recruitment efforts. The aim here is to position ourselves as a reliable skills partner for the whole HR department, something that we have already successfully started doing with some of our biggest clients such as Carrefour with great results.
Skillvue recently raised $3.3M in funding, with the latest round in September 2024. How do you plan to utilize this investment?
With this funding round we will strengthen our team with strategic figures, especially in the AI area, expand our business in Italy, get started on our global expansion and consolidate our tech stack on the three key verticals: recruitment, internal hiring and talent development.
How has Sillvue’s cap table evolved with the recent funding in place?
Simone, my co-founder, and I still hold the majority of Skillvue’s shares. The remaining part is divided between our Italian Founders Fund (IFF), 14Peaks Capital, Orbita Verticale, Ithaca 3, Kfund and some business angels.
What challenges have you faced in positioning Skillvue as a leader in soft skills assessment, and how have you overcome those challenges?
One of the biggest challenges for us was probably the fact that there are almost no other comparable companies in Italy that offer AI-based soft skills assessments, and this made it complicated to convey our message and our Unique Selling Proposition in a simple yet effective way to the Italian audience. There can also still be a bit of prejudice going around against using the use of AI technology to assess soft skills or in general for all HR-related activities, but I think in the last couple of years huge strides forward have been made in the recognition of AI’s incredible potential in this field, so I’m quite optimistic about the future.
How does Skillvue balance innovation with the need for user-friendly tools that seamlessly integrate into existing HR processes?
Ever since the beginning we have kept user research and accessibility at the top of our minds, knowing that our main target user can have very different levels of tech-savviness. Even though it’s a field in which there is constantly room for improvement, for the time being we are happy with the results we have achieved in keeping Skillvue’s interface very simple and linear while still constantly adding value thanks to new features. In terms of integration into pre-existing processes, we have partnered with top-tier third parties to allow a seamless integration with all the most-used ATS platforms, granting our end users a simple yet innovative experience.
Your Skill Test Library provides ready-to-use tests for essential soft skills. How do you ensure these assessments stay relevant across various industries and evolving job roles?
We work both internally and with external partners and researchers to constantly assess, validate and update our own tests. It’s also very important for us to be receptive towards all useful insights and signals that can come from our clients or even our prospects in order to ensure we are keeping up to date with all evolutions in the ever-changing labour market. I think this will be more and more crucial going forward, as we often find ourselves working closely with some of our biggest clients on the development of highly specific skills tests, tailored to their needs and to their pre-existing skills model.
Lastly, what key lessons have you learned since the start of Skillvue and from working with your clients?
I would say one of the biggest lessons I have learned from this experience and from working with our clients is that launching a startup in the Italian market, as hard as it can be, can also be incredibly rewarding. It has been amazing to receive positive feedback from such important companies and to establish deep personal connections with a lot of HR professionals who actually believe in innovation and in the creation of shared value with the help of technology.
