Skilit uses words to help companies decide – Le Journal des Entreprises

The Skilit start-up has been housed in the Marseille Innovation incubator since its creation in May 2022. Positioned in the semantic profiling niche, the company has developed a semantic engine that makes it possible to analyze and compare textual data . It thus aims to discover the behavioral profile of people by analyzing their writings, in all their forms. “The idea is to make digital more human and to provide companies with new keys to decision-making, thanks to a semantic analysis engine”, confides in the preamble Julia Santi, who with Jean-Marc Santi, Hubert Bettan and Cyrielle Trouillet, co-founded the company of which she is today the president. Winner of the Innovation Fund by MI, set up by Marseille Innovation, the young company has seven employees, including a CIFRE contract, and has already won assignments not only with the Aix-based company Matcheed (CA: no communicated), specializing in recruitment and more specifically in the qualification of pre-candidatures, but also with the National Higher Institute for Teaching and Education (Inspe) in Aix-Marseille. “We did not follow the traditional path of fundraising to develop our activity, we preferred to start by having customers”, continues Julia Santi.

16 basic human behaviors

Skilit’s know-how is based on a “behavioral dimension meta-model” base developed by Jean-Marc Santi since the end of the 1990s, in particular in partnership with the Departments of Scientific Psychology of the Universities of Utrech and Twente in the Netherlands. “We have defined 16 basic human behaviors, which allow individuals to cope with all the stimuli they are confronted with. From 1996 to 2017, I worked on the basis of this grid, and I applied it in human resources, marketing, communication or even team validation…” In 2017, Jean-Marc Santi decided to digitize this approach. “I wanted to be able to identify and define a personality, without resorting to the traditional questionnaire which inevitably leads to a lot of bias”, he explains, adding “when Google does the semantic analysis of Internet users’ requests, the words are processed according to use and not according to their meaning. Text data today represents nearly 80% of what is found on the Net. What do companies do with it? Not much except to sell. These However, the data could make it possible to better orient oneself, to better recruit, to put the right people in the right places. We are lifting a corner of this veil…”, enthuses Jean-Marc Santi.

Positioning in five major markets

Skilit is thus targeting five major markets. Of course, that of recruitment and orientation. In particular, a test was carried out in 2020 with the Cité des Métiers de Marseille and Paca in order to help better orient people towards professions in line with their profiles. “We are also targeting scouting professionals, tasked by football clubs with recruiting the best players. The selection of players is mainly based on statistical data. The teams want the best rated. But it’s not because a player has good statistics that he is going to be good within the club that recruited him Our tool can help to better define the player’s mentality, especially through their interviews and clubs could thus recruit talents and optimize them according to their values, their suitability with the coach and the rest of the team”, explains the leader. The young company is also positioning itself in the business digitalization market. “Banks, mutual insurance companies are interested, not only for the HR part, but also for customer relations. Our tool can help with sales and loyalty”. Finally, data scientists, all those who work with artificial intelligence, can also find an interest in the Skilit model which recorded a turnover of 700,000 euros in 2022 and aims, for 2023, a turnover of business between 1.5 and 2 million euros.