Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan

Who is Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan?

Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan is the founder and CEO of Clustree, a Paris-based HR technology company focused on helping organizations understand, deploy and develop the talent already inside their walls. She built Clustree around a simple but stubborn problem: most companies have far better data on their customers and their products than they do on their own people, and that gap quietly costs them their best performers. Her work sits at the intersection of software and human capital, where the question is not just who you hire but how you find, onboard and grow the individuals who end up making an outsized difference.

At SaaStock Europe 2017 she led a panel titled "People Power: Hiring & Developing Your Success," framing the entire conversation around the importance of finding, hiring, onboarding and developing the people in an organization. As she put it on stage, the session was about the people who are going to really make a difference for you - the 10x developer, the product person who doubled your conversion rates, the salesperson who outsells the rest of the team month after month. Her thesis is that these individuals are rarely accidents, and that the systems a founder builds for spotting and nurturing them are as strategic as any product or go-to-market decision.

That perspective is informed by Clustree's own mission. Where many founders treat hiring as a series of one-off transactions, de Raphelis Soissan approaches it as a repeatable, data-informed discipline - one that starts with knowing where exceptional people come from and continues long after the offer letter is signed. This page collects her recorded SaaStock talk, with transcripts, so founders and operators can revisit her thinking on building the teams that drive a company's success.

About Clustree

Clustree is a human-resources technology company headquartered in Paris, France, working in the talent and skills software category. Its purpose is to help organizations make better, more objective decisions about people - identifying internal talent, mapping skills and supporting the kind of development and mobility that keeps high performers engaged rather than walking out the door.

The themes de Raphelis Soissan raised at SaaStock map directly onto the problems Clustree was built to solve. Her panel centered on the full arc of the employee relationship: finding the right people, hiring them, onboarding them well, and then developing them over time. That framing reflects a conviction that talent is not a static asset you acquire once, but a capability you have to cultivate continuously. The same individual who is merely competent in one role may be a 10x contributor in another, and surfacing that potential is exactly the kind of insight software can help unlock.

By putting the spotlight on standout contributors - the developer worth ten ordinary ones, the product mind who doubles conversion, the relentless top salesperson - de Raphelis Soissan made the case that people decisions are among the highest-leverage choices a SaaS company makes. Clustree's broader contribution to that conversation is the idea that these decisions can be made more rigorously and repeatably, rather than left to instinct or luck.

Key lessons from Benedicte de Raphelis Soissan's talks

People are the difference-maker, not an afterthought. De Raphelis Soissan opened her SaaStock panel by reframing growth as fundamentally a people problem - the importance of finding, hiring, onboarding and developing the individuals in your organization. For founders obsessed with product and metrics, her message is that the team you assemble is the engine behind every other number.

Hunt deliberately for the 10x performers. She pointed to the 10x developer, the product person who doubled conversion rates and the salesperson who consistently outsells everyone else - and asked the room where those people came from and how you find them. The lesson is to treat the sourcing of exceptional talent as an intentional strategy, not a happy accident, and to study where your best hires actually originate.

Hiring is the start, not the finish. Her framing covered finding, hiring, onboarding and developing - an explicit reminder that the value of a great hire is only realized through strong onboarding and ongoing development. Founders who win the recruiting battle but neglect what comes after will struggle to keep the very people who make a difference.

Build systems, not one-off heroics, around talent. By treating people decisions as a repeatable discipline spanning the whole employee journey, de Raphelis Soissan encourages founders to bring the same rigor to talent that they bring to product and revenue, so that finding and growing standout contributors becomes a durable capability rather than a recurring scramble.