Marie-Alice Thierry Portmann, DRH du groupe Ayming aborde les problématiques actuelles en matière de recrutement et les innovations mises en place pour se constituer des viviers de talents qui sont pénuriques sur le marché du travail.
Son conseil : revisiter le Job Dating et travailler sa marque employeur en s’appuyant sur la responsabilité globale de l’entreprise.
Replay
Retranscription en Anglais
Journalist: « Hello, welcome to HR trend. I welcome Marie-Alice Thierry Portmann, HR Director of Ayming Group. Hello Marie-Alice. »
Marie-Alice: « Hello Christelle »
Journalist: “Can you tell us about your recruitment issues, the issues you face everyday?”
Marie-Alice: «Well, I think that all of my colleagues are probably facing the same issues and the same things. Today, we can see that in companies, there is disengagement between the operational staff and the recruiting process. Not because they don’t want it but because they don’t have time anymore. They have other priorities. There is a real shortage of skills, talents and soft skills, which are suitable for companies. For example, we have almost 1 million job offers which are not filled today in France. It becomes a real issue for the business development of companies. Thirdly, a cost that weighs significantly on a company’s expenses. Recruitment of a senior executive can cost between 100 000 and 200 000 euros to a company. And a classic executive recruitment between 10 and 20 000 euros. The costs are crazy.”
Journalist: “And when you internalize recruitment, is the cost as important?”
Marie-Alice: “Yes, for example, to recruit 250 people in one year, which is our case, we need 4 full-time employees. It’s an extremely important cost. We must think about finding other solutions.”
Journalist: “You have found solutions, you will tell us how to innovate today to recruit better, faster and to ensure you always have a pool of candidates and talents at your fingertips.”
Marie-Alice: “So, I completely changed Ayming’s politics and way of recruiting. We need, like all companies, to have a permanent talent pool. By pool I mean the applications that have been evaluated, identified and that are likely to reach us quickly. By evaluation, I mean both an HR and operational evaluation. Bring this pipeline and this pool to life in such a way as to keep the candidates who are identified close to us. Be sure that hard skills and soft skills meet our expectations. Creating this pool, To me is the key to a company’s successful development and I think it’s the same for all other companies.”
Journalist: “So, you have revisited the Job Dating. Explain to us what you have put in place.”
Marie-Alice: “Indeed, I took the Job Dating idea back from the 80s, so it’s not new. I have completely revisited it with the group’s HR and communication teams. In order to work at the same time on employer brand, our recruitment policy and on the responsibility of our operational staff, our managers and our teams internally, for a very low cost. For the Job Dating, the main idea is to set it where we never had a recruitment interview. It is a kind of « collective » recruitment but at the same time you have workshops, some of which are being digitized and some of which are very modern, and a career path, a candidate experience that is very different from what candidates may experience in other types of recruitment. Our 4 workshops and the course last about 3 hours, followed by a cocktail and a response within 48 hours. After 48 hours you know if you’ve been selected to return to Ayming. It’s also an event for the company, the operational staff is very involved from the beginning to the end of the process, including many choices. We realized that it was much easier to integrate the new comers in the teams because there were between 10 and 15 people who took part in the selection process…”
Journalist: “… And who already know a little about the company’s life already, who have been able to see and experience through interactions. During their interactions with people from Ayming, during the job dating, could they experience the company life from the inside?”
Marie-Alice: “Absolutely, that’s what the participants tell us in their testimonials. We’ve had many today telling us: “It allowed us to understand that the values you display and the culture you show are really real, and when you talk about friendliness, we understood what it was like to be part of a community. »
Journalist: « The importance of working on your employer brand today, is it unavoidable? »
Marie-Alice: “So we started from very far on this subject. Companies were doing a lot of marketing dedicated to their business and they realized that to attract talent it was also necessary to develop forms of communication and marketing dedicated to HR. Today, a company is a product like any other, and we sell it. And it’s a product like any other because the social context has truly changed. This change in social context brings us today to another parameter, another paradigm is that beyond HR marketing, employees and candidates really expect authenticity.”
Journalist: “It is necessary to work, that the company must become a service provider in relation to these employees. We have many expectations in terms of authenticity. We also have many expectations in terms of the environment, health at work …”
Marie-Alice: « … the atmosphere and the relationship at work »
Journalist: « So, we have to be creative all the time and bring new HR services to be able to keep this employer brand attractiveness. Is not this the ultimate bidding?”
Marie-Alice: “It’s true, I don’t know if we can talk about service, but I will talk more about creating the right environment. It’s not necessarily a service that is given to employees but nevertheless our responsibility as the HR department is to create a favorable environment so that employees and all the people that make up the company can give the best of themselves. It is therefore not necessarily a service and it involves, in any case, it is my conviction, both the relationship and the development of this relationship. In the latest google survey that came out on this topic says the same thing as the last one, which dates back 5 years, the atmosphere and the relationship with management and colleagues make the difference in work performance and retention.”
Journalist: “We will have to create environments, create an atmosphere but we also need a global responsibility and abandon the marketing approach. The employer brand ultimately no longer applies to HR marketing but rather to the overall responsibility of the company. So how can we align responsibility and authenticity in a universe that would be specific to a certain structure?”
Marie-Alice: “So for me there are several ways, but the first one is the management obviously, the kind of management that develops in the company. I think you really must base your managerial model on accountability. What does this responsibility mean? it means that as a manager, I am responsible for what I say, what I do and what I ask my team. It involves settling conflicts. For years, we have avoided conflict resolution and bad corporate politics. The more one faces the subjects as they are, the more one is legitimized by his team and that’s responsibility. For me, authenticity and responsibility are extremely connected. The second point is the culture of the company, we don’t work on the corporate culture in an office on the 18th floor with the CEO and the President. We work on the corporate culture along with our collaborators. What do they live on a daily basis? What is their real life? Their real life is the company’s culture. This is not something we imagine or that we dream of. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t accompany it and that we don’t want to develop it, change it or make it change but, in any case, the true company culture is the one that is lived. And when we don’t recognize that, we are not authentic anymore and we start making speeches that are no longer related to what people really feel. »
Journalist: “Thank you very much for this testimony”
