Diversity in Action - Guillaume Grillat x leboncoin
💖 The purpose of The Allyance is to help both companies and candidates: companies wanting to reach excellence in hiring and candidates wanting to find the perfect companies.
Today, we want to highlight the background of Guillaume Grillat! Guillaume has an unique job! He is currently leboncoin Tech Community Ambassador. His work is instrumental to connect communities from inside and outside the company.
🤙 We chose to interview Guillaume because he is a true diversity ally and advocate. His energy and passion are endless. Careful, it’s contagious!
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🔗 DIVERSITY IN ACTION N°2
GUILLAUME GRILLAT
Let’s meet Guillaume and understand his Tech Community Ambassador role at leboncoin.
———Who are you? Tell us everything!
🎸🎾 My name is Guillaume, I am 33 years old and live in Paris. I love tennis, rock music and... pepper: I mean, what would be a meal without pepper?
I have been working in tech for 10 years. First in the HR sector, then switched to the Engineering side 3 years ago. Currently, I am a Tech Community Ambassador at leboncoin, one of the biggest French pure-player, specialized in classified ads owned by the Norwegian Adevinta group.
What does a Tech Community Ambassador do?
🎯 My role is to ease the ability for leboncoin people to share knowledge and learn from others. My main goal is to stimulate the tech teams’ curiosity and ability to learn from others. My daily task is to connect leboncoin engineers with external tech communities from other companies, organizations, meetup groups, etc…
Generally, they gather during collaborative events: conferences, workshops and hackathons. This job is usually divided in different positions within a company, that’s why it is still not common, in France at least. From a HR point of view, these events are highly useful because they bring new ideas to tech teams, encouraging employees to stay longer in their company. It’s a great asset to the tech sector, known for its talent shortage and high turnover rate.
(picture shot at the Dallas’ TV show set! If you are even more curious about what a Tech Ambassador do, Guillaume shared a presentation last year on the topic)
Do you mainly work with people working at AdeVinta or external communities?
😉 It is not as binary as that! I bring internal and external communities together. My goal is to enable Leboncoin’s employees (mostly from the Tech and Product departments) to share experiences. It’s a true acculturation process. I also bring together tech communities from leboncoin and their external pair communities during meetups. These communities can come from other companies because we share the same stakes on topics such as legacy, quality, security, UX…etc.
What are the key learnings you can share about how to get in touch with external communities?
The first thing you need to do when you are a Tech Ambassador is to study the communities. That way, I make sure they share close issues and interests with leboncoin. This will then guarantee valuable reflections, processes and mutual teachings.
Time has taught me that we all share anxieties, notably through the great and quite French impostor syndrome. My role is to guarantee a safe space where everyone can feel confident to speak publicly about their experiences, whether they’re good or bad ones. I also organize public speaking workshops, where I introduce the participants to different levels of experience sharing: with their close team, with their companies and finally with external communities!
What’s the project you are the most proud of?
💻 Definitely the Deezer ConTEST project! 30 people from different QA (Quality) and Product teams (pure-players, students, major companies…) collaborated during a full day on tech challenges.
During this event, they all learned together about troubleshooting techniques, debugging Deezer’s mobile and web platforms… with attractive rewards such as wireless speakers and Deezer’s subscriptions etc! I also invited experts to talk about their experiences. This was an amazing day, even if it started with a major issue: no internet! Funny story: to solve this problem, we had to call our expert who was in Tokyo at the time.
As I am still new in Leboncoin, I can say I am proud to be recognized and well identified. It allows me to build partnerships with the Tech and Product teams.
When you reach out to communities, you want to avoid tokenism. How do you overcome this fear?
⚖️ To be honest, I just discovered the meaning of this word! I am quite lucky to never have worked in a company with such a state of mind. My experience at leboncoin has been the most interesting in this area, because the company is quite sensitive to the cause of communities. I can tell that my tech management, the general management and HR are on the same page: they take concrete actions.
For instance, leboncoin has been labeled “Best Place to Work for Women”, supports the Girls Can Code’s association and recently has recruited women professionally retrained in tech. This is helping me to smoothly take initiatives on that topic.
What’s your point of view about Diversity & Inclusion?
🏅 To me, it is essential for a company to address those topics in order to hire and promote the most diverse range of talents. Gathering the conditions to foster the recruitment of diverse talents is not enough anymore. Now, it is time to promote internal actions, speak about DEI publicly to allow each new talent to quickly feel included and part of the company. France is still quite skittish about it, and this has to change!
How do you describe yourself? A Diversity Advocate? An ally?
🌈 For the moment, I consider myself as an ally supporting a global dynamic. I still need to take large-scale actions. One of my current objectives is to connect Leboncoin to the LGBTech network and other companies addressing this topic. I want to learn from their experience and get inspired by what they achieved.
According to you, what are the key topics tech companies should address?
🌍 From my point of view, the two current big changes in tech are inclusion and digital sobriety. Awareness and cultures should progressively shift towards these objectives. Companies should integrate them into their global strategies. I believe inclusion and digital sobriety are essential for a brighter future, morally and economically.
What would you recommend to other companies who would like to start working on DEI?
📌 I do not consider myself legitimate enough to provide any advice to others. However, when I was a recruiter, I have witnessed several elitist habits. Indeed, some tech companies have the tendency to focus only on partnering with the best engineering and business schools. To me, this is obviously nurturing social reproduction. It has been proven that these strategies are poor in terms of diversity: you are not optimizing your ability to attract socially diverse candidates.
Why would you recommend other companies to work with The Allyance?
🔗 The Allyance is a good representation of this virtuous mutual aid. When I met Caroline, we were both working in tech recruitment. Though we were looking to hire the same skills, I did not feel any competition between her and me. Yet, in tech, people can be competitive and protective. Caroline and I had many opportunities to share pieces of advice and reflexions about this specific context. She is all about empowering others.
Recently, Caroline helped me find a panelist for a conference! Thanks to her, I was not only able to complete my panel, but also to meet Paola Ducolin, a truly inspiring person!
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CONCLUSION
A few words from Caroline, The Allyance CEO:
“Guillaume is one of the most committed people I know when it comes to Diversity and Community building! Both of us are not engineers yet, we are passionate about connecting tech people together. We met when he was at Deezer. He wanted to host a Paris WiMLDS meetup and I remember how cautious he was to welcome us. I thought it was interesting to highlight his job on The Allyance blog because he can inspire other organizations to set-up such a role in order to empower their engineering teams. Guillaume is a reference in his field!”
✔️ Want more?
➡️ If you are interested in knowing more about The Allyance DEI trainings, you can get in touch with us and book a free conversation with Caroline Chavier, at the bottom of the page: https://www.theallyance.one/ or write to her: caroline[at]theallyance[dot]one
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ✒️ Léa C, The Allyance Contributor:
“I joined The Allyance 1,5 year after Caroline and I met at a ionnalee’s concert! I am a freelance translator and content writer (French, English, Spanish and German). I also work as an administrative employee in the health and data science sector. So, I am not far from Caroline’s core topic! I am very active as a volunteer in social and environmental NGOs, where I always try to put intersectionality at the center of actions because I am convinced that every cause is linked to one another. It is readily apparent that Caroline and I share a lot of common interests, which is why we as friends decided to work together!”