From 2,5% women among 200 interviewees to hiring a female engineer
💖 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.
Marc-Henri Gires is the CTO of DeFacto. The Allyance supported his desire to build a more diverse engineering team. Here is his story!
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Marc-Henri Gires
__ __ __Who are you? Tell us everything!
My name is Marc-Henri but everyone calls me Marco. I’m the CTO and co-founder of Defacto, a fintech company with the aim of giving companies access to capital fairly and instantly.
I first studied civil engineering with a Bachelor’s Degree in France and a Master’s Degree in San Francisco. I then moved to the tech sector and worked as a data scientist in different startups: marketing, carsharing, logistics…
In 2021, I decided to move back to France and founded Defacto with Morgan O’hana and Jordane Giuly.
⛵️ Oh, and I forgot a tiny detail: right before coming back to France, I lived on a sailing boat between Croatia and French Polynesia with my girlfriend.
Is Diversity & Inclusion an important topic at Defacto?
One year after founding Defacto, we were 10 employees, and despite having gender parity at the executive level, the engineering team at the time consisted entirely of men. We began hiring again. Out of 150-200 candidates interviewed, only 5 were women…
That’s when we contacted The Allyance, because we realized that we did not have access to the right candidates through traditional hiring cabinets. I was also afraid that past a certain number of hires, there would be no coming-back.
In San Francisco, I was very impressed with how diverse the professional paths were in tech companies, so I tried to get inspiration from that when recruiting for Defacto.
Apart from that, we don’t talk about diversity on a daily basis at Defacto. However, we know it’s important not to hire clones of ourselves in order to have a wholesome team. On this side, I like to say that we hire based on people rather than jobs to be done. We’re always looking for the next person who will bring something new to the table. For example, we have close to 10 different nationalities among our 24 employees.
How did The Allyance help you recruiting? Which profiles have you hired?
We contacted Caroline when we admitted that gender diversity was not our best at Defacto.
The collaboration began in October 2022 and we almost put it to an end in late Summer 2023 because the profiles were not matching our high technical requirements. Indeed, most candidates did not pass the first steps of the process.
Caroline told us not to cut off the process so fast after the first steps and we went on with a new set of candidates, following her advice.
🎉 We interviewed Céline (picture below), who had trained herself to programming after a career in luxury marketing. The process worked out perfectly, so we hired her as a Software Engineer!
How do you make sure Defacto is an inclusive workplace?
A deal breaker at Defacto is the lack of respect. By lack of respect, we mean dismeaning communication or opinion toward somebody else. How to build that? We have a pretty strong position about not having official values. What you do is who you are. We believe in actions and leading by example. This is how you create a culture not by stating it. So at my level, I make sure to stay true to this philosophy. And over time, we have managed to hire persons who share this belief.
Also, we put the cultural fit at the center of our 4-step recruitment process, designed around collaborative exercises.
Interview with me, the CTO
Reversed technical interview
Cultural fit interview
3-hour hackathon
The candidate will get to meet close to one-third of the staff. We want the candidate to envision its future dynamics. If anyone has a doubt on our side, we say no.
According to you, why do companies have a hard time hiring people from underrepresented groups ?
The tech industry struggles to recruit diverse talent because it primarily hires for technical roles, and it's well known that female talents are underrepresented in these fields of studies.
I think that recruiting someone quite different from oneself is challenging, both consciously and unconsciously. During the recruitment process, we project so many things on candidates we don’t even have the time to get to know. In the end, we lack references when analyzing their profiles and decide not to hire them.
Also, the absence of salary grids can easily create disparities within your organization. At Defacto, we make sure to have an official salary grid. I always tell my candidates that the way we enforce it is by making all job offers public at Defacto.
There is also a concept of “being appealing”. In our case, we are building a core-lending infrastructure for SMBs, which might not attract profiles that deeply care about the social impact of their job. At first, it is not obvious the importance of lending in society. Even if the candidate has discarded you from the beginning, it takes time to convince them.
How do you convince someone to join Defacto?
Our recruitment process is also about promoting our strong team collaboration spirit. Once the candidate gets to the following steps, they realize what I said in the first step is truly the culture of Defacto, which is important to me.
We aim to reach 30-40 people maximum, with flat hierarchy and personal ownership at the center of our culture. When you’re working at Defacto, you always get to know every one of your colleagues, and we would not want it another way.
How did you hear about The Allyance?
When we realized we were lacking women candidates, one of Defacto’s employees contacted Ada Tech School. They redirected us to Caroline.
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CONCLUSION
A few words from Caroline, The Allyance CEO :
Collaborating with Defacto was a challenge I enjoyed. The founding team had successful past experiences and a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve. Usually, I do not work with Fintech companies because I know candidates refuse to meet them.
With Defacto, I made an exception : their recruitment process was built for the candidates to select them, they were open to remote work and they listened to my pieces of advice. I was sure they were ready to evolve. Plus, the introduction between Céline and Defacto was a perfect match !
✔️ Want more?
If you are interested in knowing more about The Allyance services, feel free to get in touch with us.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ✒️ Léa C, The Allyance Contributor