How we helped Payfit diversify their software engineering recruitment pipeline
💖 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.
➡️ Let’s meet Antoine Béliard, who will tell us how The Allyance helped PayFit engage more diverse candidates to diversify their software engineering pipeline.
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Antoine Béliard
__ __ __Who are you? Tell us everything!
👋 My name is Antoine Béliard, I am 32 years old and I was born and raised in the parisian region.
After business school, I gained experience in recruitment agencies and worked as a recruiter specialised in tech for 4 years. I also worked as a diving teacher for 4 years!
Since 2019, I have been working as a Talent acquisition manager at PayFit and part of a team of 10 recruiters. I helped PayFit grow from 100 to 1200 employees.
As of today and thanks to PayFit’s “work from anywhere” policy, I live in Hossegor, in the South West of France. I’m thrilled because I get to surf whenever I want! 🏄♂️
How would you convince someone to join PayFit?
PayFit offers an automated solution to manage small businesses’ payroll and HR processes : basically, our mission is to simplify the life of employees.
🌍 Since January 2022, PayFit is the 23rd European unicorn, operating in France, Spain, United Kingdom and Germany. We keep on expanding throughout Europe.
We just moved into beautiful offices in the heart of Paris, where many employees came back to really live the company’s culture, especially after Covid-19’s lockdown periods. ✨
In addition, PayFit offers a great flexibility to its employees, with a lot of benefits.
Is Diversity & Inclusion an important topic at PayFit? How do you make sure the company provides an inclusive workplace?
Since the beginning, PayFit has been committed to integrate D&I in its policy and development. Nevertheless, we know that we can still improve in that area so we keep on learning.
Our co-founders implemented D&I in all our key processes such as onboarding, comp & ben, communication, events and recruitment. Recently, we hired Chelsea Boren as D&I Manager, who set up clear objectives in order for our data to serve D&I by showing our weaknesses and strengths in the matter. 🙌
This year, PayFit is focusing on three D&I topics:
Gender: our goal is to increase women’s share in leadership and tech teams. In this context, we’re partnering with Ada Tech School and 50inTech, and training our recruiters and managers to inclusive recruitment as well as cognitive biases;
Academic background: we’re looking to recruit more candidates with different or atypical backgrounds in our Customer success and Sales teams;
Disability: it is crucial to display our will to adapt to any profile. That’s why we start every recruitment process by asking the candidate this question: “Our objective at PayFit is to create an environment that is as inclusive as possible. In this regard, would you like to share anything that would facilitate work for you at PayFit, or during the recruitment process, whether it be regarding material, flexibility or anything else?”.
👉 Regarding the latter aspects of D&I, Morgane has been a great help. She taught us that being inclusive begins with implementing simple steps in the processes in order to bring awareness and light to D&I for every employee.
👀 After a first contact in October 2021, Morgane spent 2 days a week at PayFit for 6 months. Though she was on a sourcing mission, she also provided a lot of training to the team.
Morgane was a great fit for sourcing: she was aligned with our people, our values and culture, which made her a part of the team really quick. Everyone could see how expert she is on sourcing and D&I. She deep-dived into the needs of hiring managers and translated them in targeted and qualitative sourcing campaigns. Her selection of candidates was fitting both our needs and D&I criteria.
I think it’s only fair to say she went way beyond her mission, as well as our expectations! 🚀
During her RPO mission at PayFit, Morgane conducted coaching and training for the team. She notably taught us how to create personalized nurturing campaigns on Lever, our Applicant Tracking System. With her, we also learned a lot about sourcing female tech profiles in quite a relevant way.
What was meant to be a RPO mission turned out to be some sort of audit with a training component to it. This had a great impact on our employer brand.
Although we did not hire anyone directly through her active sourcing, we used what she taught us to improve our recruitment methods and it worked amazingly! 🥳
How did you hear about The Allyance?
Well, it goes a long, long way! I heard about The Allyance from many people and channels.
I think it was on Recruiter’s Kitchen, where Morgane is quite active!
According to you, why do companies have a hard time hiring people from underrepresented groups ?
I think it’s all about emergency: everything’s growing so fast that we have to focus on developing activity and nothing else. Unfortunately, D&I does not come first.
Nevertheless, now we all know that D&I-sourced teams help increase productivity as well as the employees’ general wellbeing at work, there’s no excuse. 👏
In my opinion, leaders are having a hard time addressing sensitive topics such as D&I. And truly, it can be difficult: the expectations are high, the evolution is constant and being impeccable is incredibly important. Still, I think it’s crucial to admit your mistakes and start improving your policies.
Would you recommend other companies to work with The Allyance? Why?
Of course: I’ll promote them anytime! Morgane’s RPO was a great experience for PayFit and we’re keeping the partnership going in the long run.
I loved the personalised approach, the expertise and the human aspect of their work. Morgane raised the bar for my team. Thanks to her, we went past awareness and led tangible and impacting actions. 🔥
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CONCLUSION
A few words from Morgane, The Allyance’s Sourcing & Recruitment expert:
“Antoine and his incredible team made me feel like a true colleague of theirs and working alongside each of them has been a real pleasure. It was an exciting challenge to apply all of my sourcing knowledge to bring more diversity to the pipeline, and I can say that sharing my expertise with Payfit was an honor! ” 🚀
✔️ 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:
“I joined The Allyance 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!”