The COVID-19 crisis has forced more than one company to reinvent itself for the past months. For us, as for other companies in France, recruitment was quickly raised as a major issue, as soon as the first official lockdown announcements were made. For our Head of Talent as well as for the Management team, one essential question was put forward: do we maintain our recruitment plan, with what ambition and at what pace of execution?
Yes, we have continued our recruitment effort after consultation and a unanimous decision by the Board. We have executed it with rigorous discipline to overcome this exceptional situation and meet the objectives of our product roadmap. Let us tell you about it!
Continuing hiring: a concerted and well-considered decision
When Arnaud, our Head of Talent, arrived, Spaycial had 12 employees. It was March 3, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Three weeks later, the entire country was in full-remote mode and under strict lockdown. At that time, a meeting was held to discuss our operational emergencies, what we were committed to and what needed to be postponed. All topics were tackled (product, customer relations, recruitment...).
As a solution provider, we often ask ourselves which structural topics are the most impactful and which need to be given special attention, even outside of the COVID context. Nothing should be left to fate: we needed to grow and professionalise our teams, but also to honor our customer commitments without losing sight of our SaaS product construction, with a focus on scalability. Having the right in-house expertise was essential at this point.
The steps of this decision making
To continue our development, we had to organise ourselves through several steps.
We decided to plan weekly "forecast reviews", where each decision to recruit a new person had to be validated, in order to confirm that we were recruiting the right position and the one that brought the most value. Our growth, although challenged, did not stop, thanks to the relay of e-commerce and the different rhythms adopted by each European market to face the pandemic: we continued to manage the piloting of our solution at our customers, we deployed in Sweden, a country that did not experience the same periods of lockdowns as France did.
"We also approached our investors to see if they were aligned with this decision, as well as all internal teams. The goal was to avoid finding ourselves in a difficult situation, like other companies that had to stop hiring or any ongoing recruitment processes because of the crisis”.
- Arnaud, Head of HR, Spaycial.
To adapt to remote work, we dematerialized our HR processes, in particular with HelloSign, an electronic signature tool. We accelerated the objectification and rationalization of recruitment: we implemented a new CRM recruitment software, SmartRecruiters, which allowed us to centralize all applications from wherever they come from, backed up by scorecards to standardize the evaluation of skills and time to hire. We chose an GDPR-friendly solution that allowed us to automate and give complete autonomy to each candidate to delete all their personal data at any time. Our recruitment database has then become more qualitative with qualified talents, interested in joining us and interesting with regard to the increasing expertise of the candidates we were looking for.
Finally, we defined a more structured and rational recruitment strategy in order to meet our objectives despite the crisis: upstream needs analysis, use of the "STAR" method adapted to our activity, 100% remote pursuit of all hiring processes without forgetting the digital transformation of our onboarding process. From April 1st 2020, we will integrate our new recruits in 100% remote with delivery of material at home.
Spaycial continued recruiting but also structuring itself to get ready for the post-crisis era. Hence, during this period of time, we went from 12 to more than 30 Spaycialists onboarded.
What are the benefits of this recruitment strategy?
In this tense context, keeping our recruitment moving helped us consolidate our competitive advantage. Knowing that the entire fintech sector had accelerated, we had to take risks to keep us up-to-date. Our first fundraising in 2019, justified by the investment in R&D, the opening of 7 countries in Europe and the recruitment of new talents allowed us to go through this crisis. With a very tight cash management thanks to the help of Vincent, our Chief Finance Officer, who joined in September 2020 and didn't put us in a position to raise funds again to keep growing.
"As a tech company and a SaaS solution provider, we have no choice but to move forward. The biggest danger lies in standing still: we are in a global market where innovation and time to market are key, playing 'too small' or not taking risks, is risking to disappear".
- Arnaud, Head of HR, Spaycial.
Our watchwords were: risk taking, cash management, development of the employer brand, investment in human resources and in the sales force. With the maturity acquired during the crisis, we have started to lay the first milestones of the transformation of the company culture: Spaycial is now a remote-first company, with a strong written culture (with a knowledge management platforms like Notion), soon live in 10 countries and nearly 40 employees from 12 different nationalities and a physical presence in France and in the UK, since we hired this year our first employee in London.