Where does this conviction come from? Why has Diane (her first name has been changed) applied herself, for the four years that she has been a recruitment consultant in this firm, to want to shake up the established norm? The one who wants a good candidate not to be too old and armed with a smooth and coherent career path. Perhaps because she herself, at 46, is considered a senior and perhaps also because the path that led her to this position is not as smooth as the CVs her clients love.
I face totally grotesque and discriminatory requests from certain customers. When there is absolutely no reason.
Diane, recruitment consultant
From tourism to European authorities
Because for Diane, it all started far from HR, with a BTS in Tourism. After four years, she reoriented herself towards management assistantship and held several positions in this area. Gifted in languages, she landed in Brussels where she worked for the European authorities for ten years. “At that time, I felt the need to go back to school”. She enrolled at the Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in evening classes, continuing to exercise her professional activity. “The idea was to direct myself towards interior decoration”.
From Fine Arts to HR
But family needs will decide otherwise, the creation will wait and here she is back in Paris. She landed a job there.office manager in a large company. A function that she appreciates for its “Swiss army knife” side. “We touch on everything: general services as well as events, internal communications and HR”. And the discovery of this last field is a revelation for her who decides to do a Master’s degree in human resources on a work-study basis. She will not go to the end of her course and will find herself hired as a consultant in the firm where she still officiates.
Seniors ? More loyal than juniors
Since then, she has been a kind of ambassador for all those who, like her, do not come out of the right school, with the right course. All those, too, who have passed the age of 45, the age which sounds, for many jobs, like an expiration date, where one passes from the status of experienced junior, to senior banished. Diane rebels. She made it her secret fight.
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The seniors, she finds in them the qualities that the juniors do not have.
Seniors are the opposite of what I call Tinder profiles who are used to zapping between jobs and who sometimes don’t even look for permanent contracts.
Conversely, seniors, through their loyalty, can reassure companies that want to meet them and possibly recruit them. At least the ones that Diane presents to them.
Industry prefers juniors
Because for each position that her clients entrust to her, she takes care to slip senior candidates into the shortlist that she presents. Are they retained? Obviously not always “especially in industry”, the most reluctant sector, according to her, to hire people in their forties or in their fifties. “On the other hand, in the consulting firms for which I also recruit, it is simpler”. And Diane manages not only to recruit seniors, but also executives with atypical backgrounds like hers.
Atypicals are more adaptable
Contrary to what we hear everywhere, the terrain remains refractory to uneven profiles:
Companies are still afraid of people who have chained fixed-term contracts, even temporary periods, but they realize that they are often employees who are super adaptable to new professional environments.
More often in any case than those who have spent twenty years in the same box.
As for the criticism often opposed to the praise of seniors who claim that they have seen everything, heard everything and are unmanageable, she sweeps it aside:
Seniors are mostly people who don’t like being lied to. Companies must be clear with them. We must not tell them a story, neither about the box itself, nor about the post. Companies that are upfront never have to regret it.
And the seniors, like the atypical ones who pass by Diane’s office either. In the space of four years, several dozen have benefited from his benevolent attention.
#Franchement sur Cadremploi, an original and interactive series
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