Hello, I am Jean-Marie Caillaud, Head of Talent Acquisition at Orisha, and I'm delighted to welcome you to our new career website!

We want to give you a deep look inside what it's like to work within Orisha.
And what best way to do it than for you to hear it directly from our teammates?

Over the next few months, we'll share with you the feedbacks and experiences from the Orishas that help bring the best of what technology has to offer to our clients. 

We are kicking off this series of interviews with our Chief People & Culture Officer, François Guyeux. 

Jean-Marie Caillaud: Hello François ! Could you tell more about your role here, and what it means to be the Chief People & Culture Officer at Orisha ?

François Guyeux: My role at Orisha is to work with Alex our CEO and the ExCo team to help understand, design and roll out the programs that will help make the organisation stronger, deliver more value faster and strengthen its sustainability on the longer run.

I team up with the People and Culture team to identify opportunities and bring organizational answers to the many people challenges we are facing everyday.  It’s an exciting journey, where no day is like the previous one working on the company culture, coaching a team mate to manage a difficult situation, working on systems & processes evolutions, interviewing new talents… At the end of the day, P&C need to bring value to the table through accelerating business success, make leaders better leaders, make the organization more resilient and ready for growth.

Jean-Marie Caillaud: So, why should anyone work with Orisha?

François Guyeux: That's a very good question. I think there are several reasons. First of all, Orisha is a software vendor, but not just any software vendor. We are basically addressing everyday life businesses, whether you think about doctors, retailers, shops, or garages. Any of these businesses require a functional system to help make their business successful. What we do is enable these businesses to actually do what they do best. We do that in a fashion to secure them, to make their business reliable and predictable, and to have control on their cost, their stocks, and their inventory, making sure that they can really perform and concentrate on the nature of their business. In many occasions, you can work for a software vendor and it's very immaterial, but in our case, it's really tangible and palatable for people when they interact in their everyday life.

The second reason is we are an aggregate of different softwares, which means that at the core of who we are, there's one piece of DNA which is entrepreneurship. One of our attributes is our faculty to make things happen, to get results, and to simplify problems to ultimately serve the customer the best and grow the business.

The third thing is we are a tech company, and as many of us know, tech companies are facing a number of challenges these days, whether it's AI, scaling, or opening new markets. The reality is that we have all of these challenges here. Being a collection of entrepreneurs, we are in a unique place to bring a solution to these industry problems in a unique fashion and continue in the vein of entrepreneurship.

We continue to be more dedicated to our customers, better understand their needs, and better serve them, alongside leveraging all the innovations that are available on the market and migrating the technologies that we've inherited into best-run technologies for our clients.

From an organizational perspective, there are also several reasons. One is that Orisha is a continental software business. That means that when you compete with other vendors that are actually more international or global, that's not our case ; we are quite local, our roots are in Europe on the continent, and that's a big source of pride for us and a segment of our culture.

The second element is the company is changing. We have an ambitious plan to grow the business, but also an ambitious plan to make the business and the organization unique. That means we are rolling out career programs and unified programs. We are helping our employees to build a career within Orisha where in the past they were limited to a smaller origin.

The last piece is all this collection of entrepreneurs and businesses, we are making them a tribe we call the "purple tribe." It's not something that is completely artificial ; that's something we are building together by listening. Everything starts with a conversation, and we are orchestrating many of these conversations to make sure that we are building a unique company that is not copyable and that's going to build memories for lifetime careers.

Jean-Marie Caillaud: So on a daily basis, what could a potential candidate or a new employee expect to get out of their working relationships at Orisha?

François Guyeux: I think they can expect many things. The first thing is change, because the company is on a journey to grow and scale, and that entails a lot of changes. Whether you think about technology, some of our internal business processes because we are scaling the organization, or change of clients. As I was mentioning before, a lot of our customers are small, daily life customers, and therefore every day is different. They can be in every place of Europe having very unique problems, and our extended products portfolio can help serve their needs. That diversity of use cases is another facet of the change that people can experience at work.

The other thing that they can experience at work is actually kind of fun. One thing that struck me when I joined Orisha is that people are genuinely nice. Because we are made of small and medium businesses, people are by design in these organizations keen to help each other and collaborate, and that creates a very great culture of helping one another. Therefore, you tend to build relationships very quickly with people in the organization, more than if you think about larger companies. And consequently, because I like to have a good laugh every day, I think it's pleasant actually to come to work. Don't misunderstand me, we're working seriously and it takes a lot of work to transform the organization, but honestly, every day there's a smile on faces and that makes me very happy!

Jean-Marie Caillaud: Okay, building on that, we have a very low turnover compared to the tech market in general, with 10% turnover. Why do you think people are staying?

François Guyeux: I think because we have a unique value proposition. If you think about all the businesses that we've acquired, they are all located in very special places, whether in France, in Spain, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, or in Luxembourg. Consequently, building businesses on very narrow, specific use cases makes these places very unique. We haven't necessarily moved people all around ; we've left the businesses where they were originally. Some of these businesses go back 10 or 20 years, relationships have built, and the expertise has been localized to these very places. That's what makes our organization so special and I think that's why people want to stay. We accommodate these life choices to live in the suburbs, in the countryside, or in secondary cities of large countries. That's our roots, that's where we come from, and we take pride in that.

Jean-Marie Caillaud: Great, thanks. You know, most people have a special moment that they can recall when they start working with a company. There's a moment when they get, "Okay, I know that I'm in the right place." What was that moment for you? When did you realize or when were you sure that you were at the right place?

François Guyeux: That's a good question. I think it was when I had the first good laugh with my team and with the CEO. I think that's important for me that we can all be ourselves here in the workplace. Having a good laugh together is usually a signal that you find your place and you belong to a group. So I think that's that moment, and the commitment of the CEO that I share, that every talent is welcome in the firm regardless of who they are. What matters is the impact that you're making and how you transform the business and make it bigger, stronger, and running better.

Jean-Marie Caillaud: Great answer. Thanks. Last question. What advice would you give to any potential candidate who would be interested in working with Orisha and who will start a recruitment process?

François Guyeux: Get prepared, because many of our businesses are very unique. Really take the time to understand what makes that business unique, whether it's technology, a market segment, or a particular profession. And connect the dots between that uniqueness of the clients we serve and how you can actually help this client run better.