The year 2018 is coming to a close. In these last few weeks, the parade of gifts to buy, decorations to put out, menus to refine, and then before we know it, we’ll be in 2019… The time for the age-old tradition of year-end summaries and reviews is upon us, and looking over the numbers this year, one figure in particular stood out to me: Twenty-seven—the number of new hires this year.
Twenty-seven people have joined our team since the beginning of this year, quite the challenge for a business of 100 employees, in terms of integration, company culture, and knowledge sharing.
Of course, this recruiting hasn’t been done randomly. Like so many companies, we hit a crisis of growth that needed a new strategy to manage, right in the middle of migrating data centers and launching a new platform. And while all our teams were mobilized to round this new bend, we recruited nearly 30 new employees in less than a year. It wasn’t always a question of filling new positions created. This year, we’ve had to replace some “historic Gandians” that life has led to other opportunities.
We’ve also had to hone our recruitment methods. For starters, we created a page on the recruitment platform Welcome to the Jungle, interviewed dozens of candidates—some of them several times—and mobilized a fair number of Gandians to help select the best of them. And what a selection! We did our best to ensure a diversity of backgrounds and fresh perspectives to shake up some of our old institutional habits and bring a new viewpoint on the tasks before us.
We’ve also had to work on integrating all of these new Gandians to our company! To that end, we launched a monthly “Newcomers Lunch”, to welcome all the newcomers with a shared meal. We’ve also improved our internal communication tools and multiplied our company events to give our employees a chance to mingle.
In terms of our physical space, we underwent a bit of a crisis in our Paris office. Unable to expand past the walls of our office space, we opted instead to regorganize, cutting meeting rooms in half just so we can rearrange our different team meetings and stock up on coffee mugs by the dozen (not to mention the increase in our coffee consumption!).
From the richness of these new developments and the deep impact they’ve had on our team, we’ve seen new ideas, new projects, and new synergies spring up. We’ve grown, learned, progressed, and we’re just getting started.
We have for one accelerated the addition of new features and bug fixes on #gandiv5 and we will be announcing very soon the release of a host of new features and hosting products. More globally, we have restructured our management team, enriching it with greater expertise that will allow us to reach the next steps in our development. And beyond that, we’ve doubled the number of women on our management team!
Among the last crop of recruitments, we created a marketing function—something of a revolution at Gandi—that has allowed us to further improve our products and accelerate the creation of new products… but more on that in our next update …
