Hello Marion! If you had three words to sum up Padok culture, which would they be?
Hello Nicolas, just in time! At Padokwe have three values that perfectly define our corporate culture. They are team spirit, the desire to progress and pragmatism. These values are not simply displayed on our website or the walls of our premises. No, they are at the heart of our day-to-day business, embodied in the concrete actions that reflect them.
When I speak of team spirit, I'm thinking of the importance we place on the collective achievement of objectives, rather than the pursuit of individual interests. This translates into an encouragement to step out of our comfort zones to give and receive feedback, to challenge our colleagues, to help them progress and identify areas for improvement. This feedback culture is very much alive at Padok, and is put into practice in a positive and constructive way, to encourage individual and collective progress.
Secondly, we have the desire to progress. This value is closely linked to the first. At Padok, we see failure as an opportunity to learn and improve. The important thing for us is not to succeed at all costs, but to be able to identify our mistakes and put in place an action plan to avoid repeating them.
Finally, pragmatism is a value that guides us in all our actions. We always seek to maximize value creation while minimizing the time and resources required. This means finding simple, effective solutions to our problems, avoiding unnecessary complexity. This pragmatic approach applies just as much to our technical solutions as to our overall approach to our projects.
What would you say to a candidate to make them want to join you?
If you're looking to make rapid progress in your field, Padok is undoubtedly the place to be. One of our core values, as I mentioned earlier, is the desire to progress. And we do everything we can to give you the means to achieve it, whether in tech or in the more "business" professions.
If you want to become an expert in cloud infrastructure, this is our core business and we have everything you need to guide you. But even if you're more interested in the business side of things, our methodology and the support we offer will help you acquire a method of reasoning and problem-solving that will be invaluable whatever your line of work.
To be a little more precise, we have created a strong framework for progression. As I mentioned, our feedback culture is a key element of this framework. We believe that highlighting individual areas for improvement and discussing areas for improvement is essential for personal and collective progression.
Secondly, we rely heavily on Lean methodology, a working approach developed by Toyota. It provides a number of tools for problem-solving and continuous improvement. When we are faced with a problem, we always take the time to reflect on the root causes of the problem and determine the actions to be taken to prevent it recurring.
What's more, we devote a lot of time to training. We have weekly training sessions and, on the technical side, we've even set up what we call "The University". Every second Friday afternoon, all our techies take part in courses prepared in-house by our technical experts. These training sessions focus on subjects that affect us directly, on technologies that we use on a daily basis and that are linked to our customers' issues.
Finally, every newcomer to Padok is assigned a personal coach. This coach is there to make sure you feel at home in the company, but also to help you evolve according to your aspirations, your career goals and the internal projects you want to launch. He's there to help you take a step back and ask yourself the right questions. You meet your coach once a week, for a session lasting at least half an hour. It's a very strong and unique support system, I think, that helps you progress and achieve your goals.
If you had to highlight one thing you do particularly well to attract candidates, what would it be?
That's a good question. I think we still have a lot of work to do to attract talent, especially as we're still a young company operating in a fairly specific sector of tech, namely infrastructure. We're working hard to develop our reputation. However, if I had to pick one thing we pay particular attention to, I'd say it's the long-term follow-up of candidates. We do a lot of networking upstream, before triggering a recruitment process, and we also work with schools. But for me, the big difference is once a candidate enters our recruitment process. We have a very coaching-based approach. We're with the candidate every step of the way, giving regular feedback and doing everything we can to help them progress and set themselves up for success. I think this makes a difference when the candidate has to choose between several companies that have made an offer.
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What does a "Made in Padok" recruitment process look like?
Our recruitment process is based as much on skills as on values. Our values are lived daily by our team, but we also seek to find them in the candidates we recruit. For example, to validate our candidates' desire to progress, we look for people who are curious, who don't hesitate to step out of their comfort zone, who are humble and who listen to feedback. These elements enable us to know whether the person will feel at ease in our environment and be able to evolve within our culture. So, a large part of our assessment process concerns these aspects.
As a general rule, we start the recruitment process, whatever the position, in the same way, with a qualification call. During this call, we take a keen interest in what the candidate is looking for, what his or her criteria are, to see if it matches what we can offer. Then, if we decide to move forward together, the candidate undergoes a series of interviews. There's always an interview with a recruiter to validate the cultural aspect, then two other separate interviews with Clément, our CEO, and Aurore, our CTO. For technical profiles, there is also an interview with a Padok tech to assess the candidate's logical mind and ability to solve complex problems.
In terms of the positions we're recruiting for, we're mainly looking for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), both school leavers and more experienced profiles. We also have a position open for agile project management, and are actively looking for a Key Account Manager to help us develop Padok's presence in our key accounts.
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