Money isn’t everything. For a generation eager to combine professional ambitions and societal action, certain recruiters are on the rise: impact companies. The latter are defined by their desire to respond to social issues. On October 12, at A hundred and four in Paris, they will be in the spotlight and will unearth their next talents during Impact Job Fair. A recruitment fair (of which 20Minutes is a partner) organized by ChangeNow. If this name rings a bell, it’s quite normal: in just a few years, ChangeNow has become the largest event in the world dedicated to solutions for the planet. Its little brother is part of this continuity by bringing together 50 impact companies on one side and, on the other, workers, or young graduates, driven by the desire to give meaning to their professional project. On the occasion of the fourth edition of the Impact Job Fair, interview with Santiago Lefebvre, CEO and co-founder of ChangeNow.
Let’s start with the beginning. How would you define an impact business?
An impact company is a company whose mission is to provide a solution to the environmental or social issues of our time. It starts from a social problem today and finds solutions to resolve it. Of course, it must be viable and have an economic model that allows it to pay salaries and best develop its impact. Agoterra, for example, supports farmers in their low-carbon practices. We can also cite each One, which supports refugees in their integration into the professional world or also the Restos du coeur! Behind this notion of impact, there is a great diversity of structures.
More than ever, the quest for meaning at work seems essential. How do you explain this phenomenon?
For a long time, there was this promise of the Trente Glorieuses. Work was then supposed to offer happiness through the ability to have ever more material goods. This vision appears more and more outdated and we have clearly observed that new generations no longer believe in this ideal. People now want to feel useful while earning a living. An awareness that I experienced myself.
The Impact Job Fair presents a wide variety of companies, but what types of candidates will they face?
Generally speaking, we need all profiles. It’s not just young graduates who are looking for a job with impact: they represent a third of our visitors. The other two thirds often have good experience and want to change to give meaning to their professional life. In terms of skills, there is a place of choice for engineers, but not only that. There are also a lot of commercial positions: all these models must be developed and sold. All the professions that make up a company are represented. Finally, we see professions that we don’t think about today, but which will have a crucial role tomorrow, in the field of energy renovation for example.
Ile-de-France companies concentrate the majority of offers. How can we explain this over-representation in the province?
In this market, the best way to recruit in the region is to have local branches. Today, there is a very strong demand from recruiters in the Paris area. It is a booming sector.
On the recruiter side, there are both newcomers and well-established players like BlaBlaCar. What interest do they have in looking for employees here rather than through traditional means?
This event is a real success. If we do it again every year, it is because a very large majority of recruiters make offers of continuation after the event, which lead to recruitment. BlaBlaCar, for example, has found talent at the Impact Job Fair in the past: this is the reason for their presence this year. Also, we attract people who have chosen to have an impact in their career, so generally, it works very well.
We often have the image of impact jobs as jobs that are less well paid and where prospects are limited. Is this show a way to prove the opposite?
I don’t know if there’s any need to prove anything. We have many testimonies which show to what extent these are preconceived ideas. At the show, we provide all the answers to these uncertainties. There we find jobs with salaries aligned with the market and where the prospects are great! If we start now in these companies, there are possible developments and we prove it at the Impact Job Fair.
Does the existence of such a fair reflect difficulties on the part of employers in recruiting?
The show was created because we saw that there were a lot of candidates who wanted to go into impact professions. Recruiters are also numerous, but a platform was missing for the two to meet. This is precisely the role of the Impact Job Fair.
What have you observed on the business side and on the candidate side since the beginnings of ChangeNow?
The first times we talked about impact in 2016, no one understood the word. We continued to use it, convinced that it would break through. We felt the fundamental movement emerging and that we were at the tipping point after COP21 in 2015. We knew that we had to create an ecosystem to support these companies. At the first edition of ChangeNow (which has become the global meeting place for the most innovative solutions for the planet) at Station F there were just under 100 impact entrepreneurs. Two years later, there were 1000 of them. It is clear that in just a few years, things have changed a lot!