State of affairs: France and the global competition for startup talent
You heard President Macron last week: French Tech is stepping in the global competition for top tech talent. And we’re not being shy about it.
All our research points in this direction: Recruiting scale-up compatible talent is often the biggest blocker for French scale-up growth. Ranking even higher than funding or market reach. Some of the most painful gaps are:
- Battle-tested startup execs who can take companies from 30 to 300. According to BPI, the UK startup executive talent reservoir is reportedly 3x the size that of France, with 50% of their C-level execs are from other large scale-ups, unicorns or GAFA from the US/UK.
- Developers with management experience
- International sales+marketing talent. Unfun fact provided by our friends at France Digitale: 47% of the hiring gap is in go-to-market vs. 44% in engineers.
Because of this, we’ve been hard at work trying to understand the international market for tech talent, and how we can help our startups attract the best and brightest in the world. What we’ve heard over and over from our interviews with people matching these profiles in Silicon Valley, New York, and even here in Europe is that France often ranks high as a destination of interest. The rise of our ecosystem, our culture of engineering and craftsmanship, and our overall quality of life are very real competitive advantages to the rest of the world. However, we have not been able to fully capture the international enthusiasm of relocating to France due to several issues.
- The lack of brand awareness of French startups leading the pack and hiring. (In the UK, only 1 out of 12 interviewees could name three French startups off the top of their head. In the US, it was zero.)
- Complexities of settling here, both real and perceived: Ex. “French startups only work in French” or “I won’t be able to find a school for my kids.”
- Outdated myths about fiscal policy: Ex. “The 70% wealth tax is a dealbreaker, sorry.”
We want to change that.
In 2019, we intend to make it easier for our startups to recruit, and easier for candidates to accept critical roles that will accelerate our ecosystem’s growth. In particular, alongside our partners Business France and some of our powerhouse ministries (Economy, Interior, Foreign Affairs), we aim to accomplish the following:
Step 1: Radically simplify and expand the French Tech Visa. In the past, to be eligible for the French Tech Visa for Employees, you needed to have a France graduate degree and be recruited by a Pass French Tech company. Result: Only 70 French Tech Visas for Employees were issued in 2017. This all changes in 2019, once the executive order goes into effect (scheduled for March) and we will be able to start pre-authorizing hundreds — if not thousands — more French Tech startups to avail of the visa for their future employees.
Step 2: We aim to remove some of the friction, fears, and delays of relocation. It is the complexity around actually moving to France that explains much of our funnel drop-off. We will be partnering with Business France to address the anxieties related to relocation: how to find a place to live, how to get my kids into school, what are my tax implications and other such problems. A pilot of our in-person “Welcome to French Tech” services at French Tech Central and a beta of a simple portal are in already the works for early 2019.
Step 3: Launch an international campaign that uses B2C marketing practices to effectively target and reach profiles French startups need. That includes French and foreign tech talent abroad, as well as local talent pools that have yet to cross over to the startup side: engineering students, etc. We will be calling on our international network of French Tech communities, to add an important, grassroots component to our efforts.
In the Les Échos editorial I co-wrote with Fred Mazzella, co-founder of Blablacar and Wonderleon, we said that the French government and the French startup community needed to team up to make this a reality. And we meant it.
