Odoo

When it comes to finding the best up-and-coming tech talent, why should we let the details printed on a person’s CV decide whether or not they come to work for us? Easy: at Odoo, we don’t! If a person has the skills and love of tech needed to do great things, we find that’s all we really need to know. From finding untapped pools of talent, to winning newbies over with our culture, in our first Talent Voices article we’d like to share what a skills-first approach to talent acquisition looks like – and why it works…

This is an incredibly exciting time to work in talent and HR. With so much competition out there, we have the opportunity to tear up the rule book: applying our knowledge, experience, passion, intuition and spirit of playfulness to get creative in attracting the industry’s rising stars. At Odoo, we know just how engaging a candidate journey can be when recruiters are given the agency to try new things, and how creating recruitment and HR processes that fully embody your company’s values is the key to building an inspired, motivated and loyal team.

We are a business management software and app development business based on a beautiful farm in the Belgian countryside. We have 17m users, 3500 partners, and more than 2300 employees. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your background is, or how much experience you have; when we say that everyone has the same chance of getting a position, we mean it. We don’t recruit based on the candidate’s CV or qualifications. What matters to us is your talent; what you can bring to the table right now to succeed in this role. 

More and more companies are moving towards hiring candidates without a traditional four-year degree. From higher levels of engagement to lower levels of turnover, there are many benefits to hiring for talent and training for everything else. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that this kind of thinking represents a complete revolution in the recruitment market. And yet to us it makes perfect sense – particularly given the nature of the tech space that we occupy.  

Give people a chance to show you what they can do

Rather than giving us a long spiel about how they might perform in a hypothetical scenario, our prospective developers get a coding test that they take at home. Many of our other candidates are given a languages test (as befits an international company). As an example, I think the languages test perfectly conveys why our approach to skills and experience is a great one. It doesn’t matter if you studied Spanish at university, or if you have ten years’ experience in Spanish-speaking companies. What matters is whether or not you can actually speak Spanish, right here, right now. One of our gifted developers never actually studied developing at all - he studied volcanoes! But developing is his passion, and he spent every waking moment working on that passion until he was confident enough in his knowledge to turn it into a career. Why wouldn’t we want to work with someone like that? By staying open-minded, and ditching the stringent rules about the type of diploma and experience he had to have, we have been able to benefit from his skill, curiosity and talent.

This isn’t to say that we don’t think education is important; in fact, quite the contrary. We have made it our mission to make our Odoo software open source: meaning the code is accessible to everyone. Being committed to transparency in this way means everyone can learn from us, taking what they need. This combination of transparency and open-mindedness is also part of what makes us attractive as an employer – as epitomised when we opened the gates of our farm for our first annual hackathon this past April.

We invited 70 ambitious developers to come and spend a weekend with us. This approach allows us to meet and, ideally, recruit new talent, but our team throw everything we have at ensuring the weekend is mutually-beneficial for both us and them. With participants split into teams of three and Odoo coaches on hand to help guide them, the technical challenge of the weekend is to develop an application around a theme; this year’s was ‘The School of Tomorrow’. It’s important that we give our hopefuls an Odoo environment and Odoo people to make the most of the weekend, but a subject that is quite separate from who we are and what we do. This is how you can spot real vision and talent – and, importantly, doesn’t make the developers feel like they are coming to work for the weekend! Our ultimate goal is to recruit talent by sharing our culture with them, and this really comes down to the details of how we conduct ourselves in every facet of life at Odoo…

Keep a startup mindset

Our developers are used to these hackathon type of events, so it’s important that we put our own stamp on it. April’s event was organised almost like a summer camp, only in Belgium, and in the spring! Being together in this type of environment can’t help but foster conversation, creativity and connection. People brought their sleeping bags, we had a barbecue, and recruiters were on hand with help, tips and soda! 

The vibe was casual, because our culture is casual; we work on a farm, not in a corporate city office block. From what we observe, you can tell that the atmosphere at Odoo is something special: peaceful, quiet, relaxed and supportive. We even encourage people to help themselves in the kitchen – because we want it to feel like spending time at home with friends. It seems like such a small thing, but there is real power in being authentic in this way. Even if Odoo isn’t right for someone in this moment, we know making a good impression will make them more likely to think of us in the future – or recommend us to a talented friend. 

A lot of this comes down to the example set by our founder, Fabien Pinckaers. Fabien’s business and leadership philosophy is evident wherever you look at Odoo. We are now a very large global business, but Fabien works hard to maintain the startup culture that has made Odoo what it is. He makes himself accessible to people as much as possible, spends lots of time with the team, wears shorts and a t-shirt, and even drives the same car he did when Odoo was a new company! This approach filters down through the company, with a flat hierarchy, managers making themselves available to staff as needed, and people feeling that, if they need to, they can always go straight to the CEO. We try and envelop people in this culture from day one. There is no specific way to dress, or even a specific time to be onsite. We tell them, “We trust you. If you have a question, ask it. If you want to try something, try it. If you fail, we will be happy if you fail, because it means you have tried something new.” We keep HR really close to people, surveying them on everything from onboarding to new initiatives. What we hear is that people love working here – they love the company, they love their colleagues, and they love the CEO. In fact, 20% of those who leave end up coming back to Odoo. 

Where talent exists, knowledge will follow 

People with natural talent tend to have got that way through their own curiosity and practice. It is up to us to find and engage them. By removing the formal requirements needed to get people into roles, and instead looking at the talent in front of us, we not only find exceptional people in unexpected people, we keep them engaged in the long term. It may seem like there is a puzzle piece missing, but we would argue that by redefining how we look at the talent journey, we have more exceptional pieces to help us finish the puzzle. 

Where competition is high, we believe you have to be bold. We are fortunate to have the autonomy to try new things and take risks. This risk seems to have paid off. By putting our culture first, we have been able to naturally attract talent. Where there is talent, knowledge will follow – and those gaps in a person’s CV will start to fill in themselves.