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Meet Cédric Filet, KEDGE graduate and CEO of Aldelia!
1999 KEDGE graduate Cédric Filet has been at the head of Aldelia, a pioneer in the making recruitment in Africa accessible since 2005.
1️⃣To get started, tell us about your career path, from your time at KEDGE to the creation of Aldelia.
Hello, my name is Cédric Filet. I am originally from Bordeaux, I grew up there and did part of my studies there. I’m a KEDGE Marseille graduate and worked for five years in France then moved to London to develop the English subsidiary of a major French company. After working for there for two years (and after a sporting accident), I decided to create Aldelia.
Aldelia's aim was to recruit information technology and industrial engineers for companies, such as Thales, Yahoo, Ford, and Land-Rover. After a few months of activity, we started recruitments in the oil sector.
Our strategy was to use London as an international platform. We’ve helped British companies develop in French-speaking Africa, then opened subsidiaries in Tunisia, Gabon, and Congo between 2007 and 2008. After that, we expanded to our operations to high-potential countries where nobody wanted to go and where we wouldn’t face a lot of competition and so we opened subsidiaries in Nigeria and Brazil in 2009, and in Iraq in 2010.
We prospered in these regions, and then a series of crises from 2014 to 2016 arose: Daesh in Iraq, the political crisis in Brazil, the global, oil crisis. This period was an extremely difficult one for Aldelia. We lost a lot of business and turnover. We could have, and perhaps even should have, closed during that time as we were under attack from all sides. We decided to fight, to survive, and to succeed!
We believed in Africa very early on, so decided to refocus on the African continent while diversifying both geographically and sectorally. We opened offices in new countries such as Mozambique, Uganda, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Gabon and, importantly, expanded our client portfolio in various sectors.
Today we work for companies, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, AbInbev, Fujitsu, Cisco, Total, Société Générale, and Vale, and many others. We are now present in 13 African countries in addition to the Middle East, South America and of course Europe, and have 70 permanent employees and 500 subcontracted staff at our clients' sites.
This year, we are particularly proud to have won a contract with the International Organisation for Migration, in partnership with the European Commission, for the MATCH project. This project helps European companies in four EU member countries - the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy - to recruit and train African talents to meet their human resources needs. These employees will either be brought to work in Europe or work remotely from Africa.
The MATCH project also aims to help European companies develop their activity in Africa if they don’t already have a presence there. For those that already have operations there, this project will allow the top and middle managers to receive training in Europe. Once trained and back in Africa, these individuals will be able to take on both technical and managerial responsibilities within the subsidiaries.
2️⃣Tell us about the Aldelia platform? How does it work and how can Kedgers use it?
Our platform is designed to cope with the growing volume of job seekers and the flood of CVs that pour into our e-mail boxes with every advert we post. As we are also concerned for equal opportunities and human development, we created Areebajobs, a digital platform based on artificial intelligence to make recruitment procedures more efficient with automatic matching of CVs and job offers.
This new tool gives every talent a chance by processing all the CVs received, not just the first 50 or 100 that are submitted. All registered CVs are analysed and those that don’t match the job offers available on the platform at a given time are registered in the database. We now have more than 10,000 talents registered, which was launched only a few months ago.
We estimate that the amount of time a recruiter saves by using this platform to be almost five days. The work involved in receiving and analysing a very large number of CVs is now completed instantaneously. This innovation gives recruiters the ability to focus on tasks that provide greater added value and gives candidates greater visibility.
Thanks to Areebajobs, can analyse the skills and abilities of each individual in order to set up an appropriate training plan and improve his or her employability. We are creating a “Skills Observatory” to increase our ability to match the supply to the demand. We’ll then be able to better guide and advise individuals in their training and career plans, and we’ll also be able to support companies in their development and anticipate their future needs through training. Partnerships are already under discussion with major international companies to provide access to as many training courses as possible.
3️⃣As a former KEDGE student, what memories do you have of the school? How important do you think that a school has a strong alumni network?
My greatest memories come from the Junior Enterprise, the rugby team, the opening of student residences, and the countless parties.
Probably the best memory I have is the moment when we won the first Award of Excellence Award of Junior Businesses. We won it for the whole school, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the town, and the generations of Meuh who all contributed to the winning of this first prize. We won a second one the following year, and three more followed!
The alumni network is the foundation of a community, an important one for creating value. Even though this Alumni network is already working very well, we need to support it even more!
It provides the opportunity to find internships, jobs, and business. It’s also a means of opening up to address markets or subjects that one wouldn’t be able to do on his or her own.
For students and graduates looking for work, I’d say to go ahead and take advantage of our network, but most of above all to go and look for work where others don't go! Look at Africa, formerly the Continent of the Future, now the Continent of the Present. Go now, learn, grow, and make your fortune!
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