The French Army is no exception to the challenges of digital transformation. And with 16,000 new recruits every year, it’s one of the country’s most dynamic employers. At the head of this crucial mission, the Recruitment Sub-Directorate relies on some 1,000 professionals spread across metropolitan France and overseas, and at three levels (central, regional, and local). The day-to-day cooperation of in-house teams and service providers means that projects run smoothly.
Such is the context in which the Army’s Recruitment unit’s marketing department chose to put their trust in Talkspirit in 2018. In the past five years, they’ve mobilized more than 100 have joined forces.
Key figures:
- 16,000 new recruits each year
- 1,000 employees, including 70 at the central level
- More than 100 recruitment centers (CIRFA)
- Between 50 and 100 service providers
In this article, Lieutenant-Colonel Laurent Bastide, head of the recruitment marketing office’s data strategy section, looks back at the deployment of Talkspirit and the added value this tool brought to the Army’s recruitment efforts.
Supporting large-scale recruitment
“To meet our recruitment goals, we’ve deployed annual multimedia marketing campaigns that incorporate a lot of visuals, videos, and more.” This has required numerous partnerships with agencies or external solutions.
That’s why we work with a wide range of service providers, including communications agencies, media agencies, consulting firms, and IT consulting companies.
Internally, we work closely with these service providers on each project—be it creative, technical, advertising, or other. But managing several projects simultaneously can quickly become complex,” explains Lieutenant-Colonel Bastide.
Interacting with the outside world: a crucial (and sensitive) issue for the French Army
“Before we acquired Talkspirit, email was our only means of communicating with all our service providers. Our own internal network is of course very protected from the outside world. Exchanging files or managing projects is not easy under these conditions.” Consequently, information was often lost in email exchanges, and not all elements of a project could be processed via this channel.
“We needed a tool that would get everyone around the table to facilitate exchanges and information among all our stakeholders. The aim was to ensure that everyone had the same level of information at all times, with the ability to review the history of exchanges. This, while doing away with the laborious nature inherent in searching through numerous emails and attachments.”
Talkspirit is both a workspace and a discussion forum, and we were won over by its ability to bring internal staff and external service providers together on the same platform,” confirms Laurent Bastide.
The editor’s 100% French base was also a key criterion in the choice. To be sure, the French Army is subject to an important (and understandable) constraint: all the digital tools it uses must host their data under French jurisdiction.
Access on demand
During initial deployment, the Army’s recruitment department did not want to impose Talkspirit on the entire chain of command. “To encourage adoption, we preferred to offer the platform strictly to users involved in our projects.”
“In my opinion, if the employee doesn’t see the usefulness of the enterprise social network, the deployment will be a failure and the tool will not be properly used,” adds Lieutenant-Colonel Bastide.
Today, the platform has around a hundred users—not only staff from the recruitment marketing office, but also the partners the office works with on a regular basis. As a result, interactions on projects are much more fluid.
Working with others in project mode
“First, we set up several working groups on current projects, foremost among them the launch of our new recruitment campaign, and our CDP (Candidate Data Platform) project.”
“Quite quickly, most of our employees got the habit of using Talkspirit to work in project mode.” For this type of use, Talkspirit has the advantage of centralizing all exchanges along with their context and complete history. This way, each publication and shared document can be found in a few clicks with a simple keyword search.
However, Lieutenant-Colonel Bastide notes that some subordinates still dare to speak out too rarely on the platform. No doubt due to a lack of habit. “To encourage everyone to participate and interact, I try to regularly share articles and information that will interest and prompt reactions,” he reports.
Talkspirit’s take on the French Army’s project
Talkspirit delivers on its promises to streamline exchanges, break down silos for service providers, and facilitate successful recruitment campaigns.
The results? Since the implementation of the platform, collaboration on marketing projects has become much more fluid. The Army’s service providers are discovering a more agile and efficient way of working together. The decision to move away from back-and-forth chains of emails and streamline project exchanges represents a real time-saver on a day-to-day basis for everyone involved.
In addition to these needs for collaboration and openness with the outside world, the French Army pays even more careful attention to its data’s confidentiality. This is why it has turned to a solution that complies with the GDPR and is not subject to the Cloud Act.* A European company with 100% of its data hosted in the European Union, Talkspirit guarantees the security of all your data—personal and professional—making it the tool of choice for public bodies.
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Would you like to find out more about Talkspirit’s use cases and benefits for public sector organizations? Contact our team today:
*Cloud Act: U.S. federal personal data surveillance law, passed in 2018, which compels U.S. service providers to provide federal authorities, upon request, with any and all stored data—regardless of server locations (even within the European Union). (Source: Wikipedia)
