As part of our summer series of customer interviews, we spoke to Marine and Francis from the Caisse Centrale de la Mutualité Sociale Agricole (CCMSA).
If you haven’t read it yet, we also recommend the interview with the co-founder of recruitment agency Muhalink Repère.
The Mutualité Sociale Agricole is the 2nd largest social protection scheme in France after the general scheme. It is the equivalent of the CPAM, the Caf, the Carsat and the Urssaf, all brought together in a single institution. It is a private company that manages public funds for the benefit of the farming community and its beneficiaries.
The MSA is made up of 37 organisations: 35 local funds spread throughout France, 1 central fund and 1 IT structure.
The MSA represents 5.3 million beneficiaries of at least one social benefit, €26 billion in social benefits paid out each year and around 15,800 staff employed in the 37 organisations.
Let’s take a look at their recruitment challenges in 2023.
Intuition Software: What recruitment challenges have you faced this year?
Marine: I’ll leave it to Francis to add to this, because I joined the CCMSA in April, but from the point of view of someone with experience in recruitment, but who is relatively new to the MSA, the biggest issue is the number of recruitments underway at a time when there is a shortage of applicants for certain positions.
Francis: To complete the picture, all 37 MSA organisations were faced with a problem of brand awareness and therefore attractiveness.
To raise our profile, we set about creating a employer brand MSA with the signature “useful in everyday life”.
We have also created an institutional career site presenting the MSA, its missions and its organisation. The site also showcases the diversity of jobs at the MSA and features testimonials from our employees: doctors, accountants, IT specialists, social workers, etc…
And since the beginning of the year, all the job offers we generate via Jobaffinity are multi-posted on the usual job boards AND on our careers site. For us, this is as much a way of promoting our employer brand as it is a way of having a sort of ‘job exchange’ that is easily accessible to all employees to enable internal mobility. For example, we have recruitment campaigns underway to raise awareness of the MSA and its professions.
To improve our attractiveness and retain our employees, we are currently working to encourage mobility, in particular by making bridges between professions visible, and to be able to offer all our employees clearer and easier prospects for career development within the different structures.
Returning to the employer brand, the deployment of the Jobaffinity recruitment tool across all our organisations has enabled us to streamline, simplify and digitise our recruitment processes. This gives the MSA a much more positive and modern image.
Marine was talking about the number of recruitments we’ve had to manage over the last few months, and indeed the major advantage Jobaffinity represents is the time it has saved us in managing the overload of activity. We need to move fast and Jobaffinity allows us to do just that, while increasing the visibility of our offers via multicasting, but also and above all to greatly facilitate exchanges with managers. There aren’t very many of us in HR and managers want to recruit very quickly, which is perfectly logical.
IS: Do you have any specific figures to give us an idea of the recruitment workload?
Marine: To put it simply, in the CCMSA HR department, we currently have around twenty vacancies to fill per person, out of a team of five recruiters. That’s over a hundred jobs.
A recruitment tool becomes vital in this kind of situation.
IS: Speaking of Jobaffinity, do you use its features such as CV-free recruitment, QRcode recruitment or the AI assistant?
Marine : We don’t use these functions at the moment.
In the short term, however, we plan to develop sourcing.
IS: Has the creation of the careers page changed the distribution of applications? They come more from this site or from job boards?
Francis: It’s still quite varied, with applications coming in from a number of different channels, via multiple distribution. But the main point of our career page wasn’t necessarily to get more applicants, as I said earlier, the aim was above all to work on the employer brand and facilitate internal mobility.
Thanks to this site, all our job offers can be easily consulted by all the Group’s employees. It’s our job exchange, a unique platform. It’s also a way of retaining our employees and offering them interesting prospects.
I know that you are proposing career sites with a dynamic map system to visualise ads precisely at the level of the entire territory. This is something that we are going to discuss quickly internally, because we are interested in it.
IS: You have been a Jobaffinity customer for a number of years now, and have deployed Jobaffinity for a number of years. on all the national organisations, what have you gained from this?
Marine : I haven’t been around long enough to know the before and after, so I’ll leave it to Francis to answer, but in any case from a ‘new’ point of view, it’s a tool that I got to grips with very quickly and which makes my life easier on a daily basis.
Francis : I’ve already spoken a little about this, but I’d say that the first benefit is clear: it saves time. It’s a real asset at this level. This has enabled us to standardise and dematerialise all our recruitment process which, given the number of entities and employees, is a considerable step forward.
The other objective was to give a single, uniform image of the MSA so that we could have a common image when recruiting. Here too we are working on our employer brand.
It took no time at all to get to grips with the software, and I’m not aware of any difficulties or problems related to the use of the software in the HR departments of our organisations – perhaps they call you directly in such cases. But as I always say, “no news is good news” and I’ve never had any negative feedback, so I think our HR contacts are happy with Jobaffinity.
IS: That’s great news! And how do you see the future and your future uses for Jobaffinity?
Francis: We have a few modules and features that we’re interested in and will be turning to soon.
For example, I know that you have a recruitment authorisation request module (Easy Validation, which comes upstream of the recruitment application, editor’s note). At the moment we’re using a third-party tool, but it’s not connected to Jobaffinity, so having a well thought-out, user-friendly tool that’s directly connected is something we’re very interested in.
And as we said earlier, the dynamic map on the careers page for all MSA job offers in France. In short, we have not finished improving our processes thanks to Jobaffinity.
We are currently working on a roadmap for the 2024 changes. And as you suggested, we’re available to discuss our needs and give you some pointers for the future development of Jobaffinity.
Thanks to Marine and Francis from the MSA for their answers! If you are a customer of our Jobaffinity recruitment software and would also like to talk about your challenges and strategies, please do not hesitate to contact us!
