100 Yousigners and counting: Get behind the scene!

Welcome to Yousign’s class of April !Oh, and guess what? We have just passed the 100 Yousigners mark! 🥳

In this article, we will talk about how Yousign came to be and how it grew up, from a start-up to a scale up with our co-founders Luc and Antoine.

And that’s not it - our HR “iron ladies” Cassie and Margaux, will unveil all the secrets behind our exponential growth. 👭

It’s high time for us to sit down, look back and share our best practices 🚦

Back in 2011, Luc and Antoine were engineering students and...boom ! The epiphany. 🗣
After a little thinking and a lot of planning, they set up the perimeter for their project, rationalised their ideas and identified a need.

Their number one 1️⃣ mission : democratise the use of the electronic signature, by making it simple to use and accessible to all, on every device.

How on earth can they accomplish that ? Well, by being software publishers and certification authority.

In 2013, they launched their first product: Yousign 1.0 ! Over the course of the following year, the first Yousigner showed up and in 2015 Yousign raised funds for the first time !
Today, there's more than 100 Yousigners onboard spread across France. Some work in our offices in Caen, some in our offices in Paris, and some are in full remote.

Very early on, our HR team got together with all the Yousigners to organise internal workshops on Yousign's core values, with a simple objective of making it so everyone felt guided through:

💪 Team Cohesion
We all have a common objective and we value team spirit more than anything else.

🙆‍♀️ Transparency
We always question the status-quo and feel that there is nothing we cannot discuss.

🤝 Trust
We have the possibility to go about our day as freely as we want and to organise it as we see fit.

🔝 Ambition
We always aim for what's better as individuals, but also collectively.

These values can very much evolve into something else: nothing is set in stone!

In order to take up tomorrow's challenges, a team of experts rose up as years went by.

Today, it is made out of a feminine quartet: Anna, Cassie (don't even think about asking how long she's been at Yousign), Margaux and Kristina !

It's true that, as a company in exponential growth, the candidates we're looking for do not look like the ones we were looking for back then.

Our standards have evolved: we now choose more specialised profiles. We want to hire people who are experts in their area of expertise in order to accompany (and not necessarily manage) and structure our teams.

By the way, there are no automated tests around her. Our team carefully concoct personalised tests in order to evaluate specific skills. They also take time to give extensive feedback.

Then comes the question of soft skills and atypical candidates. Curiosity definitely didn't kill our cat 😛.
On the contrary, it is valued at a high price here along with self-made men and women as long as experience and expertise are there to back it all up!

Right after recruiting, comes onboarding. Here at Yousign, HR makes it a point to maintain a perfect balance and good camaraderie.  

Our digital onboarding started pretty early on in order to anticipate all the major events. Well, it is evident that it all worked out pretty well in the end!

Newcomers day is the first Tuesday of every month and all the newbies have onboarding meetings for the next 3,5 days with experts in each team.
By the way, it is Tony, our CISO that manages the onboarding's device session.

Since January 2021, our digital offices called Youniverse and developped by WorkAdventure took over for the remote onboarding of our newbies.

The work/life balance is something we take very seriously around here.  

Internally, our HR department has the duty to raise awarness about it, and give a few tips and good practices through our very own charter about every Yousigner's right to disconnect.

In this peculiar crisis and this strange context, we want each and every Yousigner to be able to keep their freedom and benefit from flexibility in the way they organise their work schedule.
Everyone at Yousign who is a parent knows how valuable this is: they can adapt their schedule and their workload! 😉👶

🇬🇧 Since we want to cross a few borders and are looking at international opportunities, we are also looking at bettering our colleagues' proficiency in English. With the help of EF - Education First, we have scheduled a few individual and collective online training session.

Things to look forward to🚧: We also want our Yousigners to develop new skills. That's why we have scheduled new training opportunities, solely focused on their hard skills, starting second quarter of 2021.

Growth comes with a reshuffle in management.

In addition to Yousign's growth, we have decided to value experience. As a result, all the Yousigners who have experience in their job and who joined Yousign early in its career were promoted managers.

In order to smooth things up and give them the best possible shot at their new job, Yousign offered management training courses to all their managers (regardless of their level) in order to help them apprehend performance management.

What do we value exactly ? A smooth combination between participative management and making everyone aware that their scopes fall under their responsibility.

For us, personal or collective initiatives are important and we think that autonomy brings creativity and efficiency.

We move forward and improve constantly: such are the advantages of our empirical approach.

Oh yeah ! We just went over the 💯 mark at Yousign. But it's only the beginning.

Don't you hesitate to join us. We need you to make Yousign the European Leader in the electronic signature market! 🚀