Paris Said Hammouche’s office is located in the fourth arrondissement, an upscale neighborhood in central Paris. Hammouche is sitting there at a conference table, talking about a friend who grew up in a completely different world: in the northern suburbs of the capital. For many French people, the banlieue with its high-rise housing estates is synonymous with crime and integration problems.
The friend, Hammouche reports, graduated with top marks from one of the best engineering schools in the country. However, because of his suburban biography and his Maghreb descent, he had great difficulties in finding a job. It was experiences like this that made Hammouche decide about 15 years ago to fight for a new hiring practice in French companies.
At that time, Hammouche founded an organization to place talented people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in companies and thus promote equal opportunities in the French working world. In the meantime, it has become Mozaik RH, a rapidly growing recruitment agency with international corporations as clients.
“Today, business sees diversity as a trump card,” says Hammouche. The 50-year-old sees himself as a kind of social headhunter, he doesn’t care about his own profit: Mozaik RH is a non-profit company. The profits flow into a foundation that takes action against discrimination and pursues the goal of an “inclusive labor market”.
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The commitment also attracts a lot of attention in politics. At the end of November, Mozaik organized a conference with the French government to promote social and cultural diversity in companies. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire highlighted the contribution of actors like Mozaik and stated the goal: “France must become the nation of inclusion”.
In a survey by market research firm Sapio Research released in September, 76 percent of French business leaders said diversity and inclusion issues were important. And 71 percent of the bosses surveyed stated that they set aside a budget for measures in this area.
Stricter anti-discrimination laws
Anti-discrimination laws have been tightened in France over the years. There is also a national diversity label for companies that pay particular attention to equality in recruitment and personnel development. However, an analysis by the French Ministry of Economy and Finance shows that much remains to be done.
“Various studies confirm that discrimination on the French labor market persists,” the November paper reads. Among other things, the ministry cites an examination of application processes published by an international team of scientists led by the US sociologist Lincoln Quillian: According to this, French people who are perceived as white have up to twice as much chance of being invited to an interview as members of minorities with their candidacy to become.
In the neighborhoods with a high proportion of immigrants, “there are many young people who want to be successful,” says Hammouche. “They are very intelligent, studying or doing an apprenticeship. But you only ever talk about those who become criminals.”
This is evident again in the presidential election campaign. On the right-hand edge, candidates Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour are stirring up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. And the candidate from the bourgeois-conservative camp, Valérie Pécresse, recently got the “Kärcher” out of the basement – President Nicolas Sarkozy had already announced that he was cleaning up the suburbs with the picture of the high-pressure cleaner made in Germany.
Hammouche is familiar with these prejudices: he comes from the Parisian suburb of Bondy and grew up in a working-class family. His parents are from Morocco. In his youth he was a successful judoka. At the age of 16, he obtained French citizenship in order to be able to compete in the national championships. He still has the stature of a martial artist to this day.
Hammouche financed his studies with jobs in fast food restaurants, after graduating in business administration and human resources he worked for the French Ministry of Education. There, his impression was reinforced that it is not good references that determine professional success, but rather where you come from. “If you can only get good jobs through networks or parents, then that’s a problem,” he says.
With the creation of the French anti-discrimination agency in 2005, there was increasing pressure on companies to give job applicants the same opportunities regardless of their name or place of birth. “The next step was to find out where to find suitable candidates to make companies more diverse,” says Hammouche. “So we had the idea of a recruitment agency that specializes in these cases.”
“Companies position themselves for more diversity”
In 2007 he started Mozaik, initially as a non-profit association. Then the Ashoka network, which promotes social social entrepreneurship worldwide, took notice of him. “I didn’t even know the term social entrepreneur at the time,” says Hammouche. “But it’s a concept that appealed to me straight away.”
Today, Mozaik has more than 80 employees. The recruitment agency recently placed around 2,000 candidates with a university degree every year, many of them in management careers. Mozaik also organizes training courses in companies and checks for companies where they still have some catching up to do on the topic of diversity.
Customers include large corporations such as Total and Sanofi, but increasingly also medium-sized companies. “There’s a lot going on,” says Hammouche. “Companies are now positioning themselves clearly for more diversity.” This is not least due to the pressure from consumers and investors who would demand this personnel policy.
Another reason Hammouche cites for the change is that the French elites would renew themselves. For the younger generation of managers, diversity in the workforce is part of it. And there are more and more people with a migration background in management positions who pay attention to these issues when selecting personnel. After all, the shortage of skilled workers in the tech industry, for example, means that it is increasingly the skills and not the family tree that count among applicants.
Mozaik has opened several branches in France: in Lille, Lyon, Toulouse and Nantes. Hammouche also relies on the website of his personnel agency. This year, he says, he wants to expand the digital offer to Germany. One is currently looking for partners in the Federal Republic.
The bourgeois building near the Bastille in Paris, where Hammouche talks about his plans, is developing into a hub for social entrepreneurship in the capital. In recent years, other non-profit companies and organizations have settled here that want to enable minorities in France to climb the social ladder. It is a kind of shared office over several floors that goes by the French name “Ascenseur”. In German: elevator.
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