en / fr
The founder

Michaël Obadia

The story of an ambitious entrepreneur, in love with his profession.

/ 01
How did you come to launch Upward ?

I was a strategy consultant when a headhunter contacted me for an opportunity. It was an immediate hit. Not for the job he was offering me, but for what he did for a living. I immediately felt that this profession was perfectly suited to my main character traits: a strong curiosity for others, an insatiable desire to build bridges between people, a strong business appetite and a need for concrete and palpable achievements in my professional life.

 

As a consultant, I felt that hunters did not understand my career prospects or really understand my profession. Having a good idea of the realities of recruitment in the consulting sector, I decided to go for it and put on the market an offer that would stand out for its unrivalled business expertise and reconsideration of the candidate in his processes; in other words, the problems of my interlocuters had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis for my intervention to be effective. If the Upward method was not going to be fundamentally different, the quality of service had to be irreproachable. This is how Upward Consulting was born.

 

/ 02
Did you already have in mind the deployment of your positioning and your method on several specialised branches? Or was it the success of Upward Consulting that gave you the idea?

Although Upward Consulting was obvious from the point of view of my background, I already had in mind the prospect of a rapid and sector-based development so that the Upward concept could impose its brand on different markets. Moreover, if I take up today the main steps of my 2012 business plan, I am completely in the nails!

On the other hand, this model is economically formidable and it would have been a shame to reduce it to a family of professions. In this day and age, frugal relationships are often disembodied and motivated by short-sighted interests. Our posture makes a strong difference in the long term: our clients and candidates are extremely loyal and grateful to us.

/ 03
Do your development ambitions have anything to do with your firm's name "Upward"?

That’s right. At the time of creation, the ambition was great and multiple. It had to respond to a desire for horizontal but also and above all vertical extension. “Upward” echoes the evolution, the professional elevation, the determination to always climb the ladder.

The Anglo-Saxon is because we do not lose sight of international development. And then it’s more class.

/ 04
What is the thing you are most proud of today?

Certainly our customer loyalty and candidate satisfaction rates are exceptional, but also clearly dependent on our business choices. When we declare “Your ambition matters”, we are committed to keeping a promise, and the fulfilment of our beneficiaries is essential.

Perhaps also of my team and the facilities we are putting in place to offer them ever more comfortable working conditions. We are clearly not afraid to invest in what will guarantee their professional fulfilment.

/ 05
Do you have plans for the firm?

Indeed I do!

We are currently in the process of developing specific services in order to deliver an even more complete Upward experience to our clients, in line with their recruitment needs. In addition to offering a tailor-made service, to best meet their needs, we want to offer them options that will help them improve their image and thus attract the top profiles on the market. In particular, we have realised that data can really respond to our clients’ difficulties in recruiting. In order to keep pace with market realities and competition – in terms of strategy, market positioning, employer branding, employee well-being and career prospects – companies today have a vested interest in adapting. For this reason, we carry out organisational, salary and reputation benchmarks. We are also deploying a much more advanced consulting approach to maximise their chances of attracting and recruiting the right profiles: rewriting job descriptions, exhaustive personality tests, talent mapping, sector best practice workshops.

 

For our candidates, we are developing services to put them in touch with service providers able to add value to their profile on the market: personal branding, improving their speech, preparing them for difficult interviews, etc. These services will be complementary to all the  Upward support they already benefit from today to achieve their professional objectives.

 

/ 06
Why did you choose to create a "coaching room" tab on each of your sites?

We were keen to enlighten our interlocutors on innovations, image & market positioning issues, HR transformations and the evolution of the job market.

These blogs are therefore aimed at our clients, our candidates – even the most senior – but also at people who want to discover issues relating to the professional world. We provide the point of view of our Upward consultants, who have business knowledge essential to professional development, but also involve experts on even more specialised subjects.

While the blog on our Group site is more generalist, we have chosen to create an ultra-specialized blog for each of our firms, always with the aim of responding to issues specific to a sector and business lines, in order to create content dedicated to a market reality.

My ambitions for 2025

70
10M
15
experts dedicated to their profession of revenue SPECIALISED FIRMS TO ALWAYS BETTER ACCOMPANY OUR CLIENTS.
Please resize your screen to access the website