Any organisation planning to create a team in Luxembourg will find themselves with a multicultural and diverse group of people. Fast-growing scale-up Tadaweb speaks about how this diversity contributes to their development.
Lena Mårtensson
Like many start-ups, Tadaweb kicked off its activity in 2011 with one employee, an investment of €70,000 and a bright idea: creating a small data platform able to scale human intelligence for gathering and analysing information on the internet. Ten years later, the company has grown to almost 100 people and has offices in Paris and London besides its Luxembourg headquarters, where most of the staff is located. A new office in Canada is underway.
The current Tadaweb team is made up of 23 different nationalities. “In the beginning, the main language spoken in our offices was French,” says co-founder Genna Elvin, who herself is from New Zealand. “As the team grew, we needed to change our dialogue to English and invested a lot in language courses to facilitate this transition. However, having so many cultures and nationalities has been great. Our staff offer very different takes on how products should be developed, how meetings should be run and how the company should grow. They really challenge the traditional way of doing things, which is completely beneficial for us.”
Our international team really challenges the traditional way of doing things, which is completely beneficial for us.
Tadaweb also puts a lot of emphasis on its recruitment and onboarding process. “We love to hire locally in the Benelux region, and interact with universities to spot interesting people. However, for some roles such as designers, developers and customer development specialists, we also have to go global,” Ms Elvin explains. “We provide extensive practical support to help people settle and make them happy here, and as we are in full expansion, our challenge is to scale our personalised approach as we recruit batches of people.”
Getting top talent to Luxembourg is, according to her, not an issue. “Expats love the family setting in Luxembourg, the easy use of English and the good pubs in the city! We recently had a COO post open and received 3,000 applications from all over the world. People are excited about coming here.”
Expats love the family setting in Luxembourg, the easy use of English and the good pubs in the city!
Photo: © Luxinnovation/Laurent Antonelli
