We met with Jean-Charles, the CEO of Crème de la crème, the first selective community of freelancers in France. He gave us his point of view on the job market and his advice on how to become a freelancer.
Hello Jean-Charles, who are you, where do you come from?
Hi, my name is Jean-Charles, I am 28 years old and I am co-founder and CEO of crème de la crème. I come from Nord-Pas-de-Calais, near Dunkirk, and I attended ESSEC before giving up everything to dedicate myself to the development of our freelance community.
By the way, what’s Crème de la crème?
Crème is now a high-end platform where freelancers are all digital experts, carefully selected. Each candidate is studied one by one in order to be accepted into the community and our acceptance rate is around 10%, out of more than 1500 applications per month.
When we launched the platform with my business partner in 2015, we were still students, it was our first company and it was our intuition that made us move mountains to get to this point. The early days have nothing to do with our situation today, the road was long and exciting!
How do you view the job market today?
It’s booming! Today’s job market offers an incredible range of choices and has nothing to do with the one our parents experienced. You can self-train on any subject more easily than before, start a new life overnight, evolve as a freelancer and have clients all over the world, thrive at work by placing your passion at the heart of your professional project, in short the possibilities offered nowadays are endless, especially in areas carried by digital technology.
If you had to give 3 tips to someone who wants to start freelancing, what would you say?
To surround yourself with a community of freelancers who share the same values as you. At Crème, mutual assistance and kindness are part of our values, which is essential when you want to start freelancing and need guidance.
To specialize in a field in which you excel or will want to excel, in order to be identified as an expert on the market. The reputation of a freelancer is a key subject, you must take care of it carefully and become your own product.
To choose your customers carefully. There’s nothing worse than a bad customer that we drag like a ball and chain. A good customer is a gaming partner, a win-win relationship that everyone benefits from. At Crème de la crème we carefully select companies to offer our freelancers quality projects and well paid missions. Today, we collaborate with the largest French companies for technical, ux, design, data, or digital marketing missions. Come join us ????
We are organizing an event with crème de la crème on the Future of Work and Digital Nomads on June 20th, at Anticafé Station F.
