There Aren't Enough Lucas and Emma to Replace the Michel and Sylvie Who Are Leaving
There Aren't Enough Lucas and Emma to Replace the Michel and Sylvie Who Are Leaving
Blandine Mercier, co-founder of Hello Masters, on why ageism is the discrimination nobody legislates against, and why the second half of a career should be where people do their best work.
TLDR
Blandine Mercier co-founded Hello Masters in October 2024 with Christophe Serret, both former colleagues at the Marcel agency (Publicis Groupe), to build a professional network exclusively for executives and leaders with more than 20 years of experience.
Her core argument: the demographic transition under way in the workforce means there simply aren't enough younger workers to replace those retiring, and few companies have prepared for it.
She argues ageism is the only discrimination that touches everyone and is built on nothing, yet remains one of the few forms of workplace discrimination without real legal teeth behind it.
Hello Masters' community has grown to around 12,000 members, by Blandine's own count.
Her ambition is a European professional network for experienced talent she describes as “sovereign”, pointing out that no dominant local player has claimed that ground yet.
Blandine Mercier doesn't warm up before making her point.
“There aren't enough Lucas and Emma to replace the Michel and Sylvie who are leaving,” she says, reeling off two generations of French first names the way a demographer might read a birth registry. It's her shorthand for a problem she believes most companies still treat as background noise: the workforce is ageing out faster than it's being replenished, and the arithmetic doesn't forgive anyone who ignores it.
Blandine co-founded Hello Masters in October 2024 with Christophe Serret, now the company's CTO. Both spent years at Marcel, the Publicis Groupe agency, where Blandine rose to deputy general managing director, having earlier held a role shaping the agency's talent and career pathways. Christophe was Marcel's CTO. Hello Masters is their answer to a problem Blandine had already spent years circling before either of them left: a professional network built only for executives and leaders with more than 20 years' experience, designed around skills and contribution rather than job titles.
The idea has a personal root. Around twenty years ago, Blandine watched her own parents retire early, at roughly the same time, from very different careers, one public and one private. What struck her wasn't the retirement itself. It was what came with it: a sudden loss of social connection, and a loss of any field left to contribute to. “They still wanted to contribute,” she says. “And we'd just told them they no longer could. I've always found that absurd.”
That observation sent her toward organisational design and career pathways, and eventually toward a narrower question: what could a second half of a career look like, once it stopped being treated as a holding pattern before retirement?
The maths behind the demographic transition
Blandine points to Korn Ferry's 2018 report, Future of Work: The Global Talent Crunch, as the moment the scale of the problem became concrete for her. The report modelled talent supply and demand across 20 economies and warned of a global shortfall of tens of millions of skilled workers by 2030, driven largely by demographics rather than economic cycles.
She sees the effects already landing in specific sectors. Energy and nuclear, she says, are where the shortage is starting to bite hardest, industries where a retiring workforce and a long training pipeline collide badly. Some companies have responded by rehiring their own retirees as consultants for specific missions, an informal patch rather than a real succession plan.
“There aren't enough Lucas and Emma to replace the Michel and Sylvie who are leaving.”
The fix, in her view, has to start with how companies plan continuity, not with how they manage headcount.
Ageism, the discrimination nobody legislates against
Blandine is unambiguous about where she thinks the resistance really sits.
“Ageism is the only discrimination that touches everyone, and it's based on nothing,” she says. Every worker either becomes “too senior” or was once “too junior”, she points out, yet unlike other protected categories, ageism carries little real legal weight in most hiring practices. Job postings can't legally specify an age range, she notes, but the workaround, specifying a years-of-experience band instead, does much the same job in practice.
“Ageism is the only discrimination that touches everyone, and it's based on nothing.”
Her frustration isn't with experience requirements themselves, which she thinks are often reasonable proxies for expertise. It's with the assumption, unspoken but pervasive, that a senior profile is less capable of adapting, less comfortable with new tools, and too expensive relative to its output. “When the cost looks too high,” she says, “it's usually because the person is in the wrong role, not because the person isn't worth it.”
A contract model built for one career, not several
Blandine expects the standard French employment contract, the CDI, to keep changing shape. She points to the temps partagé model, already common among small and mid-sized businesses, where a finance director might work two days a week across several companies rather than full-time for one, as a preview of where more roles are heading. Fewer people, she predicts, will spend an entire career, or even a full working week, inside a single organisation.
She's equally direct about what's holding the shift back: it isn't attitude, it's housing and financing rules that still assume one stable, full-time employer. Until those adjust, she says, the more flexible collaboration models she's describing will keep spreading at the edges rather than becoming the default.
Building toward a European network
Hello Masters counts roughly 12,000 members today, according to Blandine, a figure the company hasn't independently verified with public data. Her ambition for it isn't limited to France. She wants Hello Masters to become the reflex for European professionals entering the second half of their careers, and she's watching for local players tackling the same problem from other angles, citing Active Boomer, a German platform aimed at careers 55 and older, as one example of an adjacent effort worth building alongside rather than against.
Asked to describe her own leadership style, she pushes back on the word “leader” altogether. “I don't think I'm trying to be a leader,” she says. “I think I'm trying to be a propellant. I like making things exist. Once they exist, they improve.” She credits much of Hello Masters' progress to the contrast between her and Christophe: she describes herself as the talkative one, him as the calmer, more technical counterpart. Neither, she says, could have built this alone.
What she's learned most since launching, by her own account, is patience. Adoption takes longer than conviction does. Political calendars move slower than start-ups. Stereotypes, once formed, are stubborn.
“The second half is where you score the best goals,” she says. “So you'd better get on with it.”
What's next
Hello Masters is building toward a European footprint for professionals with 20-plus years of experience. Talent Business Club will be tracking how the demographic transition Blandine describes plays out across the markets we cover.
Blandine Mercier is co-founder and CEO of Hello Masters, a professional network for executives and leaders with more than 20 years of experience. She was interviewed by Francine Nyamba of Talent Business Club, the community for talent leaders and recruitment professionals. Hello Masters is referenced on Talent Business Partners, the platform tracking talent and recruitment innovation across Europe.