The Accidental Headhunter Who Bets on People Over Data
In France's tightening tech talent market, a former product marketer has built a niche executive search firm on a simple but unfashionable idea: that a recruiter who genuinely knows you is worth more than any algorithm.
TL;DR
Céline Jauneau never planned to be a recruiter — a life change and a well-timed phone call redirected a tech career into executive search
After eight years at a firm that shifted from quality to volume, she co-founded Capucine & Associés on three principles: deep specialisation, transparency, and honesty
The firm works exclusively in PLM, Industry 4.0, BIM, and digital manufacturing — presenting three to four motivated candidates per search, not fifteen CVs
In a sluggish French market facing a structural tech talent shortage, Jauneau argues that long-term human relationships beat data access every time — and that AI will simply expose those who were never adding real value
Céline Jauneau had no intention of becoming a recruiter. She had spent her career in corporate tech — CAD software, sales, product marketing for hardware manufacturers. HR had never featured in any plan she had made for herself.
Then, in her mid-career, her life shifted at once: she was pregnant, left Paris, and relocated to Lyon to follow her husband. A former contact called with an offer she nearly declined. "You understand this world," he told her. "Come and work in it from a different angle."
She accepted. What she found on the other side would take years to fully understand.
Within weeks of joining the agency, she noticed something nobody else seemed concerned about: the consultants placing tech candidates did not actually understand tech. Briefings were misread. Sourcing teams, staffed largely with juniors, could not grasp what clients were really looking for. Candidates were sent to interviews for roles they were never suited for.
"I didn't leave tech," Jauneau says. "I just stayed in it and moved to people. It was just another way."
That clarity — born from accident rather than strategy — became the foundation of everything that followed.
When Growth Became the Enemy
For eight years, Jauneau built her career at that first firm. She built from scratch and managed a tech research team of four to five people, delivered executive searches herself, and grew into a senior role. Then COVID hit, and with it a strategic shift she could not follow.
The focus moved from quality to volume. KPIs became purely quantitative. An important partner left. One by one, her team followed. By 2021, she was the last person standing in the department she had helped build.
"I had to choose," she recalls. "Should I adapt to a model I didn't believe in anymore, or be something different — more aligned with my values?"
It was, she says, emotionally quite hard. Loyalty can make exits harder than they should be. But she left.
She joined forces with Jacques Raud, a respected figure in the PLM and industrial tech In France, space whose deep client network complemented her sourcing expertise. Together they co-founded Capucine & Associés on three principles: deep specialisation, transparency with clients, and honesty with candidates — including the honesty to tell a candidate when a role is not right for them, even after significant work has gone into the search.
For agency founders watching volume-driven models hollow out their own firms, the lesson is stark: when growth targets consistently override quality, the people who care most leave first. And what they build next tends to be better.
The Discipline of Saying No to Most Things
Capucine & Associés operates within a deliberately narrow vertical: PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), Industry 4.0, BIM (Building Information Modelling), Construction Tech, and digital manufacturing — placing Sales Managers, account executives, solution architects, project managers, and programme managers primarily for software providers and integrators across France mainly.
"You won't receive fifteen candidates from us," Céline Jauneau says plainly. "You may receive three or four. But all of them will be motivated — for your company and for this specific role."
That distinction matters more than it sounds. France's industrial and digital tech sectors are facing a structural talent crisis: 72% of French companies cite skilled worker shortages as a direct barrier to investment, the ICT sector had a vacancy rate of 3.9% in 2023, and more than 15,000 cybersecurity positions remain unfilled.
In markets like these, the quality of a shortlist is everything. Sending volume into a scarcity problem does not solve it — it adds noise.
This is why Céline Jauneau insists on a thorough intake meeting before every mandate and will not proceed without full transparency from the client: the role context, the team dynamics, and a genuine reason why a passive professional should consider making a move. She also works predominantly on a retained or exclusive basis.
"If a customer doesn't pay anything at the beginning, the relationship is false," she says. "You only give value to what you have paid for. Nobody works for free — and your work will only be taken seriously when there is real commitment on both sides."
The Person Whose Child's Name She Still Remembers
The most tangible expression of the Capucine & Associés model is its network — built and maintained over twenty years in the same industry. Céline Jauneau does not just know where her contacts work today. She knows where they want to go next, what they worked on three years ago, and in some cases, the names of their children.
She and Jacques Raud have built dedicated LinkedIn communities for PLM professionals, Industry 4.0 practitioners, and supply chain actors across France — not as lead generation tools, but as genuine professional spaces where conversations happen between mandates.
"When I contact someone," she explains, "I say very freely: I'm also calling to hear your news. We haven't spoken in a while — where are you now?"
The contrast with what most candidates experience was illustrated sharply by a recent mandate. A solution architect in the PLM space told Céline Jauneau he had been bombarded with automated outreach by one company — contacted repeatedly, never with a personal response in return. When Céline Jauneau called, she brought context: the specific project, the reason she had thought of him, and a clear picture of why this particular move might make sense at this moment in his career. He listened. The conversation moved forward.
"The competitive advantage is no longer access to data," she says. "AI will help, of course. But data is everywhere. What you cannot automate is what happens when someone picks up the phone because they know you."
AI Will Expose the People Who Were Never Adding Value
Céline Jauneau uses AI daily — for recording interviews, organising research, improving productivity. She has no objection to the technology. But she is precise about where its limits sit.
"It helps for productive tasks," she says. "Not for decisions."
Her real concern is not that AI will replace good recruiters. It is that it will be used as a shortcut to volume — and in doing so, erode the trust the entire profession depends on. Candidates already tell her they are exhausted by impersonal, automated outreach. The firms responsible are building a reputation, just not the one they intended.
Used well, AI raises the floor for everyone. Used as a volume machine, it accelerates a race to the bottom that the whole industry will pay for.
A Market Thinning Out — and an Opportunity in That
The French recruitment market is sluggish. New positions are scarce; replacement hiring dominates. Long notice periods stretch timelines further. The French staffing market contracted by approximately 5% in 2024, with no meaningful growth expected in 2025 before a modest recovery in 2026. Some of Céline Jauneau's peers have already closed their firms.
Yet she reads the situation with pragmatism rather than alarm.
"A clean-up is coming," she says. "And that is why it matters now to be clear about your message — about what you do and how you work."
The consolidation she expects will favour firms that made a clear bet: on a sector, on a way of working, on a set of values.
The Thing That Is Quietly Shifting
There is one trend Céline Jauneau finds quietly significant — easy to overlook against the louder conversations about AI and market contraction, but potentially more important for how recruitment actually works day to day.
More and more, the professionals she contacts want to talk. Not about a specific role. Simply to connect. After years of remote and hybrid work, something is moving in the other direction.
"Many people I'm talking with now want to speak again, and to meet again — even more than before," she says. "People working from home are still looking for human interaction. That's quite new over the last few years."
For TA teams, it is a reminder that candidate experience is built long before a vacancy opens. For agency leaders, it may be the clearest signal yet that the firms which invested in real relationships are now the ones whose calls get answered.
The practice Céline Jauneau and Jacques Raud have built at Capucine & Associés is, at its core, a long bet on that idea — placed not in a boardroom, but in a moment of personal upheaval, by a woman who had no plan to become a recruiter, and who turned out to be very good at it.
She is still not entirely sure it was a plan. But she is certain it was the right choice.
Céline Jauneau is co-founder of Capucine & Associés, a specialised executive search firm focused on PLM, Industry 4.0, BIM, and digital manufacturing in France. She was interviewed by Jeroen Van Ermen, founder of Talent Business Partners. Capucine & Associés is listed on Talent Business Partners — the review-driven platform where specialist agencies prove their expertise with client-verified results.