How Association Siel Bleu centralised hiring for 95 regional teams under one HR officer

Association Siel Bleu is a French nonprofit that has delivered adapted physical activity (APA) programmes to elderly, disabled, and chronically ill people since 1997, through APA teachers spread across roughly 95 regional teams nationwide. Demand for those programmes kept climbing after the pandemic, and for years, hiring to keep up with it fell to whoever happened to be closest: the APA teachers themselves, each region recruiting on its own.

What they were doing

APA teachers doing a job they weren’t trained for

Each of Siel Bleu’s roughly 95 regional teams runs largely on its own, delivering APA sessions locally across a workforce of 501 to 1,000 people, which is also why hiring had always been handled locally too. Siel Bleu’s APA teachers are trained in STAPS, the French university track for sports and physical activity science, not recruitment. Before Join, on top of the client-facing work they were actually hired for, they were the ones sourcing candidates, running interviews, and writing rejections whenever a role opened in their region. “It was time-consuming, and it wasn’t their job to begin with,” says Manon Ohresser, who took over recruiting for the organisation in October 2023.

No shared system across 95 regions

With no shared tool, one region might post on Indeed while another used whatever free board had worked before, based on habit rather than any comparison of what actually performed. Nothing forced consistency, and nobody at Siel Bleu could see the full national picture: which regions were struggling to fill roles, which boards were producing candidates, or how long a vacancy had sat open. Follow-up lived in whoever happened to be tracking it. If an APA teacher got busy, that thread of communication could disappear with them, and a candidate might simply never hear back.

A budget that ruled out most commercial tools

A nonprofit budget ruled out most of the commercial applicant tracking systems (ATS) Siel Bleu looked at, tools built and priced for organisations with a dedicated recruiting budget Siel Bleu didn’t have. It needed something priced for its own reality, not software built for larger companies with bigger HR budgets.

“It was time-consuming, and it wasn’t their job to begin with.”

What changed

One person keeping the account, not 95 logins

Manon wasn’t part of the original search. She was on maternity leave when Siel Bleu first evaluated Join in 2023, then took the account over that October. Rather than handing regional managers their own logins, she kept it under her own, a deliberate call given how thin recruiting expertise was spread across the organisation. Regional teams no longer post their own jobs; instead, they receive candidates already reviewed and grouped by sector, sent in a single email once Manon has been through them. A shared pipeline replaced the separate inboxes and paper trails each region kept before, and templated emails now cover the interview invitations and rejections she sends at volume, rather than writing each one from scratch.

Multiposting to every board at once

Multiposting replaced posting board by board. Every job Manon publishes now goes out automatically to Indeed, LinkedIn, France Travail, and Apec, alongside Siel Bleu’s own careers page, without her touching each site individually. Reaching general boards where STAPS graduates already look has also made applications land more consistently relevant than the old scattershot approach did.

“Being able to publish from one tool, without having to post everywhere manually, that’s a huge time-saver.”

A screening question doing the first pass

By Manon’s count, a screening question, most often a qualification check, runs an early pass on 98% of Siel Bleu’s postings, so she can see who’s likely to be a fit before she opens a single CV. Join’s native France Travail integration means postings also reach France’s national employment agency without a separate manual step on her end, one less platform for her to manage by hand.

Everything landing in one place

Since the account began in 2023, Siel Bleu has published 827 job ads through Join and tracked 3,953 candidates in the same system, figures that would have been impossible to compile from 95 separate regional processes, each keeping its own record or none at all.

What it cost

Pricing she can actually plan around

Join charges per active job ad rather than per user or per application, and Manon’s plan caps her at a fixed number she can plan around instead of an unpredictable quote-based bill. Over the last six months she has kept 22–25 job ads live at any time, close to that cap. “I think it works well. I know I can post 25 jobs, and as long as I stay under that, my price won’t move,” she says. It’s a predictability the earlier per-region, per-tool approach never gave her, where costs and coverage varied by whichever board a given region happened to be using that month. Three years into running the account alone, Manon is still the only person who touches it, and the volume she now manages would have been unworkable split back across 95 separate processes.

What it bought back

What it bought back was APA teachers’ time. Regional teams hand off job ads, email chases, and rejection letters, and get a shortlist back instead. Manon now plans her own workload around one system, where 95 regions once ran 95 separate ones, each with its own process, its own board, its own memory of who still needed a reply. That is time APA teachers now spend leading sessions with the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill clients Siel Bleu exists to serve, not screening CVs between them.

“Time saved. Efficiency. Practicality. Relevance.”