When Lara joined Altesia almost five years ago, the team still fit on one hand. She arrived at a pivotal moment: Altesia, until then focused on interim and freelance work, had decided to hire its first consultants on payroll. She was brought on board to find these first consultants, welcome them, and look after their satisfaction to ensure good retention.
Today, Lara still leads HR internally. But for the past few months, she has been wearing a second hat: that of a consultant, on HR assignments, at Altesia’s clients.
Building a team of consultants from the ground up
When Lara first walked through Altesia’s door, almost everything was still to be invented. The company was taking a turn: it no longer wanted only to place freelancers, it wanted to hire and support its own consultants. Lara was at the heart of this shift.
“We were really sitting around a table, asking ourselves: someone’s about to arrive, what do we do the first week? A breakfast, a lunch? Which training sessions? We had to set everything up.”
What appealed to her was being able to contribute her part, to be heard, and to learn fast.
“I was a jack-of-all-trades, I learned a huge amount. And there was trust right away: they let me get on with it, and whenever I had a question, I could ask it.”
Growing people before processes
For years, Altesia moved on instinct, carried by a family-like dynamic. Then, as it grew, came the time to structure things: development paths, evaluations, career paths. But for Lara, the central challenge stays the same.
“My big challenge is retention. Making sure people feel good, that they have prospects, that they feel heard. That they know they can take part in the company’s success.”
And what makes the difference isn’t always the grand plans: it’s the small gestures, often unplanned.
“It’s those little comforting things that make everyone feel good, like at home. For example, it might be buying a tart to treat the team over an afternoon snack at the office. Small, unplanned, incidental things that may seem trivial… but they change everything.”
Seemingly ordinary gestures, but ones that nurture what makes a team close-knit and high-performing: trust, and the desire to stay.
Stepping out of her comfort zone… while staying the course
On returning from maternity leave, Lara felt like a change: she wanted to keep growing, to see environments other than Altesia’s. At the same time, she felt good at Altesia and didn’t want to leave the company.
“I kept thinking: how do things work elsewhere? And above all, aren’t there good practices I could bring back to Altesia? But I still didn’t want to leave the company, the team, and everything I’d been building there for 5 years.”
The solution emerged naturally, in conversation with management and with Laurence Janssens, Altesia HR partner: Lara would become a consultant, on HR assignments, two days a week at most, keeping time to grow Altesia the rest of the week.
“Laurence was really happy when we brought up the idea. They trusted me 100%, without my having to prove anything more.”
The first clients
Within a few months, Lara moved through radically different settings. She started with an assignment for a company that installs Christmas decorations in shopping centres, where, rather than pure recruitment, she brought a genuine outside perspective on the organisation.
Then she worked for an organisation running European projects with an environmental impact. An English-speaking assignment, with freelancers spread across the whole EU: payroll management, team follow-up, CRM, support… a true “Swiss army knife” role.
And today, she works with a company in manual trades, where each week she handles the payroll of workers (welders, carpenters, and so on).
“It does me good to get out, to build a network, to meet lots of new people. It’s really stimulating!”
Every assignment is a chance to build skills, to discover other sectors and other ways of working, to bring in winning approaches tested at Altesia, or to carry good practices from some clients into her new assignments — or back to Altesia itself.
Altesia, a safe place
While she enjoys stepping out of Altesia’s offices a few days a week, Lara can’t picture herself full-time at clients either. Altesia is her home base.
“I love Altesia, I feel I’m in the right place. We move forward with trust. It’s a bit like my safe place, even if there’s always plenty to do! And at clients, I step out of my comfort zone, because I have to prove myself.”
What she finds unique about Altesia?
“That human, caring side. We give our trust really easily. We don’t overthink things: as long as everything’s going well at the client, we let consultants work the way they want. And when I have an idea, the partners often just tell me ‘go for it, we trust you.’ That’s incredibly precious.”
Today, Lara has found her balance: “I’m continuing in consulting, two days a week, while keeping time to watch Altesia grow. Right now, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
