Stéphanie Branchu
SERIES – We all have more or less bitter memories of internship or job interviews that went wrong. But probably not as much as the character of Alain Delambre, embodied by Eric Cantona in the series “Dérapages” broadcast on Arte from this Thursday, April 23. The six episodes are also available on arte.tv until May 13.
The series, directed by Ziad Doueiri (“Black Baron”) and inspired by the novel “Cadres noirs” by Pierre Lemaitre who co-wrote the script with Perrine Margaine. She describes the gear in which Alain Delambre (Éric Cantona), a senior and unemployed at the end of his rights, fell into a dark depression, ready to do anything to regain his place in society. So when he is contacted by a very secret recruiting firm to land a key position with an aeronautical giant, he rushes headlong. Despite a strange hiring process …
To recruit a new profile, and also to test “the loyalty” and “the resistance to violence” of its best executives, the CEO Alexandre Dorfmann (Alex Lutz) imagines the scenario of a false hostage taking led by real mercenaries . Obviously, the situation is getting out of hand and nothing is going as planned. The whole gives an excellent thrilling thriller, not without black humor and carried by convincing actors.
Fiction, did you say? Not frankly. The scenario of “Dérapages” is adapted from the novel “Cadres noirs” by Pierre Lemaitre, which won the author the price of the European thriller in 2010. And the starting point of his story is not unreal, since ‘he was inspired by a real-false hostage taken by several executives of the advertising management of France Televisions in the fall of 2005.
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A commando of nine hooded people, in fatigues and heavily armed, burst into the meeting room “
The facts take place on October 25, 2005 at the Château de Romainville, in Ecquevilly, in the Yvelines. At the initiative of Philippe Santini, the managing director of advertising for France Télévisions, the dozen people who make up the branch’s management committee are gathered for a seminar. “But the meeting went wrong. Because Philippe Santini had a fatal idea: to experience the resistance to stress of his closest collaborators ”, describes Mediapartin a long investigation published a handful of years later.
“A commando of nine hooded people, dressed in trellises and heavily armed”, GIGN agents actually came to do “an extra”, “thus burst into the meeting room and take all the FTP executives hostage. The group’s leader says he claims the donation of one million euros and the distribution of a videotape to France 2’s newspaper that evening. ”
For an hour and a quarter, the employees, who had obviously not been made aware of this “ordeal”, are hooded and handcuffed. “Claustrophobic” and “in shock”, the commercial director must be evacuated from the room while others are dragged on the ground or abused. Before we finally end up telling them that what they experienced “as a real terrorist attack” was in fact only a test of resistance to stress imagined by their boss.
State of shock at France Télévisions
Revealed a month later by The chained Duck and briefly mentioned on the air by France Info, the story of this real-fake hostage taking makes little noise. However very quickly, the internal consequences are felt: some employees are victims of psychological damage following this brutal and traumatic experience, others “are pushed outside the company or leave by discouragement”, continues Mediapart. One of them, who alerted the CEO of the time, Patrick de Carolis, in a letter, was dismissed a few months later.
It was only in 2009 that the criminal complaint of this last collaborator led to the conviction of Philippe Santini, at the same time as the head of the commando, for “complicity in aggravated willful violence, with premeditation and use or threat of a weapon (…) and forcible confinement ”. He will not leave his position at France Télévisions Publicité until 2012.
When Pierre Lemaitre’s book “Cadres noirs” appeared in April 2010, the coincidence of the agendas was disturbing, because it was at the same time that the Court dismissed Philippe Santini’s cassation appeal. Questioned by Mediapart, the writer remembers having “thought he was dreaming” when he first heard the story of this hostage-taking in business. “This role-playing game was particularly shocking, but in my eyes, not really surprising,” he says. “So I used this hostage-taking as one of the main actions in my novel.”
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Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP
In addition to the attractiveness of the news item, the one who has since received the Goncourt prize for “Au revoir là-haut” in 2013 takes advantage of this story to criticize the excesses of the liberal management of our society. “I still think we’d better ban management altogether,” he said to Mediapart, denouncing a principle which “considers that it has acquired rights over our economic fate (hyperselection at entry, hyper assessment leading to exit), over our mental health (institutionalized harassment leading employees to suicide), over our private life (the Detective agencies are increasingly called upon by companies to monitor their employees) … ”
For the author, the France Télévisions Publicité initiative “marks an additional degree: symbolically, it informs us that management now claims the right to life and death over employees. It remains symbolic, it will be said. I doubt it: the hostage-taking was certainly virtual, but the certainty that it was legitimate to organize it was very real. “
After watching the series, we obviously asked ourselves the question: is this type of extreme recruitment test legion 15 years after the facts at France Télévisions Publicité? Difficult to know, it is hard to see companies swooning over such states of service.
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To judge the candidates coolly or to test their resistance to stress, some companies are not shy about offering interviews that are out of the ordinary ”
When we delve into the many comments left by happy or unsuccessful hiring candidates on the online platform Glassdoor, some evoke rather surprising situations but never so violent.
In February 2017, a candidate reports a negative experience during an interview at Heineken where he was never entitled to human contact: notified by SMS that he had received an email, he had to answer questions by recording small videos. Before receiving a simple email, “leaving the recruitment circuit”. “It was very secret agent,” he recalls.
The same company was already illustrated by simulating a recruiter’s malaise or setting off a fire alarm to test “courage and initiative” of applicants for an internship. The whole filmed with a hidden camera for what would later become an advertising campaign.
More recently, in April 2019, another internet user testifies of a “difficult interview” spent at Procter & Gamble for an internship. After a series of online exams and personality tests, candidates for the same position were voluntarily gathered in the same room, without appointment slots, forced to wait their turn for long hours to “test their mind” .
“To judge the candidates coolly or to test their resistance to stress, some companies do not hesitate to offer interviews that are out of the ordinary,” explains the HuffPost Marie Mure-Ravaud, career expert at Glassdoor, who talks about “from simple challenges, to sports matches, through staging, and even psychological manipulation”.
“But if the aim of the interviews is also, and to a certain extent, to test their attitude in the face of a little pressure, they should in no case be intended to trap them or put them in situations of extreme stress”, assures our contact person. “In reality, the staging during job interviews remains anecdotal and fortunately.”
See also on The HuffPost: credible “Bureau des Légendes”? The analysis of a former DGSE officer
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