People & Company

To the right of me, Jago is on a conference call. To the right of him, a Bluetooth speaker is playing Pearl Jam, and at the next desk, Wesley and Pauline are working on the new C-Clear Partners website. The sliding doors are open, letting in the summer air while Gianni is studying towards his next Salesforce certification at the desk opposite of me. In the meantime I’m trying to come up with a blog entry that describes what it was that attracted me to this ‘company’.

Don’t interpret above description as depicting an unprofessional environment, though. The professionalism is baked into every single individual working here. The difference to most other workplaces is simply that everybody has fun doing the best they can do to deliver the best quality for their clients and their customers.

Yes, I put the word company in quotation marks earlier. I’ll get to that. Also, to be honest, I had never heard of C-Clear Partners before they called me. But after having been here for only a month, whatever my career path looks like in the future, I already know that C-Clear Partners will remain in my memory as the most welcoming, the most supportive, and the most true to ‘our people are our most important asset’ workplace I have worked at so far.

But to answer the question of what it was that made me sign, I can really only rely on the experience I had with C-Clear Partners before said signing. So, just disregard anything positive I have mentioned so far, as well as the charity work they do, the fact that they let you choose whether you want to work with a MacBook or Windows laptop just to be sure you’re working with familiar hard- and software, the fact that everybody goes out of their way to make sure you have the support you need, the Wednesday special lunches, the knowledge sharing sessions, the workgroups (you can choose to join a workgroup that interests you), and so on.

So, why did I decide to work here? The simple answer is 3. Those of you who are familiar with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will understand that a simple number can sometimes be the answer to big things. In this case, however, it simply represents the three partners and creators of C-Clear Partners (Geert Adams, Gert Pauwels, and Kasim El Bastani) I met before deciding that I absolutely wanted to be part of what they had grown: An environment that by putting people first, attracts and creates professionals who infuse everything they do with a human touch.

The most interesting and surprising part of the interview process was that while I was fully prepared (I’m using the term ‘fully prepared’ loosely here) to dive into the details of my experience and which particular skills that I had developed during my glorious career path would exactly match the profile they were looking for, I hardly got to talk about any of that. Instead I was presented with three people who spoke with passion about their vision of what it means to create. Their vision of what it is to build the right relationships that will allow productivity to evolve out of the will to deliver quality. “Knowledge can be acquired – personality and attitude cannot be changed as easily”.

I’ve worked at various companies. Some had 5, some 500, some 5000, and one even 15.000 employees in Belgium alone. All of them express their dedication to their employees somewhere in their values or mission statement. Few, however, managed to make me believe any of it while I was working there. Geert, Gert, and Kasim made me believe it during the very first conversation and have proven every word so far. Already, I don’t think of C-Clear Partners as a company anymore. It’s simply a group of people enjoying what they do, working on improving themselves and others, while delivering professional work to enable others to do the same.