Key Takeaways
- Iliad Group is privately held and Xavier-Niel-controlled since the 2021 to 2022 delisting; there is no public stock and no employee equity plan, only cash and bonus.
- The legal employer matters: confirm whether the role is at Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, Scaleway, Iliad Datacenter, or Free Senegal before investing in the application.
- The Iliad France ATS is a custom in-house platform on a French HR stack; subsidiaries run their own portals, none of which share data with each other.
- Apply in the language of the posting. French is mandatory for most Free / Iliad France roles; Scaleway runs largely in English; Italian, Polish, and Irish English apply for the corresponding subsidiaries.
- Scaleway is a real European cloud competing against AWS, Azure, GCP, and OVHcloud; engineering interviews probe production trade-offs, not puzzles.
- Culture is challenger, technical, anti-establishment, and direct; expect to defend specific numbers on your CV in interview.
- Negotiate cash levers (base, bonus, signing) and local benefits; there are no RSUs and no public-market liquidity event to wait for.
About Iliad Group (Free)
Application Process
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1
Decide which entity you are actually applying to
Decide which entity you are actually applying to. Iliad Group is a holding structure; the day-to-day employer is one of Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, Iliad Italia, Play (P4 sp. z o.o.), Eir, Free Senegal, Scaleway, or Iliad Datacenter. The contract you sign, the labor law that applies, the language of work, and the hiring manager all depend on which entity owns the role. Read the posting carefully and confirm the legal employer before investing time in a long application.
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2
Start at the right careers portal
Start at the right careers portal. The Free and Iliad France hub is recrutement.iliad.fr (also linked from free.fr). Scaleway posts at scaleway.com/en/jobs and runs its own pipeline. Iliad Italia posts at iliad.it/lavora-con-noi. Play recruits at play.pl/kariera. Eir uses careers.eir.ie. Free Senegal posts on free.sn and on local Senegalese job boards. Applying through a third-party aggregator is fine for discovery, but always confirm the role is still open on the official portal before submitting.
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3
Expect a custom French in-house applicant tracking system on the Iliad and Free
Expect a custom French in-house applicant tracking system on the Iliad and Free side, not Workday or Greenhouse. The Iliad recruitment platform is a proprietary tool (built around a Talentsoft-style French HR stack) with French-language forms, French date formats, and a CV upload that parses but does not always preserve formatting. Build your CV in plain text-friendly PDF, not in a heavily designed two-column template, and confirm the parsed fields by hand.
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4
Match the language of the posting exactly
Match the language of the posting exactly. Roles based in France default to French, even for engineering positions; Scaleway often runs in English because the team is international, but Free, Free Pro, Free Mobile, and Iliad Datacenter France will expect a French CV and a French cover letter. Iliad Italia expects Italian. Play expects Polish, with English acceptable for senior and engineering roles. Eir expects English. Free Senegal expects French (with Wolof useful for retail and customer-facing work).
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5
Write a real cover letter for French-perimeter roles
Write a real cover letter for French-perimeter roles. The lettre de motivation is still a meaningful artifact in French hiring, more so than in the US or UK. One page, addressed to the recruiting manager if possible, explaining specifically why you want this entity, this team, and this role, ideally with a concrete reference to an Iliad product or recent announcement. Generic letters are filtered out fast.
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6
Prepare for a multi-stage interview loop with both HR and operational managers
Prepare for a multi-stage interview loop with both HR and operational managers. Typical pattern: a 30-minute screening call with a recruiter, followed by one or two technical or functional interviews with the hiring manager and team, often followed by a final interview with a director or, for senior roles inside Free France, a member of the executive committee. Scaleway adds a coding exercise or system design round for engineering roles. Iliad Italia and Play follow the same general structure in local language.
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7
For Scaleway technical roles, expect open-source-aware engineering interviews
For Scaleway technical roles, expect open-source-aware engineering interviews. Scaleway runs a real cloud platform, contributes to open-source projects, and hires engineers who understand Linux, Kubernetes, networking, observability, and distributed systems. The technical loop will probe system design, on-call posture, and pragmatic trade-offs, not LeetCode trivia. Bring concrete examples of services you have run in production.
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For retail and customer-facing roles at Free Center stores, expect an in-store a
For retail and customer-facing roles at Free Center stores, expect an in-store assessment. Free Center sales advisors and store managers go through a practical assessment, often including a role-play with a simulated customer, in addition to standard HR interviews. Hours are retail hours including Saturdays, and the legal framework is the French Convention Collective des Telecommunications.
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9
Negotiate cash, not equity
Negotiate cash, not equity. Iliad has been delisted since 2022. There is no employee stock option plan equivalent to a US tech listing. Negotiation levers are base salary, variable (bonus or commission), thirteenth-month payments where customary, meal vouchers (titres-restaurant) in France, transport reimbursement, and for senior hires sometimes a signing bonus. Do not expect RSUs and do not expect liquidity.
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10
Plan around French labor law if your contract is in France
Plan around French labor law if your contract is in France. Standard offers include a CDI (contrat a duree indeterminee, permanent) or CDD (fixed-term) under French law, with statutory paid leave (five weeks plus RTT in many cases), mandatory profit-sharing (participation et interessement) where applicable, and a mutuelle (private complementary health insurance). Trial periods (periode d'essai) are usually two to four months and renewable once. Polish, Italian, Irish, and Senegalese contracts follow local law, which differs materially.
Resume Tips for Iliad Group (Free)
Tailor the CV to the entity, not just to Iliad Group
Tailor the CV to the entity, not just to Iliad Group. A CV pitched at Free France should foreground French-market telecom, French regulatory awareness (Arcep, CNIL), and Free product knowledge. A CV for Scaleway should foreground cloud-native stack, infrastructure-as-code, and open-source contributions. A CV for Play should foreground Polish-market mobile and CEE telecom context. Do not send the same generic file to all of them.
Use the European one-to-two-page CV format, not the US one-pager dogma
Use the European one-to-two-page CV format, not the US one-pager dogma. French, Italian, Polish, and Irish recruiters all accept two pages for candidates with more than three to five years of experience. Photo is optional in France (and increasingly avoided to reduce bias claims), still common in Italy and Poland, optional in Ireland. Date of birth is optional and increasingly omitted. Nationality may be expected for non-EU candidates due to work authorization questions.
Quantify in the units that telecom hiring managers actually use
Quantify in the units that telecom hiring managers actually use. ARPU (average revenue per user), churn, gross adds, net adds, NPS, MTTR, network availability percentage, fiber homes-passed, 5G site count, customer base size, B2B accounts, and order-to-activation cycle time are the language. A bullet that reads 'managed customer service' is invisible; 'reduced inbound call rate by 18 percent across 2.4 million Free Mobile lines through self-care app redesign' gets read.
For Scaleway and Iliad Datacenter roles, lead with infrastructure specifics
For Scaleway and Iliad Datacenter roles, lead with infrastructure specifics. Name the stack: Linux distro, hypervisor or container runtime, orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad), networking (BGP, VXLAN, SDN), storage (Ceph, ZFS, S3-compatible), observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry), CI/CD, and any cloud-provider experience. Open-source contributions, conference talks, and public technical writing are real signal at Scaleway.
For network engineering roles, list certifications and protocols clearly
For network engineering roles, list certifications and protocols clearly. CCNA, CCNP, JNCIA/JNCIP, RHCE, and vendor-specific certifications (Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Huawei) carry weight. Protocol fluency (BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS, IPv6, DOCSIS for cable contexts, GPON for fiber, 5G NR for mobile core) should be explicit, not implied.
For commercial and B2B roles at Free Pro, lead with French enterprise account ex
For commercial and B2B roles at Free Pro, lead with French enterprise account experience. Named accounts, deal sizes in EUR, sales cycle length, win rates, and channel-partner relationships matter. Prior experience selling against Orange Business, SFR Business, and Bouygues Telecom Entreprises is directly relevant.
For customer service and call-center leadership, show language coverage and shif
For customer service and call-center leadership, show language coverage and shift management. Free runs French-language customer service primarily out of France with some near-shore support; Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, and Free Senegal each run their own local operations. Multilingual experience (French plus English plus another EU language) is a hiring lever for group-level roles.
Honestly state language levels using the CEFR scale (A2 / B1 / B2 / C1 / C2)
Honestly state language levels using the CEFR scale (A2 / B1 / B2 / C1 / C2). For French-perimeter roles, a B2 or higher in French is effectively required for non-engineering positions; many engineering roles will accept B1 plus strong English. Italian, Polish, and English fluency claims are routinely tested mid-interview by switching language without warning. Do not inflate.
Do not use heavily designed two-column or graphic-heavy CVs
Do not use heavily designed two-column or graphic-heavy CVs. The custom Iliad ATS, like most parsers, struggles with multi-column layouts, embedded images, text inside text boxes, and unusual fonts. A clean single-column PDF in a standard sans-serif at 10 to 11 point with section headings parses cleanly and reads well to a human.
If you have prior Niel-ecosystem affiliation, mention it
If you have prior Niel-ecosystem affiliation, mention it. Ecole 42 alumni, Station F resident teams, Kima Ventures portfolio company experience, or prior work at Free, Iliad, Scaleway, Eir, Play, or Iliad Italia is a recognizable signal in this orbit. State it plainly in education or experience; do not over-claim a relationship to Niel personally.
ATS System: Custom Iliad recruitment platform (recrutement.iliad.fr) plus per-entity portals
Iliad Group does not run a single off-the-shelf applicant tracking system the way many large multinationals do. The Iliad and Free France perimeter is served by a custom in-house recruitment platform reachable from recrutement.iliad.fr and linked off the Free and Iliad corporate sites. Functionally it sits on top of a French HR tech stack (in the Talentsoft / Cegid Talentsoft family of products that dominates French enterprise HR), with custom branding and custom workflows for the group. The candidate experience is a French-language portal where you create an account, upload a CV (PDF or DOC), confirm the parsed fields, write a short motivation message, and answer a small number of screening questions. The parser handles standard layouts well but struggles with two-column designs, embedded images, and unusual fonts; verifying the parsed data by hand before submission is worth the five minutes. Outside the France perimeter, the group operates separate portals per subsidiary: Scaleway uses its own pipeline at scaleway.com/en/jobs (the Scaleway team is international and the application flow is in English), Iliad Italia uses an Italian-language portal at iliad.it/lavora-con-noi, Play uses a Polish-language portal at play.pl/kariera, Eir uses careers.eir.ie in English, and Free Senegal recruits via free.sn and local Senegalese channels. These systems do not share data with each other or with the Iliad France platform, so a candidate open to multiple entities needs to apply on each portal separately. Across all of them, keyword matching against the job description is real: a generic CV will lose to a tailored one regardless of which entity is hiring.
- Submit a clean single-column PDF, not a designed two-column template, so the parser captures every section.
- Apply in the language of the posting (French for Free / Iliad France, Italian for Iliad Italia, Polish for Play, English for Eir and Scaleway, French for Free Senegal).
- Mirror exact keywords from the job description: if the posting says 'ingenieur reseau,' write 'ingenieur reseau,' not 'network engineer.'
- Always include a real lettre de motivation for French-perimeter roles; it is still a filter, not a formality.
- Confirm the legal employer (Free, Free Mobile, Free Pro, Iliad Italia, Play, Eir, Scaleway, Iliad Datacenter, Free Senegal) before applying so the application lands in the correct pipeline.
- Create an account on the entity portal you care about most and reuse it; profiles are not shared across subsidiaries.
- Use the European CV format (one to two pages), and skip the US-style photo-and-graphic-design CV.
- List languages with CEFR levels; recruiters at this group do verify them in interview.
Interview Culture
Interview culture across the Iliad Group is direct, technical, and unsentimental.
What Iliad Group (Free) Looks For
- Comfort with a challenger, low-cost-disruptor posture against incumbents (Orange, SFR, Bouygues, TIM, Vodafone, Hutchison, AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Operational rigor and cost discipline; Iliad has built its market position by being structurally cheaper than competitors, not by outspending them.
- Engineering depth for technical roles, with bonus weight for open-source contributions, conference talks, or public technical writing (especially for Scaleway).
- Ability to work in the local language of the entity (French, Italian, Polish, English, French/Wolof for Senegal); honest CEFR levels are tested in interview.
- Ownership and accountability; the group runs lean and individual contributors are expected to make and defend decisions, not wait for committee.
- Pragmatism over ideology: candidates who can ship a workable solution fast tend to do better than candidates who optimize for theoretical perfection.
- Comfort with a privately held, founder-controlled employer where strategic direction is set by Xavier Niel and a small executive group rather than by public-market governance.
- Customer empathy at scale, especially for product, customer-experience, and B2C roles; Free's brand identity is built on being on the customer's side against the incumbents.
- Mobility and curiosity across markets; the group spans France, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Senegal, and movement between subsidiaries is possible for the right people.
- Resilience to consolidation uncertainty (Italian merger discussions, French market structure debates) without letting it paralyze day-to-day delivery.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Iliad publicly traded?
Who actually runs the company day to day?
Which brands belong to the group, and which do not?
Do I need to speak French to work there?
What ATS does Iliad use?
How aggressive is the disruptor culture, really?
Is the Vodafone Italia deal happening?
How does Scaleway compete against AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud?
What about working at Eir, Play, or Free Senegal?
Is there equity, profit-sharing, or any upside beyond base and bonus?
What is the work environment like at Iliad headquarters in Paris?
How do unions and worker representation work here?
Open Positions
Iliad Group (Free) currently has 1 open positions.
Related Resources
Similar Companies
Sources
- Iliad Group official corporate site —
- Iliad SA - delisting and HoldCo II tender offer —
- Free careers and recruitment portal —
- Scaleway careers —
- Iliad Italia - Lavora con noi —
- Play (P4 sp. z o.o.) careers - Polska —
- Eir careers - Ireland —
- Free Senegal corporate site —
- Reuters - Iliad to acquire Play in Poland (2020) —
- Reuters - Iliad-Vodafone Italia merger talks coverage —
- Arcep - French telecom regulatory authority —
- Ecole 42 - tuition-free coding school founded by Xavier Niel —