In conversation with Arnaud Deveugle: "Actually, nothing you believe is true. You always know only one piece of the puzzle"

Arnaud Deveugle was diligently carpentering a thriving career until he suffered burnout. It forced the young engineer to reflect on his life, which inspired him to found the career platform Caramel - named after the imaginative Carmel Mountains, not the sweetness - where he passively targets job seekers. Through his experiences as a founder, and thanks to sounding board sessions at Rubicon, he discovered the art of letting things go, why you don't actually know anything and how to grow as an entrepreneur.

"I didn't know what I wanted."

"I graduated as a Civil Engineer, so I never had to look for job opportunities," Arnaud says. "Therefore, I didn't think enough about which job and company suited me. Crudely put, I always chose the money. When I ended up in a company where I could not support the mission, had no click with the team and then also had to deal with a micromanager, I suffered burnout barely six months later. I had to recover from that for a year - the first few months I slept 20 hours a day."

"It was then that I really delved into assessments. At the end, I literally had a little bundle about myself: this is Arnaud. After which I no longer found work, because I now knew too well who I was and what I wanted. I could no longer be pigeon-holed into any one category. Difficult to understand for the recruiters sitting across from me."

Those experiences inspired the entrepreneur to create an entirely new concept from scratch: caramel. "With caramel, we built a career platform for passive job seekers. These are people who only want to change jobs when they can improve significantly. Did you know that barely 15 percent of job applicants are actively looking? So the rest make up the passive group. That's why we developed a platform aimed at the latter."

"On caramel, you can also get to know yourself better thanks to the assessments and tools we offer there. We collect all that data in your personal data vault, for which we collaborate with SOLID," the founder points out.

"By the way, it is also the companies that apply to the job seeker, and not the other way around. The latter can then choose to share their data with the organization in question. A unique job application process. The first reaction I often get when I tell about caramel is, 'How come this didn't exist yet?' That's when you know it's right."

"Looking back on it now, that burnout was definitely a trigger," Arnaud concludes. "But if it hadn't been that burnout, I would have had another aha moment. I know that, because subconsciously you always want to grow toward your true self."

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