L’Oréal Shares its
Insights on How to Build
an Authentic Employer
Brand and Best Practices
L’Oréal attracts, engages and manages more than 950,000
candidates a year around the world. To create a meaningful
candidate experience and foster a positive employer brand
image, L’Oréal has set up a senior marketing team that is
dedicated to talent acquisition initiatives.
“Our strategy is rooted in three key pillars: authenticity,
consistency and creativity. Authenticity is about being true
to your company’s history, values and culture. You won’t
be credible if you are searching the last wave of trending
topics,” says Ana Duque, Digital Content and Engagement
Manager. L’Oréal is big on encouraging its employees
to be vocal about working at the company and teaching
them how to be ‘responsible social media creators’ but not
telling them what to say. “You can’t shield yourself from
negative feedback, employees are just going to talk about
it anyways,” adds Digital Project Manager Cédric Paillé.
“You should try to encourage them to do it in the right way.”
Consistency is about having a strong and consolidated
message across channels. “It’s about ensuring that what
candidates see on your website, on your social media, once
inside your company, is actually the same,” says Duque.
The end-to-end employee experience (EX) needs to fi t
together to be believable and to ultimately strengthen your
employer brand.
“Even if it’s super creative, you cannot build your employer
brand based on lies,” argues Duque. Creativity means
identifying your strengths and communicating them in an
engaging way to your target audience. “It is what you need
to stand out, but it shouldn’t come from the idea of being
different.”
The beauty giant is also leveraging technology - including
AI, automation and analytics - to achieve its goals at scale.
A major resource is its Avature CRM and ATS. The singleplatform
solution helps L’Oréal build personal connections
with individual candidates, while meeting its legal
obligations, including GDPR. “The best part about Avature
is the fl exibility of the tool...We are using information like
where candidates are from and what they’re interested in
to drive personalized communication rather than a generic
email. We’re working on bringing this to the global level.
We want to make sure our employer brand is attached to
this strategy and on a massive scale to push our employer
brand using CRM,” says Paillé.
The hard reality is that the vast majority of L’Oréal’s
applicants - over 98% - are unsuccessful. A negative
candidate experience puts both its employer and consumer
brands at risk. “If we only focused on hires, we would be
creating a bad experience for nearly everyone. So we have
different initiatives to reject candidates,” explains Paillé.
For example, it partnered up with its brand, Kiehl’s, in
Australia to send rejected candidates who had reached the
interview level vouchers to say ‘thanks for your time’. “Just
because a candidate is not the right candidate today doesn’t
mean he won’t be for a position tomorrow”.
L’Oréal can create targeted recruitment marketing
campaigns using Avature workfl ows and segmentation
capabilities, to push hyper-relevant content that resonates
with specifi c audiences, such as job specs or photos and
videos from VivaTech - an event where L’Oréal presented its
latest digital and technological innovations - based on their
resume or where they are in the CRM process, as well as
information such as where they were sourced, local market
Advertorial
nuances and their level of engagement with L’Oréal.
“L’Oréal is a very organic company so we’re building a big
project with Avature today to bring micro-optimizations
to recruiters...to automate processes, like scheduling
interviews, to give recruiters more time for value-added
tasks,” adds Paillé. “It gives recruiters more time to
spend face-to-face with candidates, to give personalized
feedback, so we really believe in the tool. It is helping us
reach candidates that we wouldn’t have seen before, to fi nd
them better and faster. It helps us be transparent and show
we’re not as process-driven as some other companies in
the tech or accounting worlds.”
L’Oréal is working with Google Analytics, third party metrics
and Avature to leverage data and seize employer branding
opportunities in real-time. Paillé says: “It’s very impressive
to see how our community has grown, to see our recruiters
caring about data and wanting to know how they can get
further with it. The needle is moving fast. I think it’s going
to drive a lot of the project we have with Avature and we’re
excited about that.”
As L’Oréal transforms into a beauty tech company, it is
taking candidate relationship management to new heights.
“These are interesting times for L’Oréal,” says Duque. “We
are becoming a beauty tech company and want to attract
a whole new set of profi les and skills. Faced with these
positive challenges and opportunities, we want candidates
to go one step further in every interaction that they have
with the company.” L’Oréal is redefi ning engagement.
HOW TO BE AN
EMPLOYER OF CHOICE
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