Articles 
In response to the heightening competition for global talent, L’Oréal discovered how to engage more effectively with skilled and diverse candidates. In an article on talent acquisition featured in The Times of London, L’Oréal’s Senior Vice President of Talent Development, Jean-Claude Le Grand, spoke to the value of renewed strategic HR initiatives. This topic is both timely and typical within the industry since, according to Forbes, 43 percent of HR leaders report not having a future of work strategy.
In an effort to redefine its HR strategies and resonate more with the diverse needs of the current workforce, the beauty giant has engineered a multifaceted approach that not only attracts but also engages and nurtures talent effectively.
The basis for L’Oréal’s revamping starts with Avature’s cutting-edge technology that allows recruiters to consolidate recruiting activities such as sourcing candidates, scheduling interviews, providing feedback and reporting on costs and results from a single, customized platform. Furthermore, the company focused on leveraging the HR suite’s powerful configurability, data model flexibility and end-user usability, especially on its web portals and mobile devices.
The tool and the technology we use are crucial. They need to be convenient for the recruiters and helpful for the applicant.”
Jean-Claude Le Grand, Senior Vice President of Talent Development, L’Oréal
The firm’s brands are actively recruiting across more than 60 countries. Therefore, Avature enabled the collection of a large amount of candidate data to guarantee a good fit across the brands.
First Strategic HR Initiative: Focusing on Candidate Experience
The modern talent acquisition landscape asks companies to treat qualified candidates as consumers in search of the best buying experiences. When L’Oréal initially revamped its recruiting strategy, it was a disruptive movement that enabled the team to leverage a strong employer brand and stand out in a very competitive market.
The company asked for a solution that could adapt to its diversifying and disruptive target demographic. To provide this high-quality candidate experience, they worked to develop three critical components of its strategic HR initiative: good visibility, transparency and regular updates throughout the interviewing and hiring processes.
In this sense, L’Oréal concentrated efforts on interacting with people very early in the process. According to JobTip, 55 percent of candidates view the company’s website before applying for a job. Thus, the firm decided to leverage the power of Avature to create a tailored career site that connects with potential candidates on a personal level, showing the job opportunities available in their region, suggesting openings based on previous searches or personalizing email communications by showcasing engaging content that is related to the potential hire’s declared interests and highlights employer brand.
We were attracted by the idea of the parallel between the candidate and customer experience, and we liked that Avature weren’t traditional players.”
Jean-Claude Le Grand, Senior Vice President of Talent Development, L’Oréal
Second Strategic HR Initiative: Marketing Is About Engagement
Organizations should understand the importance of competing for the right talent with an engaging strategy driven by the best-of-breed technology. That’s why recruiters should leverage modern marketing strategies and tools to improve their talent-attraction game.
For companies to reach these sought-after candidates, user-friendly and highly configurable software is key. This is a concept well understood by Avature CEO Dimitri Boylan. According to him, recruiting software must be agile, not corporate. It requires great usability and the ability to update regularly.
The Avature platform gives them a faster way to experiment, try things out, fail quickly, figure out what works. To do this and be competitive requires a very different relationship with a technology vendor.”
Dimitri Boylan, CEO, Avature
Third Strategic HR Initiative: Choose An All-in-one Solution
However, as organizations accumulate more tools and more data, valuable information about candidates and employees can become trapped in silos. Moreover, talented individuals can get lost along the way due to poor communication or visibility.
Avature’s one-platform approach enables the flow of data across all talent processes, from sourcing prospects to engaging employees. This approach eliminates integration bottlenecks so that HR teams can leverage data in order to deploy more effective strategic HR initiatives, meet the challenges of the digital age and become strategic business partners.
