More than 400,000 people applied last year for jobs with L’Oréal, the Paris based cosmetics group that is world leader in its field.
Of those, only 1,800 were selected to join the global workforce of some 52,080. Little wonder, then, that L’Oréal France was ranked fourth best workplace in France.
Geoff Skingsley, L’Oréal’s British-born vice-president or human resources, says a strong field of applicants makes it easier to hire employees who share the company’s ambitions and values.
“The recruitment function is very highly valued at L’Oréal,” he says. “We mobilise a lot of the company’s resources.”
Simply processing those truck loads of paper applications, and the deluge of e-mail forms, accounting for three-quarters of the total, requires a real investment to spot the star applicants.
Even then, L’Oréal typically interviews 20 candidates for every appointment.
Picking the right recruits may be the cornerstone of achieving employee satisfaction but it is only a starting point.
“Managerial people want a new challenge after a certain amount of time. That is why our career development policy is so vital,” Mr Skingsley says.
If you’re an unambitious stay-at-home, don’t waste your time sending a CV to L’Oréal. The group has an extraordinary policy of staff development and international mobility.
It wants people who want to live abroad. It wants people who want to work with those unlike themselves. And it wants people who want constant challenge.
Typically, L’Oréal moves its managers every three or four years, “before they fester”.
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Moves are tailored to ambition. Some will be upward. Others will be given the chance to complement a certain range of skills, while those who wish will simply get different areas in which to practise existing skills, moving roles within a brand portfolio that includes Lancôme, Garnier, Redken, Vichy, Maybelline and Shu Uemura.
“It’s more intuition than based on evidence, but giving people creative career paths is not necessarily expensive,” explains Mr Skingsley.
By hiring people who revel in fresh challenges and are stimulated by variety, the group has achieved consistent organic sales and profit growth, turning in pre-tax profits up 10.3 per cent last year to €2.06bn on sales of €14.5bn.
But the company has to deliver on its side of the bargain with staff. That is not just about jobs abroad, though Mr Skingsley, now based in Paris, has worked in four countries in the past 18 years.
One favourite tactic is to hire graduates who expatriated themselves to study. The result is that many L’Oréal teams, in France as elsewhere, contain the biggest jumble of nationalities, backgrounds and so on that the company can achieve.
“What we want is to have a body of people who are diverse,” says Mr Skingsley. “The fundamental principle that underpins it is that, if you have people with a variety of backgrounds in a team, they will develop more ideas and come up with surprising solutions.”
Perhaps that is unsurprising in a group whose Welsh executive chairman, Lindsay Owen-Jones, has a conspicuously different CV from those of his peers at France’s other leading corporations, who were mostly educated at Paris’s École Nationale de l’Administration or the Polytechnique.
In the group’s French operation, which has 11,500 employees - one-quarter of the group total - one in every three posts is managerial. The managerial proportion is bolstered by the head office and a concentration of research and development labs, though France also has eight production plants.
In a national culture that hires cautiously because firing is difficult, L’Oréal, with an average employee age of 41, knows it has to accommodate the ebb and flow of employee ambition as staff pass through the child rearing phase of their lives.
Remuneration in France is performance-related, with an extra three months’ pay typically coming in bonuses. And pay is well up with industry peers.
The perception in France, is that L’Oréal is a company that hires the best, gives them great opportunities, and expects a pay-back.
“I don’t think we are shy about the fact that we are a demanding employer,” says Mr Skingsley. But since pride in the job, however humble, is a deep seated national characteristic in France, that contributes to employee satisfaction.
Above all, says Mr Skingsley, employees are happiest when they identify with the group’s brands, and draw satisfaction from membership of the teams charged with developing them.
“Provided people feel their contribution counts and is appreciated that creates a positive energy,” he says.
