The international cosmetics group, L’Oreal, last month made a strong recruitment pitch and presentation of its Human Resources strategies at the Ecole Superieure des Affaires on occasion of signing a partnership agreement. Aims of the agreement include to enhance networking between ESA and leading companies and to develop the relationship between the business school and L’Oreal Lebanon.
Under the agreement, which formalizes long-standing collaboration between the two entities, ESA students will study L’Oreal marketing cases and have better opportunities to benefit from recruitment at L’Oreal, said ESA communications director Georges Najm.
For L’Oreal, international recruitment and working with leading business schools is a priority, Jean-Claude Le Grand, the director of corporate strategic recruitment at L’Oreal, told Executive. “We manage the career of the executive personality differently. We promote angry, dynamic young people,” he said. “Other companies don’t dispatch Human Resources staff to recruit on the ground at universities and only a few companies have a strategy to recruit worldwide.”
According to Le Grand, L’Oreal has collaboration agreements with numerous important business schools and spends over 1 million euro annually as direct investment into recruiting, not counting salaries in the HR department. The company, which says it takes five to ten years to build up a L’Oreal manager, seeks to recruit 70% of its managerial staff from career starters. Besides engaging in partnerships with business schools, L’Oreal employs campus business games and internships in its efforts to attract the most talented students to its ranks. “We are not chatting about to war of talent, we are acting,” Le Grand said.
