Late last year, L’Oreal presented its talent attraction strategy at the LinkedIn Talent Connect event in London. If you didn’t attend or haven’t seen this presentation, you can view the video here. This stood out to me above all of the other presentations, because if there’s one thing a lot of companies have forgotten about, it’s the experience. And what L’Oreal have created with that simple concept is nothing short of incredible.
As recruiters, our job is to find talent to fill requisitions, but quite often we forget about the importance of things such as branding or candidate experience. And with all of the other tasks we need to get done, it’s a challenge to put our mind to concentrating on the bigger picture — making your company stand out and attractive to talent.
Here’s what you can learn from L’Oreal’s example:
It’s All About Candidate Experience
It’s interesting that L’Oreal has taken sound as one of its mediums to share experiences. When we think of candidate experience, we think of visuals … whether it’s using graphics, pictures, or text to convey a company message. It took sound, along with visuals to get people sharing what inspires them, and in turn managed to create a huge follower base and inevitably candidates in the pipeline. What I love about this is that its primary focus was not to do what every company does, which is talk about how cool or creative it is. Instead, it cleverly weaved the employee value proposition into the entire recruiting process, showing that the company is unique and innovative (without saying those words!)
Ensuring your organisation is represented in the best way possible and stands out from the competition is vital. However, showing your story instead of just telling creates a much bigger and longer lasting impact.
Thinking Outside the Box
Taking its medium of Sound, L’Oreal set up a careers profile on SoundCloud and initially began using this as a means of uploading recordings of conversations. It then took this a step further by inviting employees and candidates to upload their inspiration. By doing this, it not only created its own content, but engaged with followers and asked them to share their content too. In addition to SoundCloud, L’Oreal is also using social networks such as Medium, Jelly and Flipboard as part of its talent attraction strategy.
L’Oreal has clearly decided to take a path no other company has; to be the first, to stand out, and be unique. It has been daring enough to go out and use a wide variety of social networks — even the most unexpected like SoundCloud! What’s clear is that it has not only given its content strategy but also its engagement strategy a lot of thought. Using social media is not just about posting your jobs or talking about your careers. Meaningful engagement is imperative in attracting talent.
Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Doing something new can be tough, and the thought of not knowing what the outcome will be can often be enough to put us off even trying. In the event of your strategy failing, you can use that to learn from and try again. It took two years for L’Oreal to get its attraction strategy going, and now it’s at the point where direct sourcing is its No. 1 source of hire. Two years ago it was seventh. That’s a huge change! Not only that, but it has just celebrated reaching 500,000 followers on LinkedIn. Its success story shows us that even during those times it failed, it tried again because it had a vision and the determination to change the way it attracts talent.
Being a company who created many “firsts” in the beauty industry, it used this legacy and the EVP to delve into the world of social media and test out new channels. It created the inspiration campaign using sight and sound and an attractive engagement strategy to build brand recognition and talent pipelines.
Whether your company is small, a startup, or even a globally recognised brand, you have the potential to create an impact like this for the type of talent you’re trying to attract.
Some of the Related Conference Sessions at the ERE Recruiting Conference in San Diego:
- Tell Powerful Stories To Answer, “Why Should I Join Your Team?”, April 28, 8:30 a.m.
- Build a Battle Plan That Will Win the War For Talent, April 29, 9:30 a.m.