L'Oreal

Using business gaming to deliver an immersive employer brand experience for potential candidates

In their quest for new methods to search for talent, L'Oréal have combined their experience of business games and their culture of innovation to deliver an immersive employer brand experience for potential candidates. L'Oréal wanted to create a unique platform to communicate an attractive and consistent employer image, and optimise recruitment via a single, targeted gaming platform for all L’Oréal’s audiences. The platform reflects the online habits and preferences of Gen Y, such as social networking, and a demand for a more experiential inside view of potential employers’ working environment and culture.

“REVEAL by L’Oréal” offers a unique experience for college students of all academic disciplines preparing for the working world. They discover what a global business is all about, and assess themselves though participating in real-life business challenges. The game gives players real feedback about their professional behavior based on assessments in reference to L’Oréal’s values, while also helping students to understand how they fit (or don’t fit) into L’Oréal’s organisation. This serves as a self-screening tool and also as a recruitment tool. It allows candidates to explore different career paths and tackle professional competency assessments to identity their innate skills. REVEAL also recreates L’Oreal’s highly stimulating, multicultural working environment, and provides students with guidance on potential job opportunities.

REVEAL by L’Oréal is groundbreaking on many levels:

• Recruiters use one consistent model to assess student skills in a cost-effective digital environment. These assessments align with L’Oréal’s specific company values and employment attributes, and provide students with feedback on their behavioral profile.
• One single platform captures the data for all of L’Oréal’s various job functions – R&D, Industry, Supply Chain, Marketing, Finance, Business Development.
• REVEAL is built with social networking tools that appeal to, and actively engage, the Gen Y audience. For example, REVEAL integrates with Facebook to provide updates to players’ profiles as they progress through a game and allows players to invite friends to compete and compare rankings.

In order to accomplish the objectives set forth by L’Oréal, TMP’s account, creative and web development teams (in France, the USA, Canada and India) worked to a complex project plan that included integrations with several outside vendors for analytics, assessment/scoring tools (Cubiks), and integrated web cam functionality, as well as game designers (Studio 1D) to ensure a real game experience. Assessment questionnaires and the gameplay were created specifically for L’Oréal, thanks to active participation from more than 200 L’Oréal employees, who ensured that values, company culture and management style were well represented.

Even before the official launch of the site, there were 21,000 individuals from all around the world signed up to take part in the REVEAL by L’Oréal game, with more joining every day. Within weeks of the site launch in EMEA, it had received press coverage from the French Financial daily newspaper Les Echos, as well as Rome’s business and finance daily newspaper, Affari & Finanza, along with many online references.

We believe that REVEAL represents a significant step forward in meeting Gen Y candidates’ growing desire to establish a more experiential inside view of potential employers before they decide to make an application. In developing REVEAL we suggest that L’Oréal are true innovators in this area of employer brand practice, and expect many more employers are almost certain to take their lead over the coming years.

If you’d like to discover more about applying similar employer brand management practices to your own organization, please contact: tom.delorme@tmp.com

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