News
L’OREAL CASE STUDY:
Developing a bespoke online assessment for a gaming environment
By Cubiks
L’Oréal has never been interested in following what other companies are doing.
We have always been known for setting the trend and that is as true in recruitment as it is in the design and branding of our products.
We need the best people, and to find these we must be able to attract and identify individuals who have what it takes to make a difference within our unique business culture.
Cubiks has helped us to make a quantum leap forward in terms of assessment. The solutions that they have designed are first rate and I am completely satisfied with the results.
François de Wazières
Director of International
Recruitment, L’Oréal
L’Oréal is a world leading Cosmetics Company first established over a century ago. With 23 brands and consolidated sales of €17.5 billion in 2008, the company is an industry leader in every sense.
Keen to ensure that it maintains its position at the forefront of the cosmetics business sector, the company needs to attract and identify talented people who are well suited to the L’Oréal business culture. Employing over 67 000 staff in more than 130 countries, L’Oréal’s scale and scope allows it to offer staff a range of challenging, stimulating and highly varied career choices.
Given the diversity of career options on offer, it is important that the company is able to communicate this richness and depth of choice to potential applicants through its online recruitment portal. With this objective in mind, L’Oréal recently asked Cubiks to work in close partnership with its project team and other recruitment partners to develop interactive online assessment questions that would test the suitability of candidates within the context of an online gaming environment.
Harnessing All Project Drivers
Through the redevelopment of its online recruitment operations, L’Oréal needed to ensure that a number of critical project drivers were addressed.
- Recognised for its creativity, L’Oréal wanted to ensure that the new approach would be highly innovative and different to anything else offered by other leading corporate recruiters
- The new approach would need to be highly reflective of the L’Oréal brand and provide applicants with a realistic insight into the company’s culture and business operations
- The approach needed to appeal to candidates from all demographic groups and across all academic disciplines, and effectively communicate the wide range of possible career paths available within the company
- The assessments tools would need to be embedded within an online game to create a fun and challenging candidate experience
- The process should encourage a high proportion of gamers to apply for roles with L’Oréal.
Using off-the-shelf assessments was never an option for us.
From the start, we knew that we would need assessment instruments that were fully tailored to reflect the L’Oreal brand and would provide candidates with a challenging, yet insightful and enjoyable experience.
I could see that the Cubiks team understood this immediately and had both the technical expertise and passion required to help us bring our vision to life.
The consultants were a vital addition to the project team and they established credibility from day one. With their assistance, we achieved an excellent result.
François de Wazières
Director of International
Recruitment, L’Oréal
It was decided that Cubiks would develop a series of online assessment tools, based around scenarios that were unique to L’Oréal, and integrate these tools within an online game called ‘Reveal’.
Reveal was to be a web 2.0 multi-site game that would allow candidates to go backstage at a L’Oréal product launch. During this project, candidates would be presented with the opportunity to firstly learn more about the different aspects of the L’Oréal business, and then match themselves to the company’s requirements by completing a series of online tests.
Designing and Trialling Unique Test Content
Taking the company’s ‘L’Oréal & Me’ competencies, Cubiks set about designing assessments that would combine two key elements:
Situational Judgement Questions – these ask candidates to assume that they are a L’Oréal employee and indicate how they would react to a typical workplace scenario by selecting from a range of different response options
Problem Solving Questions – these ask candidates to analyse information using their numerical and verbal reasoning skills
These two assessments were created using data collected from 200 L’Oreal professionals. Once the test content had been developed, Cubiks then trialled the material through an online pilot involving 700 L’Oréal employees.
Next, Cubiks developed all of the content for the candidate feedback screens and collaborated with the L’Oréal team of writers to ensure consistency with language used across the Reveal game as a whole. Following analysis of the results, all necessary modifications were made.
As a final step assessment benchmarks (Norm Groups) were developed after the assessments had been created by a group of live ‘gamers’.
Reveal Game goes Live
Following the achievement of the key project deadlines, the Reveal game including all assessment components was successfully launched across the globe in January 2010.
Now, applicants interested in a career with L’Oréal can complete the game anywhere in the world by visiting: www.reveal-thegame.com
Recognised as setting a new standard for professional selection and assessment, the new solution is playing a key role in helping L’Oréal to promote its key brand values and reach out to talented people from a range of academic disciplines. Furthermore, by enabling candidates to accurately assess their fit with the L’Oréal business culture, and make informed decisions regarding the likely success of their application in a fun and informative environment, the game is proving to be very popular with the target candidate population.
Source Link - http://www.cubiks.com/articles/CaseStudies/Pages/loreal.aspx
Contact us for more information about our associate company Cubiks’s bespoke online assessments.
