Driving Talent Acquisition Innovation at a Global Scale Using SmartDreamers

L’Oréal sees recruitment marketing as a core part of its talent acquisition strategy, with the candidate at the center. Our work together started with a first meeting in Paris at the beginning of 2019.

A few months later, the SmartDreamers rollout was mapped out for the first six countries. Within a year, the platform was running in more than 30 markets.

The challenge: talent marketing at a global scale

Recruitment marketing is hard to do well in a large company without the right tools. Processes are often fragmented, teams use different vendors, and each market runs its own operations. In a global company with many distributed teams, these problems grow with every new market.

To run recruitment marketing efficiently at L’Oréal’s scale, five things need to be in place:

• A scalable system that every team can use to plan and launch campaigns.
• Training and upskilling, so local teams can run talent marketing themselves.
• Consolidated data, with analytics dashboards that every group can access.
• Integration with the existing talent acquisition software.
• Stakeholder buy-in for one consistent talent marketing strategy.

Scaling and democratizing recruitment marketing

L’Oréal started with SmartDreamers in six countries, with three objectives:

• A collaboration structure that makes it easy for new markets to adopt the technology.
• One platform for all global talent marketing.
• Oversight for the global HQ team, to keep the employer brand aligned in every market.

The structure that made this possible is simple. Each local team has its own sub-account, where it runs initiatives, reviews performance and manages its budget. The HQ team in Paris oversees global performance through an Admin account, where all operations and data come together.

“We’ve started using SmartDreamers in 6 markets and scaled to over 30 in a year.”

Lisa MacNeill, Global Employer Brand Manager, L’Oréal

That balance is what allowed the rollout to move so quickly. Local teams can act on their own, while HQ keeps one view of the brand and the results. Each new market joins a structure that already works, instead of starting from scratch.

Every channel, one view of the results

All teams can run employer branding campaigns on the channels that matter in their market, including LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Reddit and Snapchat.

Performance data from every channel flows into SmartDreamers reporting dashboards in real time. Instead of collecting reports from different ad accounts, local teams and HQ see the same numbers in one place, which makes it much faster to understand return on investment, both in each market and globally.

From fragmented to consolidated

Together, L’Oréal and SmartDreamers moved talent marketing from a decentralized, fragmented process to one consolidated system. Local teams gained the tools and training to run their own campaigns. HQ gained oversight of brand and performance across every market.

A long-term partnership

Since 2019, L’Oréal has used SmartDreamers to keep innovating in talent acquisition, with recruitment marketing as a continuous part of a candidate-centric strategy rather than a series of one-off campaigns.

We’re proud to support L’Oréal’s talent acquisition transformation across the globe.