Cosmetics giant L’Oreal is piloting an online virtual reality game to help it with graduate recruitment and instil it with the ‘cool’ factor at the same time.
 

The new game called Reveal requires students and graduates to assume the guise of avatars. Their aim is to work on virtual projects and undertake problem-solving tasks across different departments, which include finance, sales, marketing, supply chain and R&D, in a virtual L’Oreal work environment.
 
The tasks are similar to those carried out by physical L’Oreal staff on a day-to-day basis and provide candidates with an overview of the organisation and its culture as well as insights into the nature of various job roles within different departments.
 
Each individual’s performance is then assessed against what the company considers to be the best solution to the challenges provided and they are provided with feedback as to their performance.
 
L’Oreal’s Thomas Riegel told peoplemanagement.co.uk: “Reveal brings something new and fresh to the recruitment market. We plan to invite the best players who achieve great results in the business game for interviews. This will potentially by-pass some parts of our recruitment process as we will already have very strong indicators about the candidates.”
 
The game has been two years in development and is currently being piloted by a group of students at Cardiff University. It is available in at least ten languages and 15,000 prospects have logged on worldwide since Reveal’s initial launch in March. A full UK roll-out is scheduled for July and will form part of the company’s global graduate recruitment strategy.
 
“It is a flexible, intelligent and interesting tool because the game can be played anywhere and people receive very in-depth feedback as they go through the exercises and tasks. It will attract candidates to L’Oreal as an employer, but also gives something back to participants,” Riegel said.
 
The firm currently recruits 30 graduates onto its annual UK management trainee scheme, but expects the figure to rise to 40 over the next couple of years. Although graduates usually work in three different departments on a rotational basis, Riegel believes the game should help them decide on a particular specialism more quickly.