Graduate Careers at L'Oréal

L’Oréal’s attention to detail has filtered through its products and business practices into its recruitment site. Click on L’Oréal’s careers link for a plethora of information for potential recruits, including profiles of current employees.

Jobs are divided by department – marketing, research, engineering, finance and operations, sales, communications and human resources – and are helpfully separated into opportunities for under-grads, grads and professionals.

Over 2,000 students worldwide are accepted onto the L’Oréal internship programme every year, but this isn’t the only option for those wanting to get their break with this cosmetic giant. The L’Oréal e-Strat Challenge is an annual competition for under and post-grad business students, where contestants act as a general manager of a virtual company. The objective: to make their company’s virtual share price higher than the competition’s. Take the crown in your region and you’ll win a trip to the final in Paris, where you’ll be pitted against the best of the rest from across the globe. The top prize is a 10,000 Euro trip to anywhere in the world; but perhaps more valuable, is the chance to secure a job with L’Oréal – in fact, a number of previous champs still hold a role with this French colossus.

L'Oréal Graduate Recruitment Info

How to apply: www.loreal.co.uk/_en/_gb/index.aspx

L'Oréal Profile & Stats

With a product range available in every conceivable beauty-distribution-channel, catering to almost every possible cosmetic need or want, L’Oréal’s message ‘Because you’re worth it’ appears to be sinking in. This cosmetic giant now has foundations in over 130 countries, with nearly 3,000 research and development employees working across its 19 global brands.

L’Oréal hasn’t always had such a comprehensive beauty range, in fact, the company hasn’t always been called L’Oréal. The tale began when a chemist, named Eugene Schueller, founded French Harmless Hair Colouring, in 1907. And while his products may have been harmless to his clientele, this can’t be said of his competition; because such was the success of L’Oréal’s progenitor, that by 1912, Schueller was exporting his products to Holland, Austria and Italy. Not content with expanding the client base, Schueller decided to expand the range of products produced too. He began to develop new cosmetics – lotions, potions, powders, gels – covering not just the hair, but all areas in facial beauty.

Under the brand L’Oréal, the company reached US shores in 1953. Today, the North Americas account for about a quarter of sales worldwide, approximately 45% hail from Western Europe, with Asia and Eastern Europe selling around 10% and 7% respectively.

Part of L’Oréal’s border-crossing appeal is that it has a seemingly never ending range of products under brands to suit any budget – from the more basic, to the professional and high-fashion. Thanks to the company’s innumerable celebrity endorsements, even the most red-blooded of men would recognise at least a handful from the following: Biotherm (skin care), Garnier (best known for hair care), Giorgio Armani Parfums (fragrances), Lan-côme (cosmetics, perfumes, make-up), La Roche-Posay (skin care), L’Oréal Paris (cosmetics, skin and hair care), Maybelline New York (make-up), Ombrelle (sunscreen) and Ralph Lauren Parfums (fragrances) – to name just a few.

Not all of L’Oréal’s products are the brainchild of Schueller or his successors; in fact, with the exception of L’Oréal Paris and Kerastase, all of its brands were fostered outside of the L’Oréal womb. The company inherited the majority of its cosmetics from its many acquisitions. Maybelline came in 1996, Softsheen in ’98, and in 2000, L’Oréal bagged Matrix, Kiehl’s and Carson. Most recently, L’Oréal took control of Skinceuticals in the US, European sun cream brand Delial, the environmentally conscious The Body Shop chain, and luxury cosmetics brand YSL Beauté.

All this talk of inheriting new products probably undersells L’Oréal’s knack for innovation. In its attempt to snag a share of the untapped Chinese market – after all, cosmetics were banned there until 1982 - L’Oréal built a 32,000 square-foot R&D facility in China, focussing its development on formulating hair and skincare products, specifically to suit people of Chinese decent.

In addition, L’Oréal has reserved a portion of its R&D budget for developing a synthetic form of human skin. The ‘EpiSkin’ could be used to treat wounds, such as burns, and can also be used as a medium for cosmetic treating – proving beyond a doubt that L’Oréal is more than just a pretty face.