Auchan recruits on Second Life

The French retailer well known for its slogan “La Vie, La Vraie” (rough translation: “Life, real life“), seems now to have found a taste for the virtual life.

As reported in LSA, retailer giant Auchan launched yesterday a recruitment advertising campaign within the Second Life virtual world.

Promoting Auchan’s “Rencontres de Talents” programme of recruitment visits to 30 towns and cities across France, 150 virtual 4 x 3 billboards have been installed in zones of the Second Life world used by French users. Touching the billboard brings up a web page at talent.auchan.fr with further information.

Auchan’s press release (pdf) positions the use of Second Life as an extension of its recruiting presence on the internet. “Second Life is a universe full of promise which attracts people keen on innovation and all that is modern, and which offers exciting prospects for enterprise recruitment strategy,” explained Joël Fabiani, Director of Human Resources for Auchan France.

The recruitment campaign mainly targets young graduates interested in becoming section managers in Auchan’s retail outlets, with the aim of hiring 300 new managers by the end of the year. Presumably there is a fair correspondance between this recruitment target and the profile of the average Second Life resident…

UPDATE Digital Trends wrote yesterday of other real world companies “trawling for employees on Second Life,” through virtual job fairs in particular. For more see their article.

UPDATE Focus RH has written on an experimental Second Life virtual job fair organised back in June by French HR publicity agency TMPNEO for various French companies, including L’Oréal. Hundreds of virtual interviews.

L’Oréal found guilty of racial discrimination

As reported in Le Monde, Libération, The Guardian and the BBC, the Garnier division of cosmetics giant L’Oréal has been found guilty – along with its recruitment partner Adecco and Adecco’s communication subsidiary Districom (now Ajilon) – of racial discrimination in hiring practices after it tried to exclude non-white women from being taken on as hostesses for a campaign of promotional animations in supermarkets for the Fructis Style range.

Few external observers would deny that France has serious issues with racism, the first and not the least being a general lack of recognition by French society that there is even an issue to begin with. Racial discrimination in hiring is practically the norm, as shown earlier this year in a study by the International Labour Office.

But the situation is perhaps changing. The Garnier ruling is the first time in France that such a major company has been successfully prosecuted for racial discrimination in hiring.