GROWING YOUR MARKETING TALENT POOL: Attracting & keeping the best marketers

Senior marketing professionals know that their own success relies heavily on the success of their marketing team – if your team fails, you fail. Recruiting & retaining the right people is ranked as a key professional challenge to most senior marketers because the talent pool can sometimes feel empty, especially in Asian markets. Smart companies like L’Oréal know that developing an effective marketing team does not come from simply poaching top professionals from other companies, it comes from attracting today’s star recruits so they can grow into top performers in the future.

In this competitive environment of fishing out the best marketers, L’Oréal has mastered the challenge hook, line and sinker. A team is only as strong as its weakest link. In order to maximise your marketing team’s efficiency you must select recruits who can exceed the highest standards. As a senior marketing professional with a strong marketing team behind her, Isabelle Svartstein-Bourjade, the General Manager of L’Oréal’s Singapore Consumer Division, will share L’Oréal’s experiences on the cosmetics company’s innovative approach to solving the problem of recruiting and retaining talented marketers during her eighteen years with the company.

In an interactive presentation, Svartstein-Bourjade will cover:

* How to objectively assess your marketing team and determine how many are high performers and how many are non-performers;

* Identifying tomorrow’s marketing stars in today’s marketing talent pool; and

* How L’Oréal has developed a sure-fire way to attract and harvest talented new recruits through programmes such as the annual BrandStorm competition.

Regardless of whether you are directly responsible for recruiting staff to join your marketing team or if you manage marketers and strive to get the best out of them and you are looking for some practical peer advice, this Marketing Peer Briefing will provide long and short term value.

Isabelle Svartstein-Bourjade has been with L’Oréal for the past 18 years and is currently the Head of the Consumer Division of L’Oréal Singapore, a division which distributes brands such as L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline and Garnier in a wide array of retail channels. In her roles at L’Oréal, Svartstein-Bourjade has worked across three divisions in five different countries. She has extensive experience in the Asian market having worked in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. When Svartstein-Bourjade first joined L’Oréal it took her from Denmark to France where she worked in marketing in the Professional Product Division and in international brand development. Later she headed the Active Cosmetic Division in Greece with L’Oréal’s pharmacy distributed brands, Vichy and La Roche Posay. Prior to joining L’Oréal, Svartstein-Bourjade graduated from the leading French Business School in Lille and is married with two children.

Marketing magazine is thankful for the generous support of Robert Walters. Robert Walters is one of the world’s leading specialist professional recruitment consultancies with a network of offices spanning Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Continental Europe, South Africa, United States, Australasia and Asia. Robert Walters focuses on permanent, contract and interim recruitment across all industry sectors and at all levels of seniority. They manage the careers of the highest calibre candidates in the fields of human resources, accounting, finance, banking, information technology, legal, sales and marketing, operations and general management. Their client base comprises leading blue-chip multinational corporations and major financial service organisations through to SMEs and local businesses. For further information about Robert Walters, please visit their website.