BBC Reports L'Oreal's Innovation in Hiring with Seedlink

[0:01]China produces 7 million job hungry graduates every year. How excited would you be to work somewhere like L'Oreal? It's, it's very worth. There's no shortage of enthusiasm, of course, but with such large numbers, how does a company go about choosing the best? Well, the French cosmetics company L'Oreal has been doing what pretty much everyone else is doing, limiting their search to China's top tier universities. We want to assess you for the culture, for the style, for the fit of L'Oreal. It's a problem that recruiters everywhere will be familiar with. There's simply no time to read every CV. And so, despite knowing they could be excluding a lot of potential talent, if the candidate didn't go to a top school, their CV is automatically rejected. At least until now, that is, because this year L'Oreal in China has decided to do away with this mountain of paperwork and replace it with something that every student has, regardless of educational background, the mobile phone. All they need to do is get online and use their mobile phones to answer three simple questions. If you're given an assignment, but the instructions are unclear, this one reads, how would you go about completing it to a high standard? Their answers are fed into the computer system of this Shanghai-based startup company by analyzing the language used. So, the vocabulary and sentence structure, the software designers claim to be able to make accurate predictions about key personality traits. Computers, they they have no emotions, they have no moods. So you can program it to act like an ideal human that would judge his answers without any sort of color, any sort of bias, and that's what we've done here. Loral Sun is one of those who almost certainly wouldn't have made it to the interview stage before, but her high computer score means now she's in with a chance. And so, to decision time, this year, of the 70 new recruits, more than a third come from universities that wouldn't previously have been considered. Do you think it was a good fit? What we're really looking for in students is raw talent. You want people that are, uh, a better fit to your company culture, uh, a better fit to the competencies that you look for. And they're not necessarily going to have those competencies just because they went to this university or worked at this company before. As for L'Oreal, How did you do, Loral? Hi. You've got it? Well, she made it through the interview. One life changed by a computing revolution in recruitment. John Sudworth, BBC News, Shanghai.