Sephora was able to modernize HR and provide a unified digital employee experience to its 40,000 in-store and head office employees by deploying a cloud-based HR system.
Sephora, highly regarded as a beauty trailblazer owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, currently has 2,600 stores in 38 markets with an expanding base of over 200 stores across the Asia Pacific region including Australia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and India. A trusted global brand that is growing at twice the market rate, Sephora needed to ensure that its employees around the world are working efficiently with the help of digital HR. This initiative would give leaders real-time insight into the workforce and equip them to make smarter, data-driven people decisions.
Sephora has chosen SAP to lead the HR transformation to fulfill the company’s needs for a high degree of localization to meet different market regulations and requirements as well as a dedicated customer engagement executive to help through the process. Leveraging SAP SuccessFactors solutions, the beauty company was able to modernize HR and increase people engagement.
Thomas Morabito, Global Vice President HRIS at Sephora said:
“We are growing fast and, as is typical in the retail sector, have a high employee turnover. Modernizing and increasing the efficiency of HR was one of our most pressing challenges.”
Morabito said that Sephora tapped SAP because they needed a strong partner that can provide flexible, scalable solutions. As a decentralized organization, the retail company leveraged the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio that offers a high degree of localization to meet local business and legal requirements for each of the markets in which it operates.
Sephora’s Digital HR
Together, Sephora and SAP launched the platform MySephoraCareer, which includes multiple solutions from SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite and the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile app.
The single, unified cloud-based HR system from SAP SuccessFactors serves as a one-stop-shop for HR processes and provides a master repository for all employee data including key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time. MySephoraCareer makes HR more reachable for in-store employees since the platform is accessible on their smartphones.
The platform also enables store managers to manage recruitment and onboarding from a single point of control, which has eliminated a significant amount of administrative work allowing them to do more productive activities.
“Previously, store managers used to rely on people visiting the store to hand in their resumes. Now that people can see and apply for vacancies online, there is a much larger pool of talent to choose from,” Morabito shared.
He said that MySephoraCareer has enabled leaders real-time access to employee data and KPIs in a click of a button, which is a huge digital change from spending around 1,200 man-days every year compiling quarterly HR reports. Morabito highlighted:
“Previously, we could never be completely sure of the true turnover rate, for example, as different countries had their own ways of measuring it. Now that data and reporting are standardized and centralized, we have a true picture of the situation. This is extremely important for planning purposes, but also in times of economic or health crises.”
Assigning a CEE
Aside from achieving a cloud-based HR system, another goal of the partnership with SAP is to assign a customer engagement executive (CEE) for Sephora to act as a single point of contact committed to its success. The CEE was able to establish strong relationships with Sephora stakeholders, which help them manage challenges, navigate the SAP solution landscape to facilitate engagement and adoption, and address issues quickly and meet deadlines.
“Our CEE worked tirelessly to ensure we always had the resources we needed to succeed,” said Morabito.
“We worked very closely with the SAP team at every stage of the project. The dedication and support of our customer engagement executive enabled us to meet aggressive project timelines, “ he added.
Results by the Numbers
Now with a modern, digital HR, Sephora has seen the following progress:
- 83{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} faster to hire new people, saving store managers 1.5 hours of paperwork per recruit
- 98{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increase in the number of candidates as a result of posting job openings on Sephora’s careers Web site and external social channels
- 600 candidates per job requisition when using MySephoraCareer, compared to 10 to 20 candidates in the past
- 20 minutes to complete the hiring process for a new employee, down from two hours in the past
- 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} global adoption rate for the performance management tool
“Based on SAP SuccessFactors solutions, MySephoraCareer gives us a world-class talent system that will enable us to grow in the future and provides an excellent user experience, which is what our people deserve,” Maria Farrow, Global CHRO, Sephora
