Internal promotion programmes

Inditex is firmly committed to the internal promotion of professionals who have started their career working in the Group’s stores – the core of the brand’s business model. Almost 50% of Inditex’s commercial representatives and heads of product departments originally come from the Group’s stores, because Inditex considers that the shop floor produces high levels of potential, talent and awareness in identifying what its customers want.

On the basis of this, in recent years, Inditex has implemented mechanisms to identify potential among store employees. InTalent and ZaraGo! are two of the most efficient initiatives used by the brand to detect and promote internal talent.

• Intalent: Founded in Spain in 2011 as a tool to centralize information on store employees’ curricula and gaining first-hand knowledge of their concerns and professional preferences, Intalent provides Inditex with a database that can be used to identify potential talent. The tool is currently being implemented in 21 markets. Some 16% of the people that have participated in Intalent processes have been promoted to product or central services teams. The initiative is due to be extended to China and the United States over the course of 2015.

• ZaraGo!: This programme selects internal and external professionals with potential in the sphere of product for training, with a view to recruiting participants to product-related jobs in the future.

Training of internal teams

Inditex considers investment in training to be a key element of encouraging the growth, development and promotion of employees. In the Group’s stores, employee knowledge of products and processes is strengthened with a crosscutting focus on the customer. In this respect, in 2012, for example, the company established the e-Fashion programme, an online course on the management of all aspects of the fashion business. Designed by Inditex in collaboration with the European Design Institute of Madrid, it offers teams in stores certified and specialized training in the fashion business, increasing their professional knowledge, motivation and commitment. 397 employees from all the commercial formats of the Group have received since 2012 training in this course, which is intended to take place in other countries in Europe, America and Asia.

Specific technical or skills-based training is also made available to the rest of Inditex’s teams, according to their specialization, although all courses have an overarching focus on store service. In 2014, the Group devoted more than 1.3 million hours to training its employees.

Hours of training per country 2014 (*)

(*) Bulgaria: Data from September 2014 to January 2015.
(**) Scandinavia comprises Sweden, Norway and Denmark
(***) Spain: Data gathered from January 2014 to December 2014. This year includes training for Logistics employees and some of the non-subsidised training

Talent attraction

Internal promotion activities are complemented with the Group’s strategy to recruit talent. The main corporate emblem in this area is the platform JoinFashion. The Group’s nine training centres in eight countries also continue to be a pillar for guaranteeing the selection of the best professionals in cities with high recruitment rates, where the aim is to consolidate Inditex’s presence.

Designers have one of the most important jobs within Inditex. In order to identify young designers with potential who could grow within the company, a range of projects has been designed to find and promote young professionals with creative talent. Historically, Inditex has maintained close, regular contact with the best design schools in the world, recruiting from these schools to fill the majority of the brand’s design jobs. In 2014, there were more than 450 designers working in Inditex’s eight retail brands, recruited from the world’s most prestigious design schools.

The year 2011 saw the implementation of the Cantera project, which aims to recruit recent graduates with excellent potential from national and international schools and provide them with training adapted to their profile and departments in order to generate new profiles in the product sphere in the future. To date, 97 people have been trained as part of the project.