Internal promotion programmes

Inditex is constantly growing and evolving. We are commited to internal promotions. This is particularly evident in the stores, our business core, where almost half of Inditex’s product managers and product department heads started working with us. Inditex strongly believes that its stores are a prime source of talent, very well attuned to its customers’ needs.

To reinforce this commitment to the Group’s sales force, in recent years, we have developed specific mechanisms for identifying potential and skills among store employees. The most important of these tools are the InTalent and Go! systems, designed to find and promote internal talent as efficiently as possible.

InTalent

Founded more than half a decade ago in 2010, InTalent is a system designed to reach out to our store employees and get to know them better by centralizing the information on their curricula.

This simple tool also allows users to submit their CVs and update them at any time. It also has a section where users can ask work-related questions and explain their career goals at the company.

During 2015, we continued to expand InTalent to a total of 27 markets. The most significant new addition was China. Parallel to InTalent’s arrival in these markets, the Job Finder was launched in some European countries, as well as Brazil and Mexico. This tool publishes internal job openings and was launched in 2014 to give employees a chance to hear about positions and sign up to apply for them.

Project Go!

Project Go! was created in 2013 as a way to identify, select and develop promising young talent both inside and outside of the company to fill openings on Zara’s teams. This initiative has connected the talent in our stores, the cornerstone of our growth, with the world’s main education centres.

Zara Go! was originally developed in response to the needs of the Zara product teams in the various countries. But the programme caught on quickly and successfully, and every year it has expanded to other product teams and areas such as procurement, distribution, management control and logistics, all of which have adopted this system. Other brands like Zara Home, Massimo Dutti and Oysho also use the system.

By the end of the year, 94 people from eight markets in Europe and Asia had joined our teams thanks to Zara Go! All of them have benefited from a personalized development plan revolving around the stores.

The project will continue in 2016 under the name Go! Logistics for the Transport, Infrastructure and Automation Departments. We have also launched Zara Go! Stores to strengthen the Zara store teams in Germany and the UK. This new project type is designed to identify talent at the major universities of those countries and offer career tracks at the Group.

The project has already yielded results: 55% of new hires are internal promotions and 67% hold management positions at product divisions. Both statistics confirm that stores are the company’s primary source of new talent.

Training for internal teams

We encourage the growth, development and promotion of our employees by investing in training. All of the Inditex Group’s areas of activity offer specific technical or skills-based training programmes which vary by specialization but share a cross-cutting focus on serving our stores. This customer-oriented approach extends to all employees, regardless of whether their daily work is directly related to stores: from those participating in the production process – designers, salespeople and logistics teams– to professionals working in corporate divisions such as human resources, systems or finance.

Across the board, the training given to store employees emphasizes familiarity with products and processes, and a customer-centric mindset. In line with this philosophy, in 2012 Inditex designed the e-Fashion programme in collaboration with the European Institute of Design in Madrid. This online integral fashion business management programme provides certified and specialized training to enrich our employees’ professional skills and improve their competencies.

In 2015, the programme expanded to Italy and trained 30 professionals in store management. The programme’s latest round in Spain provided training to 122 people from different management areas, for a total of 152 people trained in 2015, and a total of 565 alumni since the project’s inception.

Our commitment to training continues to grow. Time spent on training rose notably in 2015 as compared to the previous year with 550,000 additional hours. Our Group devoted more than 1.3 million hours to training its staff in 2014, while the 2015 total exceeded 1.8 million hours. Altogether, this training benefited more than 75,800 employees in more than 50 markets where the Inditex Group operates.

Of these hours, 154,862 were spent on languages, IT and skills. 65,106 hours were devoted to training professionals in workplace risk prevention.

Training hours by country 2015

* This number also includes training in Luxembourg
** Scandinavia comprises Sweden, Norway and Denmark
*** This number also includes training in Monaco
ND: No data available

Attracting talent

Our Group’s cycle of internal promotions and employee training is completed by our talent attraction strategy, the cornerstone being the Inditex Careers website. In 2015, Inditex Careers replaced its predecessor, Join Fashion, with the goal of centralizing and channelling job offers from all of the Group’s areas of activity.

Inditex Careers is an international job site designed to collect information about our candidates, as well as a platform for open communication to provide potential candidates with as much information as possible about our company.

Under the philosophy that “talent moves in all directions”, the site offers specific information about the Group’s major areas of activity. In each area, users have access to specific multimedia content: personal stories from staff showing who we are and how our teams operate on a day-to-day basis.

In addition to the directory of job offerings, the site gives the locations of the nine recruitment and training centres run by our Group in eight different countries. In 2015 alone, more than 220,000 people came in to our centres, where they were met by a team of 80 recruitment experts in order to fill more than 44,000 openings.

The goal of this process is to ensure that we recruit the best professionals in the cities where our business has a significant presence. But it is equally important that everyone who approaches us has a positive experience, receives a clear response regarding their application and goes through a streamlined and simple process they can enjoy and share.

Fashion school visits

Designers have one of the most important jobs at our Group. As we like to say at Inditex Careers, “Inditex is made up of eight brands” but, more than that, “Inditex is what you put on to go to work, how you decide to decorate your life, or what you wear for that special occasion.” That is why in 2011 we began to visit and learn about some of the best fashion and management schools and universities in Spain and abroad. We currently have a network of 600 designers for the different brands.

Cantera Project

One of our strengths lies in our commitment to young talent: more than 40% of the year’s new recruits for product teams are young professionals from Spain and abroad who are offered a career and growth opportunities at the Group.

This is the spirit of the Cantera Project, which recruits young recent graduates and tailors their training to develop professionals who can meet our specific future needs, especially in the design and purchasing departments, and product managers.

Since 2011 we have been going to the main Spanish and international design and management schools to find just the right people, although direct recruiting and job sites have been no less important strategies. In 2015 alone, we visited 29 schools in five different countries and recruited a total of 34 people for the Group’s different brands.

The backbone of the Cantera Project is a system of concrete and definite steps: following the selection process, the new hire spends six months rotating between the different department teams with no fixed position. This gives them a holistic perspective on our work, as well as a better understanding of how their division works, its mechanisms and how it all fits together. After this period, they are given a specific job and are fully integrated into the department.