ATTRACTING TALENT

INDITEX CAREERS

To recruit the best professionals to our workforce, we created inditexcareers.com, which aims to centralize and channel all of the job offers available in all of the Group’s areas of activity. This site is also a window into our world, to offer a more precise image of who we are and what it is like to work in our business.

In 2016, Inditex Careers has become a key source of talent in many of our markets through social media. By creating content that people can identify with and find interesting on our social media, we have strengthened relations with candidates and positioned ourselves as an attractive company to work for. Moreover, our social profiles are the first online point of contact with our candidates which allow us to have personalized contact every day with people who are interested in working for Inditex.

TALENT CENTERS: ATTRACTING TALENT IN STORE

Our stores are the central axis of our business model, and account for 87% of the Group’s total workforce worldwide. In order to seek out the best candidates, Inditex has developed a well-honed employer branding strategy that positions us as good employers.

A decade ago, we implemented our Talent Centres, a network of centres that form a meeting point with potential candidates in ten key cities for the company in terms of commercial presence. At these centres, our team works every day to improve candidates’ recruitment experience, offering them an easy and simple process and the option of receiving a clear response to their application.

In 2016 we also developed the 24h Candidates system, which ensures a 100% response rate to all spontaneous applicants that we receive in store, as well as including their CV on our database.

ATTRACTING CREATIVE AND PRODUCT PROFESSIONALS

Our eight commercial formats have more than 2,400 professionals working on the creation and development of the collections that fill our stores in 93 different markets. Over 700 of them are designers. The team is also made up of people from the Purchasing, Commercial and Pattern Design areas of each brand, all based in Spain.

It is key for these teams to be able to attract designers from all over the world. That is why we are exploring new forms of recruitment, making use of a methodology that was first created in 2011 with the Cantera Project, whose aim was to hire young professional recent graduates that could be incorporated into our creative teams following a made-to-measure training process.

Thanks to this initiative to select young, creative candidates, in 2016 we have maintained close and regular contact with 30 design schools worldwide. We have also explored new channels for contacting such candidates, including the fashion competition Shape the invisible:

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

At Inditex we are committed to internal promotion as the best way of promoting the growth of our employees and of the company. Our commitment to internal promotion systems is vital to our constant growth and evolution, and has been a key to our success since we began. Some 17.4% of our workforce was promoted in 2016. Of that number, 75.6% were women.

This commitment to internal promotion is particularly evident in our stores, one of the most important starting points for a professional career in our Group and the source of more than half of our retail and product management jobs. The other pillar of our activity are logistics, where our professional development programmes are to be found. In both areas, we can highlight the Go! and InTalent projects to identify and promote internal talent.

With the aim of reaching our store staff and centralizing the information on their CVs in the most efficient way, in 2010 we implemented the InTalent initiative, a tool that allows us to communicate directly with our staff and get to know their interests in order to help them define their next professional steps within Inditex. Once the potential of these candidates has been identified, they are offered an internal training and development programme.

In 2016, InTalent covered a total of 23 countries and more than 45,000 employees who have registered their data in this tool, specifying their career expectations and interests within Inditex. Thanks to InTalent, more than 1,600 people participated in development and promotion programmes in 2016

INDITEX GO!

Inditex Go! was created in 2013 as a way to identify, select and develop promising young talent in Zara in order to maximize promotion from stores to other areas of the company. The programme has become a way of training our future management staff.

Zara Go! was originally developed in response to the needs of the Zara product teams. But it was so swiftly accepted and so successful that it has been expanded to other brands including Zara Home, Massimo Dutti and Oysho, as well as other areas and departments including purchasing, distribution and management control. In 2016, we launched the first version of Go! for the areas of imports, exports, transport and logistics.

Go! currently allows us to employ 144 people in different teams, all working under a personalized development plan. The plan includes an initial training period of six months in the range of business areas, from product to distribution centres, central services and country subsidiaries, with training in store as the main focus.

One new feature introduced last year was the extension of the programme to the United Kingdom and Germany to strengthen Zara store teams. This is the aim of the Zara Go! Stores programme. This version of the programme is designed to identify talent at the major universities of those countries and offer career plans to them with the idea of covering store management roles in our subsidiaries.

TRAINING

Training our employees is key to our business, which is based on a business model that requires constant innovation and teamwork. All of Inditex’s areas of activity offer specific technical or skills-based training programmes tailored to the range of roles that exist in the Group. Our network of internal trainers incorporates the contents of training programmes into everyday work, including service in stores and customer orientation as key pillars of this activity.

In 2016, Inditex provided more than 1.6 million hours of training, of which 200,000 were training programmes on skills, languages or IT. We have also included environmental training and awareness raising through workshops that have been attended by 3,418 employees across all our areas activities, stores, logistics and central services in Spain, Portugal, China, India and Germany. More than 89,000 attendees in 43 countries participated in the range of training programmes during this period.

eFASHION PROGRAMME

Since it started in 2012, the e-Fashion programme has allowed 702 students in Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Italy to train in the integrated management of the fashion business. Designed by Inditex in collaboration with the Instituto Europeo de Diseño de Madrid (IED), e-Fashion offers store teams online training lasting 220 hours structured into three blocks of contents – product, business and image and communication – seeking to improve professional skills and competencies among employees.

Meanwhile, since 2016 store management in eight countries (Italy, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Austria, Germany and Switzerland) can make use of the Manager Toolkit. This is a tool installed in the app INet, the mobile app Inditex makes available to its employees which gives them access to training materials on store operations, staff recruitment techniques, identification and development of internal talent and staff management skills, all specifically tailored to their role.