The TI&CD highlighted as "relevant" by Laurent Freixe, Executive Vice President Nestlé S.A., Zone Director for Europe

Laurent Freixe stated below on Nestlé's recruitment policy and highlighted the interest of the TI&CD program in a previous interview for Edhec:

How do you create the Nestlé long term culture and how do you bring human resources on board?

[...] We have rigorous recruitment and training policies, and an efficient communication of our values and leadership principles. Recruitment is primarily carried out at the local level because of our decentralized nature. We prefer to recruit beginners - with exceptions for some more experienced people - for whom we open up long-term prospects. We favour applicants with a vision for the future and real leadership potential.

To help employees reach their potential and ensure that the best remain at Nestlé, we make every effort to increase their capabilities using a competence development model designed in-house which strongly emphasises leadership culture. As a result of these recruitment and training policies, people remain committed to Nestlé in the long term. I am living proof of this, as are two thirds of the leaders who comprise the Executive Committee.

With regards to tools and procedures, our managers have powerful information systems which, in our decentralized set up, enable them to act as entrepreneurs on the market instead of implementers. Nestlé values are perpetually disseminated using internal communication tools, which also inform employees about objective and strategy.

Nestlé recruitment and training procedures strangely remind me of the "Talent Identification & Career Development Program" set up in the new program design at EDHEC. Have you taken note of this new design, and if so what do you think about it?

What I do know seems quite attractive: The decision to teach exclusively in English from the second year onwards seems completely fundamental, because that will create perfectly "fluid" students and executives, an essential quality in our increasingly global world.

The innovate aspects of the TI&CD also seem very relevant to me. It makes sense for a business school such as the EDHEC to develop talents by using the same grids as the world's largest companies. As all that will take place on a new, particularly attractive campus, I will be increasingly proud to serve as a flag-bearer for EDHEC. And for Nestlé, of course!.

Source: Edhec Innovation and Management - Winter 2009

For the full interview, please click here.