Lily Desnoes: The Human at the Heart of Corporate Performance
After an initial part of her career in marketing, Lily Desnoes (MBA HR, 2012) decided to change professional direction and move into Human Resources. This career transition was made possible thanks to ENS Paris-Saclay: there, in one year, she obtained the specialized degree in Human Resources Management, the only program capable of offering the high level of expertise essential for talent management in international environments.
From Marketing to Human Resources
Lily Desnoes graduated in 1997 from the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP). Recruited at its career fair, she began her career in consumer goods marketing within major international companies (various entities of the LVMH group, then Dolfus Mieg et Compagnie, a leading French company in creative leisure and textiles). “I successively held the positions of assistant product manager, product manager, group manager and Marketing Director,” she explains. These intense professional experiences led her to travel extensively around the world. But the desire to spend more time with her family led her to reflect. “With three young children, I wanted to travel less, but contribute just as much to the company’s performance, no longer through the prism of products, but through human capital.”
ENS Paris-Saclay: Technical Expertise and Teaching
Thus, in 2012, Lily Desnoes set out to find a training program in Human Resources. “Already knowing the organization and team management well, I wanted to acquire skills to manage human resources internationally,” she explains. Her choice fell on the specialized degree offered at the time by ENS Paris-Saclay in partnership with ENSAM. At the age of 38, she immersed herself alongside students who had just graduated with a Master 2 in this one-year program, which she describes as “extremely enriching”: “in addition to the challenges of international mobility and mastering intercultural issues, we addressed the complex management of compensation policies and ‘benefits’ programs from the perspective of figures and statistics,” she recalls. International taxation, valuation of social liabilities, executive compensation (employee share ownership, employee savings, social benefits): the program enabled me to acquire genuine technical expertise, which is rather rare in this field.” Lily also retains an unforgettable memory of her professors, “passionate people who gave us fascinating courses, with a high degree of technical expertise and remarkable teaching skills.”
Armed with this new expertise, Lily Desnoes returned to her former group within Louis Vuitton’s Compensation & Benefits department. “My manager called it the ‘KGB of Human Resources’, given how highly confidential the matters handled were,” she confides. “There, I acquired all the complex and strategic know-how related to high-level human resources.” She then left Louis Vuitton for a human resources consulting firm. For five years, she led various assignments for players in the banking and insurance sectors. In 2019, she was appointed Group Human Resources Director, first at Klépierre (a real estate investment company), then at La Banque Postale Asset Management (LBP AM) in 2021. There, over six years, Lily Desnoes completely transformed the HR function, led several mergers and acquisitions, and supported change.
A Career Path Guided by Her Values
With hindsight, Lily Desnoes has developed a conviction: “You have to remain aligned with yourself. Choosing a profession matters just as much as choosing the environment and culture in which you practice it.” These decisions must also take into account the priorities specific to each stage of life. In this spirit, she continues to commit herself to other missions that are close to her heart: her involvement with Avarap[1], which supports professionals in repositioning themselves, as well as the teaching she provides at Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne to Master 2 HR students. Her next step? “Returning to a major international group,” she states. “You have to give yourself the means to see your projects through to the end and never make choices by default. Anything is possible for those who put energy into it.” For example, the HR Director advises ENS Paris-Saclay students not to rule out the private sector, with which the School should, in her view, build stronger ties.
More broadly, drawing inspiration from her own children and observing that increasingly hybrid academic programs make this possible, Lily Desnoes encourages the younger generation not to give up their extracurricular vocations, such as sport, art or music. “It is essential to show young people, who are often subject to family or social pressure, that they have the right to take alternative paths, to make mistakes, and to pursue a passion and academic success side by side.
[1] Association for the Promotion of Relations with Professionals
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