As an internationally growing company, we attach considerable importance to attracting new recruits. We therefore further stepped up our successful recruitment activities in Germany and abroad in the year under review.
In recent years we have already been successful in recruiting qualified new employees in a timely manner. If we are to maintain this high level, it is vital to remain prominent and attractive as an employer and to know the expectations of candidates on the job market. With this in mind, we undertook a conceptual overhaul of our employer branding approach in the 2017 calendar year that was rolled out in the year under review. This reworking targets both our general image on the recruitment market and appropriate adjustments to the recruiting tools that we use. These include, for example, our job advertisements, our presence at job fairs, informational materials and our website.
In overhauling our advertising campaign we focused on previously identified requirements that make us an attractive workplace and employer in the eyes of relevant applicants – and which we are actually able to fulfil with the positions that we have to offer. Our primary target groups are university graduates and young professionals/professionals. In terms of content, most job profiles are still centred on the disciplines of mathematics and economics. Nevertheless, demand for IT profiles is also growing – as is the difficulty of filling such vacancies. This is another of the challenges that we tackled in the redesign of our advertising campaign.
The systematic mix of marketing tools that we use to address our target groups has been largely retained. When it comes to the target group of graduates, this encompasses various measures such as building and cultivating contacts with universities, attending job fairs, offering to arrange field trips, publishing activity reports in student magazines and trade journals as well as using online media and providing job application training etc. These measures are constantly reviewed with an eye to their effectiveness and adjusted as necessary. As far as the group of young professionals / professionals is concerned, we use Web-based business networks such as XING and LinkedIn. In the Career section of our website we also explore aspects such as leadership and career advancement for professionals as relevant topics.
On the recruitment side, too, the role played by word-of-mouth recommendations is growing. To this extent, the already existing "Employees recruit Employees" programme and our excellent employer rating on the portal kununu are important marketing factors for attracting young talent.
These various points of contact are complemented by a range of entry opportunities for new employees: