New Hiring: Why the new working world is turning the labour market upside down

Hosted by Stefan Keuchel, PR Director of NEW WORK SE, Julia Bangerth, CHRO at DATEV AG, Jonathan Kurfess, CEO and founder of Appinio, and Tim Good, Senior Managing Director at Accenture, discussed necessary changes in recruiting at New Work Experience in June 2022.

If you ask Julia Bangerth about her experiences during the pandemic, she reports that at DATEV the changeover to remote work was much easier than expected. A new understanding and a new way of dealing with recruiting processes have also emerged during this time. Moving away from an isolated approach, towards new concepts in which a synchronisation of recruiting and learning takes place. For Bangerth, current employees are a valuable HR resource that needs to be better empowered in the future. By special training programmes – DATEV i.a. initiated the one-year programme “Become an Engineer” – vacancies can be filled with internal candidates. Incentives are also important to motivate employees who have the willingness to change to acquire necessary skills to take on new roles. For Bangerth, new hiring therefore clearly means internal talent promotion and corporate learning.

In the future, software tools and artificial intelligence will be more important in recruitment processes. In combination with human intelligence, digital processes ensure efficiency in all recruiting phases and set procedural standards. For Tim Good, finding talents requires “applied intelligence” with accessible tools that support the search for potential. “Not filtering out candidates, but filtering candidates in” should become recruting motto. For him, recognising potential and developing employees is one of HR’s main tasks. The candidate experience is also becoming an important success factor for new hiring. Here, Accenture is increasingly focusing on digital work atmospheres. The Metaverse is an integral part of Accenture’s HR digital strategy. In “The Nth Floor“, a novel employee onboarding experience with a mix of immersive experiences, interactive presentations and demonstrations is available for existing employees and applicants at “One Accenture Park”. As for Bangerth, also Good points out current employees as important sources to find talents. Internal skill building will co-exist with external candidate sourcing in the future.

Living corporate culture is an important factor for Jonathan Kurfess when recruiting new employees. With its “remote first” philosophy and a working model built on trust and flexibility, the Hamburg-based company Appinio has been able to recruit many new talents. “Everyone should be a mini-CEO at Appinio,” Kurfess says. Appinio’s employees are allowed to work from everywhere at flexible hours and are also free to choose the number of days they take off. Appinio’s HR model relies to 100 percent on trust and is based on the idea that employees go to work with the aspiration to perform well. This requires a high level of commitment, entrepreneurial mindset and ownership on the employee-side, but also creates identification and enthusiasm. For Kurfess, new hiring is about radically rethinking and breaking new ground, and it is a formula for success in the war for talents.