- Employer Branding
- HR Marketing
- Recruiting
- HR Services
- HR Development
- Shop
- About ARTS
ARTS secured the top spot in the Dresden Acency Prize 2024 with its impressive success at Autobahn GmbH des Bundes!
The Autobahn GmbH of the Federal Government manages over 13,000 kilometers of highway throughout Germany, from Rendsburg in the far north to Kempten in the Allgäu, Krefeld to Cottbus. It has been operated under the responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Digital Affairs and Transport since September 2018.
One of the biggest challenges with the start of operations on January 1, 2021, was the mammoth task of recruiting in the organizational structure, which is very similar to the civil service. ARTS supported the 10 branches and 41 field offices of Autobahn GmbH for 24 months as a strategic and operational partner in personnel recruitment - and the results are impressive!
ARTS Recruitment Team
By bundling tasks centrally in Autobahn GmbH, several advantages were to be realized. In addition to faster planning, the new organization also enables uniform quality standards nationwide and efficiency gains through synergy effects.
Since day one, Autobahn GmbH has pursued the goals of faster planning, more efficient construction, operation and maintenance.
One of our first activities to strengthen Autobahn GmbH des Bundes was therefore to build a positive employer brand. Our team carried out a comprehensive benchmark study to characterise the employer brand, analysing the specific benefits that are particularly relevant for the target groups in more than 25 different occupational groups. This enabled us to ensure that Autobahn was able to stand out from its (primarily privately organised) competitors with an attractive offer and that our recruiters were able to target potential applicants. Our consulting approach aims to make the entire application process - from the first point of contact to hiring - as quick and personalised as possible. We want candidates to have a positive and seamless experience that convinces them to become part of Autobahn GmbH des Bundes. Therefore, another preparatory step of the recruiting task was to design a barrier-free candidate journey.
In order to ensure smooth cooperation between our ARTS recruiting team and the individual branches, branch offices and motorway maintenance depots of Autobahn GmbH des Bundes, we also initiated a series of workshops. These workshops were used for process design and together we were able to develop customised solutions that meet the specific requirements and circumstances on site.
Good and effective HR marketing is always based on the correct definition of all applicant personas. This was no different in this project with Autobahn GmbH des Bundes. Based on the individual search profiles of the vacant positions, we created detailed personas that enabled us to develop targeted communication strategies and utilise the relevant channels effectively.
We then designed an appealing SEO landing page for the active searchers and worked with keyword-optimised job advertisements. We also used duplicate posts to massively increase the reach of the individual vacancies. This approach enabled us to increase a vacancy with an average of 860 search queries per month to around 56,000 search queries per month and thus attract as many qualified applicants as possible. In addition, the SEO landing page served as a link target for adverts in social media.
Social networks have become indispensable in today's digital age. Employers that are not listed there are not even considered by potential candidates. We were also able to close this gap in cooperation with Autobahn GmbH des Bundes and realise an attractive Xing presence for the company.
With a team of up to eleven recruiters at times, we relieved the burden on Autobahn's internal recruitment team at the head office and in the branches as external colleagues and thus made a significant contribution to filling a large number of open positions in a very short time. Our colleagues mainly worked remotely from Dresden or Hamburg, but occasionally travelled to the various branches for individual appointments. From the client's perspective, it was important that we carried out our work directly and comprehensively in Autobahn's applicant management system (BMS). This led to further increases in efficiency for the entire recruiting process.
The labour market situation and the acute shortage of skilled workers mean that no one can rely solely on multiposting job advertisements to find suitable employees. Our recruitment consultants therefore supported Autobahn with active sourcing, especially on Xing and LinkedIn. On Xing alone, we viewed almost 10,000 profiles and added them to sourcing projects. Almost 12,000 messages sent on Xing over a period of two years demonstrate our efforts to attract high-calibre applicants.
Our recruiters have familiarised themselves with the requirements of a wide range of professional fields in order to better assess the fit for the respective position. Of course, the motorway requires a lot of expertise in civil engineering, and our ARTS colleagues are now very familiar with the qualifications required in road and tunnel construction and know, for example, that bridge construction requires more than just knowledge of statics. Another focus of our search was on positions in the legal and administrative sectors, which also have many specialisations, as well as IT positions, which are difficult to fill for all companies.
In total, ARTS managed over 550 positions with a 90% staffing rate and screened over 22,000 applications.
We would also like to take this opportunity to expressly thank those for whom the idea of external recruiting colleagues initially felt alien, but who nevertheless gave us the opportunity to be convinced.
In the process, our recruiters have immersed themselves in the requirements of a wide variety of professional fields to better assess the fit for each position. Of course, the autobahn requires a lot of civil engineering know-how, and by now our ARTS colleagues are well acquainted with the qualifications in road and tunnel construction and know, for example, that bridge construction requires more than just knowledge of structural engineering. Another focus in our search was positions in law and administration, which also have many specializations, as well as IT positions, which are difficult for all companies to fill.
Our now well-positioned applicant network, constant desire to learn about new areas and requirements, and more than 20 years of HR expertise helped us provide Autobahn with a solid hiring recommendation for every position we advertised.
Throughout the staffing process, it was always important to ensure that we met the requirements of public sector recruiting. As a publicly owned limited liability company bound by the collective bargaining agreement of the German federal states, and as a federally owned company with a certain exemplary function, Autobahn prioritized legal certainty in all selection steps. It was not just a matter of selecting the best person for a position, but also of being able to justify perfectly why another application was less convincing. Without the patient explanations and close cooperation with our contact persons at Autobahn, we would not have been able to deliver this high quality in our work. Over the course of the two years, a trusting, appreciative relationship has developed between ARTS and Autobahn, both at headquarters and in the branch offices.
Many talk about time-to-hire to measure the speed of recruiting. However, we have focused on another figure, namely the number of working hours that have to be put into a position from the beginning to the end on the recruiting side. This includes coordinating with the department on the specific requirements of the position, selecting suitable job portals and posting the job, answering questions from interested parties, active sourcing, reviewing and evaluating resumes, making appointments for interviews, conducting telephone interviews and job interviews, administrative maintenance of applications in the BMS and, last but not least, writing a hiring recommendation. All in all, you can expect 80-100 working hours spread over several months - depending on how coordination-intensive the application process is, whether there are synergy effects between the positions, or how many applications are received. To put it in a nutshell, we have saved our customer around 50,000 man-hours, making high-volume recruiting in the public sector possible in the first place.
If we assume these approximately 80 working hours per position, the recommendation from personnel management literature is understandable that each recruiter should ideally only look after 5-10 positions at the same time. Of course, you can give your recruiting team more positions at the same time, but then it is only logical that staffing processes will be protracted. Recruitment outsourcing, especially in times of intensive staffing, is the more elegant solution here.
The outsourcing concept has long been established in industry. The advantages are obvious: turn fixed costs into variable costs and benefit from the efficiency advantages of the service provider. Business process outsourcing is also a strategic success factor in the HR sector. At ARTS, we have been solving the HR challenges of our customers from a wide range of industries, such as IT and communications technology, the automotive industry or the energy sector, for over 20 years. In the context of recruiting process outsourcing, we have already been able to support start-ups such as Lilium with ARTS Expert:innen on site for recruitment as well as onboarding. High volume recruiting, as in the case of Autobahn GmbH, is a special form of RPO, as it involves filling a large number of positions in a very short time. It is characterized, among other things, by the fact that we can take on individual subtasks as well as the complete recruitment process. The focus is always on the individual needs of the customer.
We would also be happy to save your team an hour or two of work and thus continue your success story.
Create your success story with ARTS