This post comes from Dominik A. Hahn Global Head of Employer Branding, Strategic Recruiting & Onboarding at Allianz!

I’m lost without taking notes and ticking off to-do lists.

When introducing myself to others I’m sometimes referring to StudiVZ, the German equivalent of Facebook which was hyped amongst students in the mid-2000s. Similar as Facebook, StudiVZ allowed to create groups. Often, those groups did not have any other purpose than having a funny or stupid name. This way, joining specific groups painted a pretty accurate picture of your personality. One of my favorite groups I joined was called „To-Do-Listen abhaken macht mich glücklich“ (ticking of to-do lists makes me happy). Having said that, the following brief overview of what we in Allianz’ „Global People Attraction Team“ are planning to deliver also helps me to keep track of everything we have on our list – and hopefully, we can tick off as many items as possible! So let’s get started:

New Employer Brand positioning

A project we have already started last year is the development of our brand new Employer Value Proposition (EVP). Our current one, Allianz is the home for those who dare, has been in place since 2015 and Allianz as a company but the world around us has changed quite a lot in the meantime. Based on our company’s purpose „We secure your future“ we surveyed 16,000 employees and 1,200 external candidates out of our most wanted target groups. Now that the research and analysis have been finished (no, I won’t disclose the new EVP but will do so once we officially launch it in Q2 2021), our main priority is to prepare for its (internal/external) launch. To enable our 100+ local entities and support their local HR-Marketing activities, we will deliver ready-to-use as well as easy-to-adjust templates for various channels and platforms. This could be stage banners for local career websites, a bunch of online banners for digital marketing/campaigning, templates for local LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram Accounts, email signature banners, job ad templates, roll-up templates, videos, GIFs and much more. All of those templates will be available in four versions – with (employee) faces, without any faces but graphical visualization only, sports illustrations and also Olympics/Paralympics versions (if you have not yet heard it: Allianz is the official worldwide Olympics and Paralympic Insurance Partner). All in all, we will provide more than 50 different templates our local colleagues can directly use and/or adjust. This approach saves a lot of money. In the past, Allianz entities were developing assets on their own although local needs were overlapping to like 90%. Of course, we in the global team will also make use of the templates/assets, and take care that all global platforms will adjust to our new EVP. 

Olympics/Paralympics

Talking about the Olympic and Paralympic Movement, we will see a lot of HR-Marketing and recruiting activities here, too. On the one hand side, we are going to support our local entities’ (para-)athletes recruiting efforts with corresponding (social media) communication formats. Having said this, we have developed, again, easy-to-use/localize social media post templates (e.g. interview formats with athletes, dedicated job ad templates in Olympic/Paralympic style etc.)) that all our entities can use themselves without the need of developing similar formats dozens of times locally. 

Additionally, we will create a dedicated landing page on careers.allianz.com talking about how the Olympic and Paralympic Movement and Allianz share the same values – including employee ambassadors who are/were professional athletes themselves. And more to come!

SuccessFactors (SF)

In Q4 this year we are about to experience a massive go-live: In a so called Big Bang all of our dozens and dozens of entities will get SF for recruiting and onboarding (in technical speak: we’re rolling out RCM, RMK incl. CSB, ONB2.0). We have spent the last months designing one global template (!) that fits all of our entities operational recruiting and onboarding needs. Now it’s about the roll-out, making adjustments here and there (e.g. due to legal reasons), and testing. But when introducing a new ATS you also need to decommission an old one, right? In our case, this is SAP eRecruiting. After having it used for the last 15 years at Allianz (at least in most of our entities), it is time to say good-bye. But of course, it’s not just about switching it off but also about defining a transition strategy and how to make candidates that are in the middle of an application process aware of the fact that we have moved on. 

In parallel, we are also working on both comprehensive SF recruiting reporting dashboards (our current „MVP“ foresees ca. 25 reports which are either targeted towards operational recruiters, entity recruiting leads/HR Heads or the global recruiting team) and measuring the entire candidate experience on all relevant touchpoint (online application experience, hiring experience, pre-boarding experience, onboarding experience). We will do this using the NPS and Qualtrics. Read more about it soon.

Career Website Migration

In 2018, we started a longer journey. Before every single Allianz entity maintained its own local career website – on own servers, with own content, sometimes using old CI and not-in-line EVP messages. With our so called „One Allianz Career Website“ project we decommissioned 18 local websites and bundled them on one single platform: careers.allianz.com. We also switched from our usual „inside-out-thinking“ to a way more candidate-centric experience: instead of forcing a candidate to decide at which Allianz entity he/she wants to work (guess what: almost no one knows the difference between the various entities …) and then presenting the corresponding content and jobs, we automatically showed available jobs and content based on the candidate’s location. 

With the implementation of SF as a new ATS we also decided to switch gears when it comes to our website CMS. Being currently on Adobe (AEM), which is an awesome CMS btw, brings a lot of pros (many marketing opportunities) but also a lot of cons (e.g. difficult to maintain for local entities which might not have dedicated employer branding experts taking care of a CMS). Having said this, we will hop over to CSB (Career Site Builder). Being fully aware that CSB is not an actual full-blown CMS it will, nevertheless, enable our local colleagues to better maintain their career content at lower costs. Unfortunately, it is not just about switching an old CMS off and a new one on. The migration is about designing the UI completely from scratch. Based on this, all existing content needs to be re-written, adjusted (e.g. image sizes) or created. Not to mention all testing, making the CSB looking like an Allianz website (and not a website that looks like 1999 …) etc. pp.

Communication focus on I&D, Benefits, Health and Career Development

Allianz has a lot to offer. And a lot to tell. That’s why we want to „industrialize“ our social media communications going forward. To be more focused, to be more efficient, to save costs for our local entities. Our solution: For all key topics we will define specific formats which all get dedicated templates – in line with Allianz’ brand identity and our design style guide. Having those blueprints, we can focus on collecting the needed content and putting it into the templates instead of also thinking of how to visualize it. All of our local colleagues can build on that and also make use of those templates. And did I mention that I love Canva.com (pro tip)?

Add-on projects

On top of all mentioned action items, we have some more things in our pipeline. As many of you know, making your own employees employer brand ambassadors is THE royal discipline in the TA area. This is one thing we want to better tackle in 2021. As a global team, we receive more than 500 emails from candidates each month asking about career opportunities at Allianz worldwide. Often, we are not able to provide a deep answer. Honestly, I have no clue what concretely happens in our Actuarial departments … so why not let our Actuaries talk about this. Live on our website. In real-time. So stay tuned 🙂

Another project is to make our job descriptions more engaging, more inclusive and get rid of acronyms and abbreviations that no one gets. Using AI and Machine Learning will, hopefully, support us on this journey to write and publish better JDs. Then I can also delete this one folder I have on my desktop called „Bad job titles at Allianz“ … 😉

I’m pretty sure I forgot a lot of other tasks we gonna deliver on the course of 2021. But what I do not forget to mention is to say THANK YOU to my Team Awesome. Thank you for a great 2020 and thank you for, yes, a very challenging 2021 but also a year ahead that will make us proud when we will back at it in 2022. Again, thank you to Bea, Franziska, Charlotte, Nadja, Katharina, and our great working students Burcu and Liz (we’d be lost without you!). Let’s do this. Together.

source: Linkedin.com