How did referrals become the most powerful recruitment channel for adesso SE, IT expert?

• Siège : Dortmund (Allemagne)
• Nombre de collaborateurs : 8 500 sur 62 sites en Europe
• Secteur : Conseil - IT (Informatique)

Some key figures

• +80% more applications in the very first year
• 2 times more recruitments
• 24% of candidates recruited come from referrals

The adesso SE Group is one of Europe's leading IT service providers, particularly in German-speaking countries. With 62 sites across Europe, the company is permanently looking for new employees with profiles that combine technological expertise with an excellent understanding of customer needs.

Challenge: dealing with the talent shortage in a highly competitive recruitment sector

Adesso SE faced a double challenge during the Covid health crisis: remote working led to more customer requests (and therefore more sales), but the situation also triggered a staff shortage. The company was particularly short of engineers and consultants, but also of other profiles such as sales people. 

To support their strong growth while talent was becoming scarcer, it was essential to find solutions to find the gems they needed: experts in their field, able to work in a high-growth environment and in line with adesso's corporate culture.

Even though it already existed, adesso's referral program had reached its limits because it was not digitized. For the recruitment teams, it became essential to be more effective in encouraging employees to take part in the program and submit profiles, even if they had already done so before: more communication, more easily and more playfully.

Another finding was that employees' motivation to find suitable profiles within their networks was increased if more actions were rewarded... even if less so in terms of reward level. As well as getting a bonus for referring a profile, employees should be able to be rewarded for sharing job offers, employer brand content, etc.

Adesso's last challenge? A centralized referral system, integrated into adesso's ATS, was needed for all the Group's countries, BUT with sufficient freedom for each site to adapt it to the regional level.

Setting up: a phased roll-out from Germany to the rest of the world

How do you create a referral solution tailored to adesso's unique structure, with its 62 sites and more than 20 separate companies? The individual platform requirements were identified, and the digitized program was launched first in Germany, then in Austria and finally in Switzerland. Once these initial integration stages had been successfully completed, the international rollout was launched.

Au-delà de la praticité de l’outil pour les collaborateurs, l’élément déterminant du Beyond the tool's ease of use for employees, the decisive factor in deployment was internal communication around referral. The launch took place in Germany during the lockdown, and it was even more essential to communicate to reach all employees: 

• teasing on the intranet and internal magazine
• goodies on the vitamin theme (in reference to the program's name “vitamin a”) which generated a lot of positive feedback, not only from employees but also on social media
• a launch emailing sent out for registration, with a link to an FAQ, explanatory videos, an animated film and many other communication tools

Most of this content was then adapted for other Group companies.

To maintain emulation and commitment to the referral program over time, adesso continues to rely on regular internal communication, particularly in the weekly digital magazine, at internal events and meetings, and through the stories offered by CleverConnect's referral tool.

Results: +80% applications and +100% recruitment!

The “vitamin a” referral program represents 24% of all new hires at adesso.

The success of this digitized program can be seen not only in the significantly increased referral numbers, but also in the increased awareness of the company's employer brand thanks to the employees' social accounts. Traffic on the referral platform has exploded.

With almost a quarter of recruitment coming from “vitamin a”, referral has become adesso's most effective sourcing and recruitment channel. The system provides precise data not only on the number of subscribers and active participants, but also on the quantity of job offers and content shared and clicked.

Why is this so important? Because based on these key results, rapid and precise adjustments can be made. After the program was launched in March 2021, a clear increase was observed for the first year with 80% more applications, for 100% more hires. The fact that the growth rate for hires is higher than the growth rate for applications is a very good sign for the quality of the applications!

And, in the first 5 months of 2022, adesso was able to recruit more new employees than in the whole of 2020. A real success story.

For our employees, the possibilities provided by our referral program before it was digitized were limited: in the end, they only approached their active network, and we had few results. With CleverConnect's referral platform, we have a modern, tailored digital solution that enables us to position adesso as an attractive company through a combination of shared offers and content that shows who we are and tells our story. In this way, we also reach people in passive search within our employee network.

Benjamin Nitze - Senior HR Manager - adesso SE