Dekra Arbeit Croatia - Recruitment Agency

As companies worldwide face significant challenges in finding and attracting relevant talent, recruitment agencies with an even more extensive scope of work in recruitment are at the forefront of this challenge.

DEKRA Arbeit Croatia, as one of the leading recruitment agencies in southeast Europe and a daughter company to one of the world's leading expert organizations, DEKRA SE, has a base of over 30 000 candidates and is constantly working on improving their recruitment practices. However, with offices spread around the region and around 100 employees working on a broad scope of work and multiple types of hiring, they were looking for a specific platform to support their efforts which led them to turn to TalentLyft. 

To get a better understanding of the significant pain points in their recruitment process, the strategy they implemented to overcome those challenges, and reasons for choosing TalentLyft we sat down and had a conversation with Mateja and David from DEKRA's team. 

No company is immune to talent shortage

“At the moment, the biggest challenge in recruitment is finding talent. Only in Croatia, the number of job ads increased by 30% in the past year. People can pick and choose where they wish to work which also resulted in many of them leaving the country”, said Mateja and opened an interesting conversation.

In this environment, DEKRA Arbeit Croatia as a recruitment agency that recruits everyone from students to temporary workers and mediates hiring for executive positions, identified another challenge. That is a significant dependence on one paid source of promotion which made the cost of hiring highly determined by their pricing model. 

“Our goal with recruitment marketing is to minimize our dependence on one source of candidates, for instance social media or a specific job board. Our goal is to increase presence on multiple sources so in case prices of one channel skyrocket, we can have a solid stream of applicants from other sources.”

With the prices of promotion going up and the chronic lack of available skilled talent on the market, the team implemented numerous changes to gain a competitive advantage among other recruitment agencies…

Innovating to overcome the challenges 

At DEKRA, they are constantly looking for solutions that will make their hiring more efficient. To be able to build long-term relationships with candidates and hire high-quality talent for their clients, they decided to implement a range of different activities:

1. Redesign of their website to improve brand image
2. Creating new ways of communicating with candidates  
3. Diversifying recruitment marketing efforts
4. Building long-term relationships with students 

Building a stronger brand image

“In our region, agency mediated hiring still carries a negative connotation. Many people believe that the agency will take a percentage of their salary and somehow scam them. Since that is nowhere near the truth, we decided to redesign our web and showcase to our candidates what the real situation is.“

However, as the situation on the market changes and more and more candidates consider, and even start preferring to work as contract workers instead of full-time employers, DEKRA decided to improve communication and revamp their website to attract this talent. Since their hiring structure is quite complex, they decided to create a custom-designed website and connect it with their candidate base in TalentLyft via API to have the best of both worlds. 

Ultimately, as David mentioned, the goal of the new website is to build a recognizable brand image:

“We want our website to be a channel that comes to the top of our candidates mind when searching for a new job. We want them to pay attention to it and the way we communicate through it.”

Creating new ways of communicating with candidates

At DEKRA they are aware that frequent and relevant communication with candidates leads to building better and stronger relationships with them: 

“When people receive emails with irrelevant information to them, they quickly form a negative opinion and we as a company become more irrelevant to them.” 

At the moment, they are leveraging bulk campaigns within TalentLyft and they are reporting success in both attracting more relevant candidates and saving money on promotion through different promotion channels:

“We created a communication flow that starts by sending out bulk campaigns and receiving referrals prior to allocating any resources to job advertisement ”, David said.

However, they are looking to create even more precise communication by further segmenting their base. Since they have a base of over 30 000 candidates, they are aware that manual segmentation is not an option for them. Therefore, having the ability to properly segment their candidate base with Talentlyft custom fields will enable them a more precise and successful communication with candidates.

Diversifying recruitment marketing efforts 

“We are currently promoting our jobs on social media and multiple job boards relevant to our market that are integrated with TalentLyft which enables us to track not only the number of applications we receive through each channel but also the quality of each application.” 

By diversifying their recruitment marketing efforts and relying on more channels of job promotion for which they can track success through several analytics, the company saves valuable resources: 

“Since we established tracking based on the source of application it became easier for us to decide where to allocate our resources for promotion. Over time, we can say that we reduced our dependence on external expensive job boards and now we manage to hire half of our candidates solely through TalentLyft - whether that be bulk campaigns, social media or job boards integrated with TalentLyft.” 

Building relationships with students 

Besides hiring temporary workers, and high-level positions, DEKRA Arbeit Croatia is offering student jobs as a part of their portfolio. Going in line with building a stronger brand image with the new website and their proactive communication with candidates - the company is also working on projects related to students to build long-lasting relationships with young talent entering the workforce. 

“We work hard to establish long-term relationships with the student population since we believe that we will be reconnecting with them sometime in the future.”

Simplicity as the winning factor

Even though there were several other recruitment solutions taken into consideration prior to implementing the external recruitment solution, both David and Mateja mentioned that it didn't take them long to make the decision to go for TalentLyft. 

Fast implementation with good support, the ability to cover multiple use cases needed for their agency’s success and a simple way of tracking candidates’ GDPR consents were just some of the winning factors of TalentLyft. As David nicely put it:

“I would recommend TalentLyft because of its simple integration, simple use of custom fields, simple way to search through the base and a simple way to promote jobs on job boards. In one word, TalentLyft equals simplicity!”