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Interview with 8select: Better Coordination Within Departments

Jun 12, 2018 11:40:26 AM

We conducted an interview with Magdalena Riedl, HR Manager at 8select Software GmbH. She told us about challenges in recruiting IT developers, their experiences with the Talention software, and developments in the recruiting market.


Magdalena Riedl 8Select Talention

Magdalena Riedl
HR Manager - 8select Software GmbH

 

Please tell us a few words about 8select Software GmbH and your role in the company.

I have been working at 8select Software GmbH since January and together with Mathias Stiefel, one of the co-founders of 8select, I am responsible for HR. To do this, we use the Talention software for the administration of applicant management and manage the vacancies in close cooperation with the departments. Since 8select is still a relatively young company and, with currently just over 30 employees, is not that big, my area of responsibility is not limited to one subarea of HR. My areas of responsibility include topics such as recruiting, the application process, personnel administration and employer branding.

8select is a young company based in Regensburg / Bavaria. The idea of offering a SaaS solution for fashion online retailers was not part of the business model when it was founded in 2012. Following a shift from B2C to B2B, 8select now offers a plug-and-play solution for online shops to generate product recommendations in the form of content-based product sets (e.g. outfits) with the Curated Shopping Engine Plug-in (CSE plug-in). This cross-selling approach opens up the full selection to the end customer in the online shop, as is otherwise only possible for a specialized salesperson in a physical store. If you click on the product page of a pair of jeans in the online shop, for example, our widget directly displays an outfit generated by us, which, in addition to the clicked jeans, also displays a matching blouse, pair of shoes and jewelry.

 

You currently have many vacancies on your website online. Is it difficult for you as a young company to gain new and suitable employees?

Like many other companies, we are also concerned with filling our vacancies, and IT developer positions in particular are usually difficult to fill. Nevertheless, we benefit from certain factors, such as our location in Regensburg's Innovation Center, the TechBase. This location offers us the proximity to the University of Regensberg and the Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, interesting advanced training events and a good exchange with other young companies.

 

Are you conducting events or have you found solutions that work especially well for you?

Employer branding is a point that we would like to focus on more intensively in the future. We have collected many ideas in this regard and have already implemented the first projects, such as the optimizing our website with the addition of a detailed career page. We would like to give more information to potential applicants and to turn to the developers once again. On our career page you will now find answers to questions such as: Which tools do we use? How are we organized? How does the application process work? What benefits does 8select offer its employees? Answering these questions in advance is important for a start-up. Building on this, we want to expand our corporate pages on Indeed, Glassdoor, etc., in order to increase our visibility and offer potential candidates the opportunity to learn about us through various channels.

Other important future points in employer branding are the career fairs at neighboring universities as well as participation in events such as hackathons.

Furthermore, some employees have registered for a company run in Regensburg in July. Here we want to take the opportunity to draw attention to 8select with an appealing T-shirt print and to pick up those interested with an extra landing page. For the implementation of the landing page, we will have our partner in the customer success team of Talention give us advice and adjust the page accordingly. So far we do not use Talention at events, but in the future we can imagine this especially at career fairs, so that interested parties can quickly register on an iPad in our talent pool in order to keep in contact with them.

 

Do you have a specific case in which Talention software has been used so far?

So far we have used Talention mainly for applicant management. What I find very convenient is that the e-mail contact within departments is no longer necessary, as all processes are entered directly into the history of the respective applicants. Everything is neatly documented and nothing is lost, even when several people from the departments are involved. Everyone can read about what has already been done and what the next steps are, as soon as they find the time. I clearly see this as one of the advantages of Talention. We also use analytics to identify the relevant referral pages and derive action steps from them.

 

In which direction do you think the recruiting market is developing?

I think that sourcing will be or is already a central topic. It is also an important point for us because we are in direct contact with the applicant and can already collect information about the candidate without having to upload a cover letter or CV. This removes the first inhibition threshold for candidates. Coveted professional groups are usually not actively looking for a job, so they have to be picked up directly without detours.

I also believe that rating portals are becoming increasingly important. Many applicants inform themselves before they send their application on portals such as Glassdoor and Indeed whether the corporate culture actually fits their own value system. That is why we motivate all 8select employees to give a short and honest feedback on the current rating portals.

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