Our colleague Veena has been working for DONE! since February 2021. Her major client is Knauf Digital. “Knauf Digital is one of the greatest projects I ever had and still have. Being part of a complete digital transformation is really challenging. Also, this is the biggest squad I have ever worked within DONE!Berlin”, says Veena.
She started working for Knauf 1.5 years ago. As HR consultant, she is responsible for the technical and end-to-end recruitment, which includes planning, defining the role, creating job descriptions, sourcing and interviewing potential tech talents, pushing the decision making process and providing the best candidate experience, in order to close the perfect hire.
As a family-run and international company, Knauf is the market leader in the building materials' industry: 300 plants and more than 40,000 employees. Especially during the pandemic, Knauf experienced a huge boost in demand and realised that they needed to drive innovation and digitalisation along the customer journey.
That is why Knauf Digital GmbH was born. The mission of the new digital department is to rethink what it means to provide value to Knauf’s customers and thereby drive growth around the world. The new team shall focus on reinventing marketing, sales and service processes and integrate these processes with custom-made software and digital interaction solutions.
For Veena and the DONE! team, the challenge has been to build up a team from scratch in an industry and a job market, where digital talents and entrepreneurial mindsets are highly in demand. It is important that this new unit is fully integrated in the whole corporate structure, in order to make quick decisions, to plan efficiently and to execute the rollout of digital products, and continuously transfer knowledge that the entire company can learn from.
Until today, Venna has recruited from scratch many tech talents from all over the world for Knauf Digital. Grounded, hands-on and inspiring minds from Brazil, Argentina, Iran, India and Germany. These include experts in Data, Solution Architecture, Quality Assurance as well as specialists for Digital Project Management. How did she manage to build up a team in these difficult conditions?
She and her team have implemented an exceptional candidate experience and a fully digital recruiting process to recruit globally. In addition, she has an eye on diversity and inclusion. To that end, she also redefined the application process and job requirements. For example, it was important that Knauf Digital focus on hiring personalities and not just experts with skills. Knauf is enthusiastic about this innovative approach and supports it, because it fits perfectly with Knauf's corporate values of humanity, partnership, commitment and entrepreneurship.
Why does this approach lead to success? Today, IT teams need employees with equally good hard and soft skills in order to manage the future. This includes an open mindset, flexibility, the ability to adapt and work in a diverse team, as well as cross-functional, intercultural and communicative skills. In many cases they lead the projects. This requires additional leadership skills. Therefore, it makes total sense to focus on soft skills while sourcing talents for IT teams, and it opens up much larger talent pools for vacancies, too.
At Knauf Digital there are always exciting positions open, like Solution Architect, DevOps Engineers as well as QA Engineers. Please contact Veena (veena@doneberlin.com) or visit the career site of Knauf Digital: https://www.comeet.com/jobs/knauf/56.004
