Audi Immobilien Solutions
Client · 12 monthsCLIENT · CORPORATE REAL ESTATE · 12 MONTHS
Audi is on the door, and the accounting post still would not fill.
Two Audi companies, searching the way most companies search: newspaper ads, StepStone, Monster, Indeed. Nothing wrong with any of them, and no shortage of budget or reputation.
What was missing was a channel that reaches people who are not looking, and the in-house knowledge to run one. That was the conversation we had before there was a project: how do you use the new channels for hiring, and who runs them for you.
An accountant with SAP and IFRS behind them is employed. They are not browsing job boards on a Friday afternoon, because they do not need to. A job board reaches people who are actively looking, and in that group there are very few of them.
The brand does not solve it either, and this is the part people get wrong. A name like Audi produces applications for the jobs people dream about. It does not produce them for a tax specialist post in corporate real estate.
Those roles compete against every other employer in the region for a small number of people who all already have a job.
“Deine Buchhaltung läuft. Nur deine Karriere nicht?”
Your accounting runs. Your career doesn't?
I do not start a twelve-month contract on a promise. We ran one position first — accounting — as a test, at a price that made the decision easy.
We filled it. Only then did we roll it out: twelve months, one open position included at any time, any further position booked on top.
Getting in was its own project.
Working with a company like this is not only a matter of convincing someone. You get listed as a supplier, you negotiate terms with purchasing, and you need the patience to sit through both before anyone places a single ad.
This is the part that decides whether an ad works, and it is the part most agencies skip.
Sent before anything else.
Who do you really want, and why that person.
Not from the job description.
No CV, no cover letter.
Every candidate, by us.
Before any position went live, we sent the questionnaire and then sat down with the department head who would actually work with this person. Not with HR — with them. Who are you really looking for. What kind of person. Why that kind. What do they have to be able to do, and what explicitly do they not. Is there someone you already have in mind, and what makes them the one. Then it went back into the approval document, and only then was there an ad.
An advert written from a job description reaches people who match a job description. An advert written from that conversation reaches the person the department head actually wanted.
Three application funnels, running on our own domain rather than on the careers site, so the path could be built for the candidate instead of for the applicant tracking system. Applying took sixty seconds, with no CV and no cover letter, because a specialist who already has a job will not write a cover letter for a maybe.
The ads ran under the company's own page, in the company's own voice, on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads, with the careers domain visible. Where an image was generated with AI, the ad said so.
You can still check all of it: these job ads sit in the Meta Ad Library under the company's own page. One of them reached 40,929 accounts. It was targeted at a single city — Ingolstadt, population roughly 140,000.
All three images are AI-generated, and the ads said so, in the ads.
Filled: the accounting position we started with, an SAP specialist, leadership positions in finance, several more in accounting, and one in sales.
“Thank you for supporting our search for the right candidates. You were always available with advice, and you responded to our requests and adjustments flexibly and quickly. That is how we managed to make more than one successful hire.”
The IS department lead was not filled, and it is worth saying why. The applications were strong. The good ones wanted more money than the company was prepared to pay, and after six weeks the position was cancelled rather than repriced. A funnel finds you the people the market has at the salary you are offering. It cannot make the market cheaper, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
The second one is smaller and just as real: with some positions the decision sat with a department head who had other priorities that week, and a candidate who waits does not wait long.
How it ended: in November, when the hiring wave calmed down and the team wanted to carry on with their own measures. That is a legitimate way for a project to end, and we would rather write it here than let the page imply we are still there.
