A group of five students from the University of Vechta in Northern Germany conducted a project that dealt with the specific recruiting strategies of the enterprise Piepenbrock, a company that offers building cleaning, facility management, maintenance, and security with a high standard for sustainable products and services. The students first informed themselves about recruitment strategies in general and the importance of aligning the recruitment strategy with the needs and aims of the company before they learned about the current practices applied by the Piepenbrock recruiters. Being set in the frame of a course on corporate sustainability communication, the project focused on the ways through which the company addressed and hoped to attract potential future employees. It soon became obvious to the students that the special characteristics of the company’s branch come with a particular challenge for recruitment, but also offer a great chance for sustainability positioning: While the cleaning sector might be a rather unattractive work field, the explicit commitment to sustainability can raise the company’s appeal in the eyes of environmentally conscious jobseekers considerably.
Based on this finding and a thorough situation analysis, the students pointed out possibilities to take advantage of the already performed sustainability practices within recruitment communications. The developed concept was comprised of five key steps: alteration of the negative sectoral factor, pooling of all sustainability activities, presenting the activities prominently on the application portal, adjusting the content and language of job advertisements and implementing sustainability visibly in the recruitment process. The cooperation with Piepenbrock and its employees throughout the project was well appreciated by the student group.
Students involved in the project:
Simon Isbrecht, Fabian Kentsch, Maria Schmedt, Mathias Stohr
