What’s Your Why? For Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, It’s a Growth Mindset

Science and technology company Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, started its Phenom journey in the summer of 2023 on two parallel tracks. One was a talent acquisition focus using Phenom's recruiting solutions. The other was implementing an employee-centered Talent Marketplace under their branded company-wide initiative called "MyGrowth," which provides employees with easy access to internal jobs, development opportunities, and skills-building activities.

The most important intersection between the two tracks, according to Colleen Rush, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, is internal mobility. She spoke at length about the company’s change tactics at a IAMPHENOM session titled “Building AI-Driven Career Mobility and Organizational Agility.”

For clarity, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is a separate entity from the U.S.-based Merck. Despite the shared name, they are independent companies operating in different markets with distinct business portfolios.

Merck KGaA has three businesses — life sciences, pharmaceuticals and electronics. “We are about improving the quality of human health and the quality of life,” Rush said.

The company is, to put it simply, huge — 63,000 employees doing business in nearly 70 countries. That suggests ample opportunities for employee growth. The reality, however, was that the three businesses operate essentially as separate companies. “The walls between the silos are not as permeable as we would like,” Rush said. “We're working on that.”

Their Why

Merck KGaA’s “why” behind the MyGrowth effort is enabling business growth by unlocking the workforce’s growth potential and developing a strong focus on learning. On the talent acquisition side, the company needed to raise its game in terms of competing for talent.

This is an important distinction because, as a 357-year-old, family-owned company with healthy growth aspirations, it means continually adapting, which has profound implications for its people. Employee skills and retention are the driving forces behind the company's transformation strategy and its ability to remain competitive in rapidly evolving markets.

Long before MyGrowth, business leaders across the organization recognized the need to be ready to upskill and reskill the workforce. That’s because one of the secret sauces is continuous transformation. Being 70% family-owned influences our culture, so when there’s an internal reorganization that leads to a headcount reduction in one business, the company would rather have the internal agility to reskill and redeploy them to another part of the company.

Early Challenges

As Merck KGaA began developing its talent initiatives, several key challenges emerged. 

Retention was a significant concern. "A very large proportion of our employee base, when they completed the Exit Survey, indicated that the reason they were leaving was they did not perceive that they could realize their career aspirations at Merck," Rush explained. “One of the first things that I discovered with a heavy heart was that our internal candidate experience was a long way from what I would like it to have been. There were examples where people said, ‘I applied for a job, and I only discovered I didn't get it when the person who got it was announced.’” 

Company-wide buy-in was another obstacle. Among the company’s 10,000 managers, some were talent generators and some were talent hoarders, reluctant to release their best people for opportunities elsewhere in the organization. These insights helped shape the company's approach to internal mobility.

Standing up MyGrowth was one thing, but then getting people to create a profile and list all their skills was another. On the TA side, getting recruiters to work differently and make good use of the technology investment was another initial roadblock.

"It was the first use of AI in human resources,” Rush shared. “Fortunately for us, our business is leaning very heavily into AI, and the tone from the top was AI as an enabler, as a co-pilot,” she explained. “That helped, but we still needed to work very intentionally to build trust among our employees in the AI — and even among our talent acquisition professionals to begin to make good use of the AI.”

Innovative Change Tactics

Rush and her team took an unconventional approach to change management: "We actually attacked the change management challenges top down and bottom up simultaneously. Our CEO was a great champion," she explained.

Before launching company-wide, they conducted a strategic pilot program. "Before the company-wide launch, we did a soft launch where we invited employees to become part of the pilot and invited employees to engage with the team that was creating this journey... we had 600 employees that took us up on that offer and were very engaged in helping us shape how we configured the platform," Rush said.

To support internal mobility, the TA team conducted extensive training: "TA delivered various workshops... One, to give employees and leaders a behind-the-scenes look at how we were using AI, and then how they themselves could show up as their best selves as a candidate. Another one that was much more tactical, focused on, for example, writing an AI and a human-friendly CV,” Rush elaborated.

Employees Saw the Light

Persistence paid off. Since launching the internal mobility tool in November 2023, which included the call to create a profile, 41,000 of out 63,000 employees started an account. That’s an incredible level of engagement. “When you think about the fact that more than a quarter of our workforce does not sit in front of a laptop every day, those numbers are pretty impressive,” Rush said.

More than 15,000 employees have gone into their profile and voluntarily added skills, an important step for job-matching. The average number of skills that each employee added is about 15. Reinforcing its commitment to a constant culture of learning, Merck KGaA offers employees over 27,000 learning offerings, which they can access through MyGrowth.

Further enhancing its upskilling and reskilling opportunities, Phenom Mentoring has helped bridge that gap. "Mentoring is really popular," said Rush. "We have over 1,000 mentoring pairs, and that has grown pretty quickly," she revealed. Implemented less than a year ago, employees can choose from private mentoring groups or public mentoring. 

External Candidates Are Flocking, Too

On the TA side, more than 38,000 people registered for the Talent Community to be kept apprised of future job opportunities. As a result, the Talent CRM database has swelled to 739,000.

A Hosted Apply process available across multiple languages accounted for another positive trend. “We dramatically simplified the application process and the reduction of the time went from 9 minutes to an average of 4 minutes and 17 seconds," Rush shared. 

On top of that success, interview scheduling in the United States — Merck KGaA's largest market — resulted in a 70% reduction in the average time to get an interview on the calendar. 

"The reduction in our time to source eventually-hired candidates went down by more than four days... from 27 days to 22 days. That is the piece where we, as talent acquisition, deliver better candidates faster to the hiring manager," said Rush.

What can others learn from Merck KGaA?

Rush counseled business leaders to focus on the following topics:

• What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the impact your organization wants to have?

• “Think beyond the technology,” encouraged Rush. “Success is what you wrap the technology in. Just launching the technology will not ensure that people actually use it in the way you intended. And if they don't use it in the way you intend, you will never see the impact you're trying to achieve."

• Manage stakeholder expectations. “I've implemented a lot of technology in my career. There has never been a launch without some surprises,” she said.

Rush concluded with poignant parting advice. “The cool factor is not enough — it has to solve a problem.” This focus on problem-solving rather than novelty perfectly encapsulates Merck's approach: starting with a clear "why" that addresses both organizational challenges and employee aspirations, then building meaningful solutions around that purpose.

Want to dive deeper? Book a demo to learn more about the different ways Phenom can support all of your talent experiences.