How Kuehne+Nagel Is Empowering Employees To Own & Grow Their Careers

The Challenge

Resourceful. Collaborative. Customer-driven. These are the people who work at Kuehne+Nagel, one of the largest logistics companies in the world. One glance at their career site makes it abundantly clear that the Switzerland based logistics leader is also deeply committed to their workers — and their professional development.

With approximately 78,000 employees across 1,400 locations, 100+ countries, and virtually all key industry sectors, internal job opportunities abound. But not if employees aren’t aware of them.

Kuehne+Nagel was already deeply committed to providing a best-in-class candidate experience for external job seekers. However, they wanted to extend their vision for a superior talent journey to internal candidates, as well. “We have amazing people who work for us, however, we haven’t always been able to tap into it for internal hires,” said Sandra Aasma, Global HR Systems Manager at Kuehne+Nagel. “We want to empower and enable our employees to take charge of their own careers.”

Despite the team’s goal to enhance this critical aspect of the employee experience, making internal career opportunities visible company-wide and across the globe was a challenge. Their self-developed internal job page wasn’t delivering the results they had hoped for, and traffic to the page across the board was lacking. “A new internal career opportunity depended more on networking instead of transparency,” revealed Kuehne+Nagel’s Claudia Harms, Global Talent Acquisition Expert.

Determined and confident they could be more proactive in increasing visibility into career development opportunities for employees, Kuehne+Nagel partnered with Phenom for a scalable, effective solution.

The Solution

Already a customer using Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform, Kuehne+Nagel originally chose the AI talent leader because of its comprehensive approach to pain points throughout the talent journey.

“Phenom focuses on the different stakeholder experience by providing a good-looking front-end for candidates and internal employees — and an intelligent back-end for recruiters,” Aasma shared. “This goes hand-in-hand with our vision to provide the best experience for all candidates,” she continued. “In Phenom, we found our strategic technology partner to realize our vision.”

Leveraging Phenom Employee Experience — which supports internal mobility and a host of additional employee-centric goals — the logistics authority launched their own internal talent marketplace with goals to:

• Increase the number of internal placements

• Boost employee engagement and retention

• Reduce time to fill

The Phenom Talent Marketplace, which they aptly named “Career Explorer”, empowers employees to do just that, without ever leaving the Kuehne+Nagel culture.

After an employee logs in, they are greeted with pre-populated employee profile information from the company’s various HR systems. The employee can then complete their profile, add additional information, and instantaneously view personalized job and learning recommendations based on their preferences. In addition, they can access pertinent content on related job opportunities, development, and more.

At the same time, recruiters can gain valuable insights that enable them to actively approach internal candidates to help their colleagues grow while filling requisitions. These insights have critical potential for leadership as they proactively evaluate talent gaps and strengths for succession and workforce planning.

“With every new tool, success hinges heavily on adoption, adaptation, and communication,” said Harms. Working together with Phenom, Kuehne+Nagel made adjustments along the way and recently relaunched Career Explorer with improved recommendations, enhanced employee profiles, as well as built-in data feeds.

The Results

“Our initiatives, coupled with Phenom’s technology, make internal career opportunities more tangible and transparent. This encourages our employees to make their next career move cross-functionally within Kuehne+Nagel — so we don’t lose them to the external market,” said Aasma.

“With the help of Career Explorer, our own recruiters turn into internal head-hunters and proactively search for, pre-screen, and reach out to employees with job opportunities that could be of interest to them, before searching for external candidates,” added Harms. “Like this, we are able to build a strong talent pipeline, offer hiring managers the best available candidates, reduce time to hire, and create an all-around better — even unique — employee experience.”

How do they know it’s working? The ultimate measure of success and ROI for this initiative is the ratio of internal versus external hires, revealed Aasma. In just 6 months, “Career Explorer is already a very efficient hiring source with an impressive conversion rate between the number of applications received through it and the number of hires made,” she reported.

In fact, data over the course of the last year reveals a 13% conversion rate for Career Explorer-related hires, and a 22% conversion rate for internal candidates overall — almost double the rate seen prior to re-launch.

The base for this success is profile completion, Harms pointed out. With a completed profile, employees get more accurate job recommendations, which increases their likelihood of being discovered by recruiters for the right role. Because of its importance to the overall success of the program, profile completion is its own KPI, said Harms.

And although the team is well aware that long-term adoption requires a comprehensive change management protocol they’re prepared to foster, platform conveniences like Phenom Campaigns — that automate messages to employees — are proving instrumental in driving usage.

Together with Phenom, they're achieving:

• 20%

  Decrease in time to fill for internal requisitions

• 2x

  Higher conversion rate for internal candidates overall

• 74%

  Employee satisfaction rate with Career Explorer

The Future

Over the past few years, Kuehne+Nagel’s different initiatives and investment in technology have equipped their team to build what Aasma asserts is their most efficient, sophisticated talent acquisition ecosystem yet.

Through Phenom, they have been able to strengthen their centralized recruitment activities per hemisphere, build an external career site and adapt it to local markets, implement a CRM — and now level up their employee experience.

In addition, she revealed the team has plans to take advantage of more available and still-in-development Phenom products.

Currently, they’re looking into expanding their internal talent marketplace to enable employees to search and f ind relevant colleagues with the skills they need to help complete a particular task. “We see big potential value add in the future for Phenom Gigs,” Harms noted. On a larger scale, they’re exploring Phenom Referrals and an alumni portal, both of which support speed, volume, and quality of hire.

“Having a tangible, transparent way to show employees we want to keep and develop them is a big step ahead for us,” said Harms — “and it’s just the start.”