Allianz [ETR: ALV]

Oksana Antonova

Antonova’s Professional Journey

I have been fortunate to gain more than 15 years of leadership HR experience, in companies such as P&G, J&J and Allianz, which are all represented in global top employer rankings. Currently, I am the Head of Recruiting, Sourcing and Onboarding at Allianz SE in Munich, Germany, where I ensure that our recruiting and onboarding processes are offering top notch employee experience. I am also involved in a number of other engagement initiatives where I can contribute with my extensive experience in HR.  I am also the leader of the local chapter of Allianz’s Beyond Employee Network – an employee network dedicated to people with disabilities.

The Influence of Positive Consistency

If a superior customer experience is part of the overarching business strategy, processes around employee and candidate experience should be part of a company’s DNA. Candidates often share their experiences about application processes, particularly through sharing their feedback on social media. Even though, as a company we are not able to offer a job to everyone who is applies, we should respect our candidates, the time they spend on their application, and provide prompt response in regards to our decision. Measuring candidate satisfaction and benchmarking it with the best-in-class is also key to understand whether you as an employer are on the right track. To ensure this, my team and I dived deep into a candidate’s experience journey. We mapped out different interactions and milestones that the candidates encounter and defined at which point in time candidates get a friendly response from the company in the reasonable timing. Improvement in this area also requires training for all the parties involved: not only recruiters but also those who interview from the specialist departments and of course the respective hiring managers.

“Understand your company’s business well to be able to design processes and capabilities for recruiting and onboarding to support the business strategy.”

Crucial Elements of a Structured Onboarding Program

After having hopefully executed a smooth hiring process, onboarding is the next step in the employee journey. Having had experience with both remote and face-to--face onboarding programs, I would strongly suggest investing into an onsite experience. Getting to know the new company is something that in my view is best done in person. At Allianz SE, my team and I developed a very comprehensive approach. For instance, we use a pre-onboarding portal, so that curious new joiners have the possibility to learn about the company before joining. On the first day of each month, we invite our new joiners to a  welcome breakfast at the office, during which they learn about the company business and values from existing leaders, have the chance to create new connections with other colleagues and learn about practical onboarding steps and resources available. They also receive their IT setup and go through a Metaverse Virtual Reality experience, where employees are able to explore the world of Allianz, company key achievements and strategies in a fully immersive way, ensuring the best information retention. We keep in touch with the new joiners for few weeks after the welcome breakfast and ensure that they get a so-called new joiner mentor assigned, who is then able to support with deeper insights about the company. Finally, we systemically ask for feedback which helped us evolve the program and reach nearly 100% satisfaction rate over time.

Trust, Engagement and Mutual Support

Caring for people and helping them succeed and develop is an essential part of our culture. I was very positively surprised by the uptake of the new joiner mentoring program once we have launched it – both managers and potential mentors were excited to embark on this journey. The program concept is very simple: the hiring manager connects the new joiner with someone senior either from his team or from within the broader organization. The mentor’s role is to facilitate knowledge transfer, connect the new joiner to his or her network of people inside the company, share some of the unwritten rules, and more. You may argue this is also a role of a good manager, which is still the expectation. However, we found that having this additional support role during the first few months has helped to enhance the onboarding experience, speed up the integration, and contributed to creating special bonds among colleagues. So, I would recommend investing into these kinds of personalized programs.

Role of People Sourcing, Recruiting and Onboarding

I am a big fan of technology, and I believe it can help to simplify so many things in recruiting – if we get the systems right. We are already using several AI tools and automation in recruitment and sourcing processes e.i. Datapeople to improve the inclusive wording of our job posts, different LinkedIn enhancements for active sourcing, etc. However, we can always do more. There are many exciting offers available on the market, when it comes to sourcing talents from different platforms, automated interview scheduling, evaluating CVs, which I personally would love to experiment with. Nonetheless, as we are  part of big, global organization, we are conscious about meeting the needs of all other entities who are using the same systems around the world. Finding a one-size-fits-all-solution is tricky. Also, ensuring that our tools fit all current regulatory requirements brings a whole new dimension into adopting new technology. We are in a constant upskilling mode to understand technology very well and be able to use it responsibly. At the same time,  it is important to have a proper balance between AI and the human touch, especially when it comes to candidate experience.

Keys to Effective HR Leadership

My first and foremost advice is that you need to love what you do and have passion for people. You need to understand your company’s business well to be able to design processes and capabilities for recruiting and onboarding to support the business strategy. Never stop learning, exploring, networking and experimenting with the best practices!