How Allianz Drives Employer Brand Change with a New Set of Values

The words ‘Home’ and ‘Dare’ are two fundamental aspects of what makes Allianz an attractive prospective employer. The brand has been around for almost 120 years, they are still striving to improve, innovate and change what the company is all about. This is a challenge any candidate would want to be a part of.

We speak to Angelika Inglsperger, the Group Head of People Attraction and Talent Management at Allianz, responsible for employer branding, recruiting, and talent management for over 140,000 employees in 70 countries worldwide, who in turn deal with more than 80 million customers.

Have a listen to the interview below, keep reading for a summary, and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play or SoundCloud.

Describe the Corporate Culture at Allianz.

• • Right now, we follow a ‘Renewal Agenda’ where we want to stay ahead of the curve at all times. One of the aspects of this agenda is culture, and the new culture we have developed is called ‘Inclusive Meritocracy’. Inclusive stands for diversity, and Meritocracy means both people and performance matter.
  • Because of this culture, we have introduced four core values:
    • Customer and market excellence
    • Collaborative leadership
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Trust
  • These values were launched three years ago and ensure that we stay ahead of the curve.

What are your talent challenges and how does employer branding help?

• Like everyone else, we are interested in digital talent. The issue is that this talent doesn’t have Allianz in mind because of our core business perception and external brand.
• We introduced a new EVP; ‘A home for those who dare.’ Home means we offer a caring environment with trust and expertise. Within this, we are looking for people who are daring and want to make a change for Allianz.

How do you communicate and activate this?

So we started with delivering our EVP internally first. Last year we had a big campaign called ‘People Attribute’ week, where all entities worldwide celebrated our people for a whole week with talks, workshops, games, and more. We wanted our people to live our company values and our EVP.

What employer brand initiatives are you most proud of?

We introduced a business game called ‘The Rise of Drones’; where players could make decisions on how to insure in the drone business, and based on the decisions you make in the game – we could find out what kind of people attributes are linked to you, what are your key preferences and what kind of job at Allianz would be most suited to you. It’s a fun gamification approach and has given us some great results.

Any hard lessons you have learned along the way?

We were the first to go into mobile candidate applications, but we found out that people weren’t even that interested in doing this. So while we were being innovative, it wasn’t actually what our target group wants. So we have learned to take a more careful approach.

Instead, we launched Ellie, a 24-hour and 7-day-a-week chatbot that answers any candidate questions, if none of our experts are available. Our target audience benefits a lot from this, and we have seen much more value in having this available 24 hours a day.

Your number 1 tip for employer brand managers?

If you develop an EVP, yes, look at market research and what the key drivers of employer brand are, but the most critical factor is whether or not the EVP represents your company internally first and whether or not it is an authentic representation of your employees and your brand.

Whats next for Allianz’ employer brand?

• We are very decentralized, so what’s next for us is creating one career channel for the whole Allianz brand.
• For employer branding in general, the challenge for me is getting the awareness of people. On the one hand, it is very easy to give candidates access to your employer brand, but on the other hand, people don’t have time to look into all these different channels. If you look at specific types of candidates, like IT, maybe they are not on Facebook or LinkedIn. You have to delve into more and more online communities to find ideal candidates that would suit your company.

Connect with Angelika on LinkedIn.