⚭Recruitment in practice

Through the areas, not through categories:

• Contacts and Companies are the client side — contact persons, decision-makers, purchasing.
• Candidates are the supply side, with their own documents and their own rules.
• Opportunities connect the two: they belong to a client and are what you work on.

Why the separation matters more than it seems: candidate data is employee data. It is subject to stricter rules than business contact details, needs its own deletion periods and must not end up in an advertising campaign.

The most common mistake: creating candidates as normal contacts because it is quicker. Six months later one of them turns up in an acquisition campaign.

It is personal and often particularly sensitive. In concrete terms:

• Purpose limitation. Collected for a specific placement — not for everything else.
• Consent for inclusion in the pool. Anyone applying for a position has not consented to staying in your database permanently.
• Deletion periods. After a procedure has been completed, usually six months (the period under the German General Equal Treatment Act, AGG), unless there is consent to further storage.
• No passing on without consent. Sending a profile to a client requires the person’s agreement — caution is needed even with an anonymised profile if the person remains recognisable.
• Special categories — health, severe disability, ethnic origin — only belong where they are necessary.

What follows in practice: actively obtain consent for the pool and record when it was given.

With consent and in two stages — which is also the better way commercially:

1. Anonymised profile first: experience, industries, availability, day rate — without name, without employer, without features that allow identification.
2. Once the client is interested: check with the candidate, then send the complete profile.

Why stage 1 is not just data protection: it protects your business. A complete profile that goes out without an intermediate step can be used to contact the candidate behind the recruiter’s back.

Bear in mind when anonymising: recognisability arises from combination. “Plant manager at an automotive supplier in Saxony with 400 employees” is not anonymous.

Record the consent — with the date, for which client, for which position.

One position per vacancy, with the details you will search by later:

• Client and contact person — otherwise in four weeks you will no longer know who reported it.
• Location and radius. The most important search criterion of all.
• Categories that match your business — specialism, level, fixed term.
• Status. Open, being filled, closed.

What you can save yourself: typing out the complete job advertisement. The text is useful for reference, but it does not have to be pretty.

Do not delete completed opportunities. They are the basis for seeing next year which client looked for what — and the best reason to get in touch again.

Three things, and all three are preparation, not reaction:

1. A well-kept pool. Anyone who only starts searching when the assignment arrives is too late. The candidates you put forward within two hours have to be there beforehand.
2. Keeping availability up to date. A candidate who has been “available” for eight months usually is not any longer. A short call every few months is the most valuable routine in this business.
3. Prepared building blocks. Anonymised profile, covering letter to the client, query to the candidate — as templates, not written afresh each time.

What actually costs time and can be avoided: gathering documents together, asking about the day rate, waiting for a consent that could have been obtained beforehand.

With a fixed rhythm instead of campaigns:

• Every three to six months, follow up with active candidates. Briefly: are you available, has anything changed?
• After every project ends, a call. That is the moment someone becomes available again, and the best time of all.
• An availability date instead of a tick. “From 1 October” does not age into something false; “available” does.

And the unpleasant side of upkeep: weeding out. Anyone who has been unreachable for two years no longer belongs in the active pool — quite apart from the fact that the deletion periods apply anyway.

A pool of 200 up-to-date candidates is worth more than one of 2,000 whose status is unknown. The second only creates the illusion of reach.

With occasions instead of enquiries. “Do you have anything for us?” is the question nobody likes to read.

What works:

• After a completed placement: a call after three months. How is it going with the candidate? That is quality assurance and acquisition in one.
• At the turn of the year: what is planned for this year? A question decision-makers like to answer.
• When the market changes — new regulations, collective pay agreements, skills shortage topics in the industry.
• When a particularly suitable candidate becomes available: offer them actively, even without an assignment.

The last of these is the most effective in this business, and it requires a well-kept pool and well-kept client profiles.

All of this belongs in follow-ups, not in good intentions.

A fundamental one, and it determines whether a licence is required and who is liable:

• Placement: you bring two parties together; the contract is concluded between client and candidate. You receive a fee.
• Temporary agency work (Arbeitnehmerueberlassung): the candidate is employed by you and works at the client. This requires a licence under the German Temporary Agency Work Act and brings considerable obligations — equal pay, maximum assignment period, documentation.
• Service or work contract: you owe a result, not labour. The distinction is delicate; disguised temporary agency work is subject to fines.

With interim management, the distinction is particularly important: a self-employed interim manager is not a temporary agency worker — but if they are integrated like an employee, this can turn into bogus self-employment.

That is a question for your legal adviser, not for a help centre. But it should be settled before the first assignment.

Four things that shape the process:

• The candidate is self-employed. It is about day rates and project periods, not salaries and notice periods.
• The pace is higher. An interim need often arises from someone dropping out — days count there.
• The profile is the product. A profile that is well tailored to the specific task decides who gets the assignment.
• The relationship recurs. The same manager comes back in a year — and so does the same client.

What follows for upkeep: day rate, availability and travel radius are the three details that must be up to date. Everything else can wait.

And the line between this and bogus self-employment needs checking in every project — it is the risk most likely to threaten this business.

For the question every interim manager and every client asks at some point: what have you actually done for me?

A report answers this with figures instead of assurances: how many contacts, which companies, which responses in the period.

What this changes in day-to-day work:

• The monthly enquiry disappears, because the report arrives by itself.
• The discussion becomes more objective. You can talk about a figure; you cannot talk about an impression.
• It becomes obvious when nothing has happened — to you as well.

What to watch out for: check the sender details before the first sending, keep the period the same (otherwise reports cannot be compared) and look at every report once before it goes out. It carries your name.

With three simple steps:

1. Look at the record before every approach. When was the last contact, and what about?
2. A note for every contact, including unsuccessful ones. A call without a note is invisible to colleagues.
3. Merge duplicates regularly. The same person with two email addresses creates two entries, and then two calls.

And the case that is particularly awkward: the same candidate for the same position from two recruiters. That cannot be avoided entirely, but:

• Ask before putting them forward whether the candidate has already been presented there.
• Record to whom you offered them and when.

This also matters commercially: whoever presented the candidate first usually has the claim to the commission, and you have to be able to prove it.

Useful as pre-sorting, not as a decision — and that is not only a question of quality but of law.

What the match rating does well:

• Picking out from fifty candidates the ten you look at first.
• Giving reasons why they fit — often more useful than the figure.
• Pointing out wording you would have missed.

What it cannot do:

• Judge whether someone fits into the team.
• Put gaps in a CV into context.
• Recognise that a candidate does not want to move right now, even though they fit.

And the legal limit: automatically filtering out applications falls under the high-risk rules of the EU AI Act and is also a risk under the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG). Let the system make suggestions, decide yourself, and do so in a way you can prove.

As a note on the candidate and on the position — with date, recipient and in what form.

Why this is more than tidiness: the claim to commission regularly depends on who presented the candidate first. If a client hires six months later and claims to have found the person themselves, you need proof.

What belongs in the note:

• Date and time.
• To whom — a name, not just the company.
• What — anonymised profile, complete profile, name mentioned in conversation.
• How — the email itself is the best proof if it is assigned in the inbox.

The effort is one minute. What is at stake is a commission.

It depends on the role in which the person is stored with you:

• Rejected application for a specific position: usually six months after completion — the period is based on the time limits for claims under the AGG.
• Inclusion in the pool: only with consent, and then for as long as the consent covers. One to two years with renewed confirmation is customary.
• Ongoing or completed working relationship: as long as the contractual relationship and the retention obligations attached to it last.

What this means in practice: one date a year on which someone goes through the data. Without it, a pool grows that nobody can justify any more.

And: deleting means deleting — the documents too, the notes too, the exports on the drive too.