Applicant management for WDR

With over 4,000 employees, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne is ARD’s largest broadcasting organization and the broadcaster with the second largest workforce in Europe after the BBC. Apprenticeships, internships and trainee programs are in particularly high demand, with several thousand applicants vying for around 120 junior positions every year.

At the start of the collaboration in 2012, the main focus was on apprenticeships and the broad range of internships offered by the broadcaster. The administrative workload needed to be reduced in order to achieve faster response times. Interns in particular go through a complicated multi-stage selection process for WDR, involving managers from different departments who view large amounts of data from work samples (images, audio samples, video samples, etc.).
As a public-sector client, WDR also has to make its job ads and online applications accessible.

Following a public tender, the contract for introducing a suitable e-recruiting system was awarded to milch & zucker at the beginning of 2012. The recruiting processes were digitized in beesite Recruiting Edition and many of the manual processes were eliminated. Introducing the online application significantly reduced the administrative workload for applicant management, as all data is now available in a structured format and can be processed directly. Processing status can be checked at any time, and communicating with applicants is straightforward, with emails sent directly from the applicant management system.
The accessibility requirements of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia are fully taken into account.
Since November 2014, beesite Recruiting Edition has also been used to fill externally advertised vacancies for freelancers and specialists. The internal applicant market will be integrated in March 2018. This means that the software is now used for recruiting all applicant target groups and entry levels.