Headhunting In Germany Discussion Some Legal Frontier And Perils

The German labour market has had a shortage of skilled workers in recent years and this has led to a lot of employers to utilize professional  'headhunters' that appoint or recruit future top executives. Let us understand the headhunting of Germany in this article and analyze some legal boundaries and risks for recruiting or headhunting professionals in the German workplace.

German Employment Law Overview

As a general guideline, according to German law, headhunters and in-house recruiters can poach employees. This is considered a very crucial part of free competition. It is generally not accepted for headhunters to make personal visits to the existing employer's business place or premises.

Detailed View Of The Law

With respect to telephone calls at the workplace, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has actually established and also confirmed the below guidelines in the recent few years:

A headhunter or recruiter from any small or big Top Executive Search Agency Germany is allowed under German law to make initial contact through telephone if he or she:

1. Concisely introduces herself or himself at the start of the call

2. Elaborates on the purpose of the call

3. Cross checks with the employee if he or she is in fact interested in the contact

4. If the above needs are fulfilled, the headhunter might continue with the call and also describe the details of the position briefly

5. Any further contact needs to be outside of the workplace

What Is Considered Illegal In Headhunting In Germany?

Any recruitment call which goes beyond the above is illegal per German law. This means it would be illegal to ask about details of the CV during this initial call or other information regarding the candidate’s potential career ambitions. Moreover, it should also be noted that any particular call that is made either to the employee's landline at work or to the employee's mobile phone that exceeds a 'few minutes' will bear evidence that the call is effectively illegal.

Apart from all these elaborate details, calls that are made by the headhunter to the employee's personal mobile phone (even if during working hours) are far less critical because they do not use the facilities that the employer has put in place. On the other hand, the legality of recruiting or headhunting in Germany through business e-mail has not actually been considered by the German courts. Also, legal assumptions or individual perceptions regarding this area are practically non-existent.

Important Points For Headhunters

The headhunter should refrain from sending an email along with a link to the detailed information regarding the relevant position to the business email of a candidate. Though it is a common perception that an email is far less intrusive than a telephone call, it has not been clarified by German courts whether this is acceptable or not. Besides, it is simply not good form to do this since it is unknown to the headhunter in Germany whether the email account of the candidate is perhaps being read by someone else within the organization or not.

Personal Email or messages through social media will not give rise to any legal risks for recruiting or headhunting. This is because it will not have any effect on the employer's IT system. If you are not using a local German headhunter (who is familiar with these rules of course), it is advisable for employers to educate their headhunters and make sure they abide by the law guidelines if they are recruiting in Germany.

Recruitment Trends In Germany

Entering and forging further into foreign markets is surely a step worth considering especially developing and evolving the business. However, there are massive barriers a business has to overcome to happily enter a brand new niche, domain or market. In order to find highly skilled staff which is one of the biggest challenges let's understand the top 5 trends that companies must be aware of regarding recruiting or headhunters Germany.

Recruiting Technologies

It does seem that the trend of digitalisation is unstoppable but there are video-based job interview technologies that are now emerging and becoming far more popular over the past couple of years. Mobile recruitment solutions are also evolving and are very much on the rise since the year 2014.

There are also many Challenges that recruiters face nowadays. Every second recruiter is concerned with finding suitable candidates and placing candidates in a timely manner. About every third recruiter complains about their extreme pressure and workload along with the struggle to find an apt balance between operational recruitment tasks and project management.

 

Active Sourcing & Social Media Recruiting

Post a dip in the year 2015, active sourcing has now turned out to be a commonly utilized recruitment strategy that people use.

When it comes to the digital concept of social media recruitment platforms there are no surprises in the recruitment market trends. Platforms like Instagram, SnapChat, Pinterest and Whatsapp are live in the shadow of the huge players in the market.

 

There are now various channels that communicate about vacancies. The corporate career and job websites have come at the top of these channels and are being used to post communicate vacancies that are followed by social media business platforms. These also include recruitment events like the federal employment agency and various job fairs. On the other hand, print media, HR consultancies and various other external manpower sourcing providers have become important in communicating with clients and posting job vacancies on varied portals

 

Future Investments

In which domains do German recruiters plan to invest more money? Almost every second company is planning to invest further in social media business platforms to attract candidates and hire new employees. The companies also emphasized investment into employee referral programmes, job fairs and social media platforms.

 

Recruiting Tools in Executive Search Germany

Candidates actually consider employee referral programmes as crucial and a very efficient tool in the entire end to end recruitment process. This very much aligns with the new trend of companies who are ardently willing to invest into such innovative new age programmes. Video recruitment tools are found to be the least helpful by many job candidates. This fact is also indicated by various findings from recruitment trend studies in Germany. Lastly, it is crucial to have a culture test right in place because it is the second highest ranking recruiting tool which candidates will find extremely useful.

 

What We Learn

1.  Candidate Experience and Active Sourcing has developed to be a very relevant topic in the entire recruiting business in Germany.

2.  Employer Brand has obtained significance in the most recent years and also imposes tons of challenge or restrictions to the recruiters in Germany as compared to hiring professionally experienced workforces.

3. Social Media Recruiting trend has seen to be dipping low in the year 2015. However, through the entire year of 2017it has regained the traction and strives hard to make a comeback.

4. Since 2013, the existence of applicant management systems is being steadily growing and the employee referral programmes will continue to obtain importance since the year 2014 as well.