Initial situation
Deutsche Telekom had a bloated workforce, including numerous civil servants with special dismissal rights, making it difficult to significantly reduce its size after the company’s privatization. At the same time, the rapid pace of technological and market changes created a demand for new and specialized digital and IT-related skills, particularly those involved in fiber optic deployment and cloud transformation programs.
Task
Deutsche Telekom had to responsibly reduce its overall workforce in traditional areas while simultaneously hiring thousands of new technicians and IT professionals from the job market. The most critical problem was the lack of internal skill alignment with existing business requirements and the inability to see through the global internal talent pool.
Our strategy (action):
We have developed a multi-stage and technology-driven approach to ensure the scalability of recruitment:
Internal measures: Deutsche Telekom implemented socially responsible practices to reduce staff, eg, special retirement plans, partial retirement and severance payments for civil servants and long-term employees.
Recruitment agencies/partnerships: Our recruitment agency has been contracted to provide technology and expertise to find and manage specialized talent.
Resource expansion: We guided the use of partners such as Devshore Partners, who offered highly qualified IT experts to fill urgent project resource gaps when internal teams were busy, thus avoiding project setbacks.
Talent management based on artificial intelligence: With Eightfold AI, we helped Deutsche Telekom implement a competency-based talent intelligence system (the Growth Center) to identify skills gaps and connect the current workforce with internal projects and open positions. This provided insights into the global talent pool and thus eliminated the need to hire externally when the talent was already available internally.
Employer branding : To present ourselves as an attractive digital employer, we conducted special employer campaigns (eg #QuestionTodayCreateTomorrow), focusing on IT jobs and work-life balance.
The result:
Deutsche Telekom has achieved its employee restructuring goals in a socially acceptable means.
The partnerships with resource expansion and AI platforms enabled the company to staff the project faster, distribute resources more effectively across borders, and improve the recruitment process by focusing on skills and internal mobility.
The expansion of Deutsche Telekom’s fiber optic network, in which the company was able to recruit almost 2,000 technicians and experts within a year and was consistently ranked as one of the best employers in Germany, improved the capacity to hire urgently needed skilled workers.
