Making of

When I went to film school in the 90s, the job market in the weekend editions of the daily newspapers was as thick as a phone book. The economy was booming and all a company had to do back then was place an advert. The bigger the advert, the better the pay.

Today, the weekend editions have long since shrunk back to normal size because the adverts have migrated to digital job portals such as StepStone or Indeed – but even there their effect has almost completely fizzled out.

This is because the job market has completely turned round. The days when applicants queued up at companies are long gone. Youth Wilken, Head of Recruiting at finanzcheck.de, puts it this way: “We live in an applicant market. It’s not about a candidate applying to us. We apply and to candidates.”

And these candidates are selective and inform themselves intensively about a company before they even apply. Soft factors such as the corporate culture, work-life balance and flexible working hours are increasingly taking centre stage in the decision-making process. Once a candidate has made a decision, the application process must be made as easy as possible. They must feel welcome and well looked after. If you then bother candidates with cumbersome pdf forms or handwritten CVs, you will inevitably lose the battle for the best talent. The basic attitude of recruiters today is “We’re looking for talent. Skills can be learnt.”

The use of professional recruiting software is therefore a must today. Softgarden not only offers an applicant platform, but also a comprehensive software solution that allows recruiters to completely reorganise their processes, network them and adapt them to their own individual needs.

My first contact with softgarden was simply to modernise the somewhat meaningless film on the website. But with every loop we made in the concept, the film became more lively. In the end, we ended up with really great storytelling about the positive “candidate journey” that an applicant experiences with the help of softgarden during their application.

Thanks to the great team around Managing Director Mathias Heese, especially Sandra Müller, Andreas Poell and Saphir Schiwietz, who gave me the opportunity to realise this wonderful project. A special thank you goes to wordsmith and Google Ad professional Aurel Gergey for his great feel for language, his always alert mind and the always open ear – he helped me a lot to polish and develop the script.