I applied in April and didn’t have my 1st interview until June. They take ages to even get to the 1st initial stage of interview.
Before the 2nd in-person interview which was in June, I was asked to do a case study which was sent very late and which was just a list of questions without any key KPIs or metrics. It took the team about a week to send just a few questions to me as a candidate and that left barely a day for me as a candidate to complete the case study. To me, it was a reflection of how they work internally where they are often in meetings and struggle to launch campaigns seamlessly as a wider team.
They don’t seem to have a HR department internally, so they use a very expensive recruitment company who are based in London. None of whom speak German & the recruitment agency have a very superficial understanding of the German digital landscape.
A lot of the wider team are legacy employees who have been there 10+ years. Very uninternational team, with a clear preference for native German speakers.
As their portfolio of websites are so discount heavy, they are struggling to scale their marketing due to such thin margins. They talked a lot about CM1 and CM2 margins during the interview process. Their BI team sound overly involved in their performance marketing campaigns, to the extent that the performance marketing team take direction from the BI team on daily bidding strategies.
Their SEO presence is very weak and they haven’t keep abreast of their key competitors who aren’t necessarily excellent at SEO, but they’ve been much more strategic in their content marketing approach. APO are years if not decades behind their SEO competitors.
They are trying to launch into the prescriptions market, which is a big revenue opportunity for them. They are very behind their competitors also in this regard, as a lot of their competitors have already achieved DiGA status.
They ask candidates to have an in-person interview in their head office in Markkleeberg, but don't offer any travel compensation to candidates who don't live locally. As a candidate, this said a lot about the company in terms of how they don't like to put their hands in their pockets.
