With more than 36 million monthly users, Kleinanzeigen is Germany's leading second-hand marketplace goods. Since its founding 14 years ago, it’s become a cultural icon and beloved institution in the German market.
Previously part of the eBay brand, in 2021 Kleinanzeigen was acquired by Adevinta, a global classifieds expert with more than 25 digital brands and around 6,000 employees.
EX Lab are employee experience consultants. They specialize in helping companies turn their time-consuming and inconsistent onboarding processes into seamless experiences that foster a sense of belonging.
Since 2019 they’ve helped people leaders improve their employee experiences with strategic advice, design services and trainings, in organizations like the UN World Food Program, the German Red Cross, HeyJobs and CoffeeCircle.
At the same time Kleinanzeigen was finalizing its acquisition by Adevinta, it had ambitious growth plans. From a base of XXX employees, it planned to add another 120 in little over 12 months. To deliver against both of these priorities at the same time, the Kleinanzeigen team would need to find a way to deliver their onboarding with dramatically less manual effort.
A second concern had emerged over the course of the pandemic: the impact of hybrid work on new hire engagement.
Kleinanzeigen was rightly proud of the unique company culture they’d cultivated, and knew that early exposure to that culture during onboarding helped to lock in retention. However, after embracing a hybrid model, the magic of their onboarding waned. It failed to immerse new hires in their culture and growth opportunities; Zoom calls felt less engaging; and recognizing new hire’s struggles became tricky.
Kleinanzeigen might not have had a retention problem yet, but they knew that they needed to act now to prevent one from developing.
Kleinanzeigen partnered with Employee Experience consultants EX Lab to transform their onboarding, with a goal of reducing manual effort, while increasing consistency and fostering a sense of belonging. EX Labs quickly realized that HR automation was an essential part of the solution, and working with the Kleinanzeigen team, selected Dado as their onboarding automation platform.
"A quote from Madlen about why EX Lab chose Dado."
EX Lab started by streamlining the existing process, identifying where tasks could be removed, or automated to lighten the load on managers and support teams.
They then introduced the Dado platform to manage this lighter-weight, more automated process.
Rather than spending weeks or months building an ideal onboarding, EX Lab focused on achieving results quickly. Dado enabled them to get started with a simple “Minimum Viable Experience” and then iterate to expand and improve.
Every month, EX Lab analyzed the feedback and made adjustments to the Dado Experience. They rolled out new parts of the onboarding gradually, to avoid disrupting the experience of previous cohorts, and enable them to measure the impact of these changes.
Since the program was fully rolled out, 95% of new hires rate it 4 or 5.
This translates to saving 2 months of a manager's salary per year. Managers report using this time for coaching and training the new hire into their role.
Dado gives your employees the consumer-grade experience they expect, so they complete their to-dos on time.
“Meeting other new joiners” is rated the 2nd most enjoyed feature of the onboarding experience and new joiners have reported to “feel part of the Kleinanzeigen community from day 1”
Our onboarding process was largely lots of people doing the same things independently. EX Lab and Dado centralized and automated our processes, saving us lots of time in admin work.
Matt Goodwin, Technical Manager
From pre-onboarding to the end of the onboarding journey, the process helped me to identify with my employer in an orchestrated and organised way, to understand the complex structure of our matrix organisation, to get to know central ways of working and ignite a spark of enthusiasm for my job.
Ansis Schön, New Hire
With the help of a tool that sends out notifications, guidelines and best practices for the manager and the new hire, it is effortless to do all necessary steps for the onboarding and to give the new hire a good feeling of taking care.
Petra Lenz, People Manager
