One tool, 85 roles, zero lost candidates: how MARTENS & PRAHL rebuilt hiring with Join

Founded in Lübeck in 1898, MARTENS & PRAHL is one of Germany’s five largest insurance broker groups. It’s been recognised as the “Best SME Service Provider” in the insurance broker category by WirtschaftsWoche for eight consecutive years. The group acts as the brand umbrella for more than 90 independent brokers and turns over around €100 million a year — while retaining the feel of a Hanseatic family business.

That structure makes hiring genuinely complicated. 1,000+ employees across 90+ partner offices throughout Germany, all recruited centrally from the Lübeck holding company. Each broker keeps its own identity, its own hiring managers, and its own roles to fill. Giving each partner company visibility into their roles — without exposing the others — is both an operational and a compliance problem in an industry where trust and discretion are the product.

The Challenge: The hiring tools were working against them

When Josephine Stresius joined MARTENS & PRAHL two years ago, the recruiting function acted as an internal HR business partner — managing every step centrally while interviews happened in person at partner companies across Germany. With 85 open roles annually and hiring managers ranging from third-generation family-business leaders to specialist subject-matter experts, alignment was already difficult. The existing tooling made it worse.

Email-based candidate sharing made data protection harder. Every applicant landed in an inbox and was forwarded to the relevant hiring manager. Maintaining consistent access controls, auditability and oversight over personal data became extremely difficult, especially under GDPR.

An external provider meant every job took a week to go live. Publishing a role required briefing an external service provider, waiting for confirmation, and following up if anything stalled. A process that should take minutes was taking the better part of a week. Every day of delay meant another potential candidate moving on.

Once a profile was forwarded, the central team had no idea what happened next. After sending candidate profiles to hiring managers, visibility ended. There was no way to know if profiles had been reviewed, whether feedback was coming, or how long candidates had been waiting.

“We’d sent the email and that was it.”

Without access controls, hiring managers could see candidates from other companies. Without role-based permissions, a hiring manager in Munich could theoretically access applications meant for a Lübeck role. For a group of independent businesses sharing one recruiting function, that was a real trust issue and a compliance risk.

Tracking candidates in Excel meant one skipped row could mean one lost hire. Without a proper ATS, candidate management lived in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets don’t send reminders or flag when a candidate has been waiting too long.

“The biggest problem with Excel is the fear of forgetting someone by skipping a row, losing a candidate. That can’t really happen with Join.”

The Solution: One tool, every step of hiring, finally connected

Josephine’s manager discovered Join at a trade fair and handed her the evaluation. She created an account, posted a few open jobs, and ran a complete hiring process end to end.

“Join is pretty self-explanatory. So I just tried it. And it worked.”

After a year-long pilot at the holding level, the rollout was straightforward: a handbook for hiring managers, a group-wide announcement, and a quick sync managed by the marketing team. For anyone who needed more help, Josephine offered screen-share walkthroughs.

Role-based access ensures each company’s candidates stay private and compliant. Every application now lands in one centralised view, and hiring managers see only the roles that belong to them. Role-based access through Join’s hiring-teams feature eliminated the email chain entirely — removing data exposure and cross-company privacy risks at the same time.

Self-serve job postings cut publishing time from a week to five minutes. What previously required an external provider now takes about five minutes. Josephine posts roles directly in Join; the listing auto-syncs to company websites and goes live on connected job boards simultaneously. First applications now arrive the same day or the next — compared to the previous week-long lag.

Real-time pipeline visibility made a five-day candidate response SLA enforceable. Every stakeholder with role access can now see which stage each candidate is in, what notes have been added, and whether feedback is overdue. For the first time, the team could hold hiring managers accountable to a five-working-day response commitment.

“If a hiring manager hasn’t responded, I call them directly. That shortens the whole process enormously — for the candidates too.”

Scorecards give every hiring manager a clear brief and remove guesswork. For Josephine personally, scorecards make the biggest daily difference.

“Scorecards give me structure. I know what information I still need, and I can write it up clearly for the hiring manager. They read it and have everything they need.”

Across a group where interviews happen at partner companies Josephine never visits, standardised evaluation frameworks ensure decisions reflect comparable evidence — not whoever delivered the most confident recommendation in the room.

Screening questions keep high-volume roles manageable. When the in-house accounting team needed to hire three accountants urgently, screening questions combined with visual pipeline management kept the process structured. All three roles filled.

“When our most experienced recruiter — someone who’s done headhunting — saw Join and said ‘Wow, we can do all of this in one tool?’ That’s when I knew we were on the right path.”

The Results: A year later — 25 hires, full compliance, zero lost candidates

The compliance risk is eliminated. The external provider is gone. The mystery around what happens to candidates after application is resolved. In their place: a single platform, 77 active users, and a team that knows exactly where every hire stands.

Job postings go live in minutes, not days. What used to take the better part of a week now takes about five minutes, with automatic sync to company websites and job boards included.

First applications arrive the same day or next. A faster publish time means the hiring cycle starts sooner, and qualified candidates apply before pursuing other opportunities.

25 hires completed via Join in the first full year. Roughly one in three hires across 85 open roles came through Join during a year when the team was still onboarding partner companies.

Full GDPR compliance across a 1,000-person group. Role-based access controls replaced email forwarding, resolving a compliance risk that had been quietly building.

Five-working-day candidate response SLA enforced for the first time.

“Candidates get much more information about where they stand. It doesn’t just disappear into nothing.”

Beyond the quantifiable metrics, something subtler has shifted. Hiring managers who initially resisted the change now use Join because it makes their work easier too.

“When it genuinely makes their life easier, there’s not much reason not to use it.”

And on the partnership:

“The team at Join genuinely listens. You can say ‘this feature would be great’ and someone actually works on it. That matters to us.”

When Josephine summarises what Join is, in four words: centralised, user-friendly, clear, and time-saving.