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

At a Glance

A family-owned insurance group, hiring centrally for 90+ independent offices since 1898

Founded in 1898 in Lübeck, MARTENS & PRAHL is one of Germany’s five largest insurance broker groups. Voted “Best SME Service Provider” in the insurance broker category by WirtschaftsWoche for eight consecutive years, the group operates as a brand umbrella for more than 90 independent brokers, generating annual turnover of around €100 million while staying true to its roots as a Hanseatic family business.

That structure is what makes hiring genuinely complex. With 1,000+ employees spread across more than 90 partner offices throughout Germany, recruitment is managed centrally from the Lübeck holding company, but every broker retains its own identity, its own hiring managers, and its own hiring needs. Giving each partner company visibility into their own roles, without letting anyone see what they shouldn’t, isn’t just an operational challenge. In an industry built on trust and discretion, it’s a non-negotiable.

Before JOIN, candidate profiles were forwarded by email, job postings went through an external agency (slow and costly), and once a profile left Josephine’s inbox, it disappeared. Today, MARTENS & PRAHL runs all hiring through JOIN across 77 users, 164 jobs created, and nearly 2,000 applications managed.

The Challenge

The hiring tools that were working against them

When Josephine joined MARTENS & PRAHL two years ago, the recruiting team was already functioning as an internal HR business partner: managing every step of the hiring process centrally, while interviews happened in-person at partner companies spread across Germany. With 85 open roles in a single year and hiring managers who ranged from third-generation business leaders to highly specialised subject-matter experts, keeping everyone aligned was genuinely hard work. For a long time, the tools made it harder.

• Email-based candidate sharing made data protection harder to manage
  Every time a candidate applied, their profile was emailed to the relevant hiring manager, which made it difficult to maintain consistent access controls, auditability, and oversight of where personal data ended up, especially with GDPR compliance in mind.

• Relying on 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 something went wrong. A process that should take minutes took the better part of a week, and every day of delay was a day the right candidate might have gone elsewhere.

• Once a profile was forwarded, the central team had no idea what happened next
  After sending a candidate profile to a hiring manager, visibility ended completely. No way to know if it had been read, whether feedback was coming, or how long someone had been left waiting. “We’d sent the email and that was it,” Josephine explains. The process didn’t break down dramatically. It just quietly went dark.

• Without access controls, hiring managers could see candidates from other companies
  With no role-based permissions, a hiring manager in Munich could theoretically see applications meant for a role in Lübeck. For a group of independent businesses sharing one recruiting function, that was a serious 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. They don’t flag when someone 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 the evaluation to her. Josephine created an account, posted a few open jobs, and ran a complete hiring process through it from start to finish. “JOIN is pretty self-explanatory. So I just tried it. And it worked.”

After a year of piloting at the holding level, the rollout was straightforward. A handbook for hiring managers, a group-wide announcement, and a quick sync handled by the marketing team. For anyone who needed more, Josephine offered a screen-share walkthrough.

• Role-based access ensures each company’s candidates stay private and compliant
  With JOIN’s pipeline management in place, every application lands in one centralised view and hiring managers only see the roles that belong to them. Role-based access through JOIN’s hiring teams feature replaced the email chain entirely, eliminating any data exposure and the cross-company privacy risk in one move.

• Self-serve job postings cut publishing time from a week to five minutes
  What once required an external provider now takes about five minutes. Josephine posts a role directly in JOIN, it syncs automatically to company websites, and goes live on connected job boards simultaneously. The first applications now arrive the same day or the next, compared to the week-long lag before.

• Real-time pipeline visibility made a 5-day candidate response SLA enforceable
  Every stakeholder with access to a role can now see which stage each candidate is in, what notes have been added, and whether feedback is overdue. For the first time, Josephine’s 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 from decisions
  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, having a standardised evaluation framework means decisions are based on comparable evidence, not whoever gave the most confident recommendation.

• Screening questions keep high-volume roles manageable before they become overwhelming
  For roles that attract large numbers of applications, screening questions filter candidates before they reach the review stage. When the in-house accounting team needed to hire three accountants urgently, screening questions combined with the visual pipeline kept the process structured throughout. All three roles were filled.

“When our most experienced recruiter, someone who has 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.”

Josephine Stresius

Recruiter at MARTENS & PRAHL Gruppe

The Results

A year later: 25 hires, full compliance, and zero lost candidates

The compliance risk is gone. The external provider is gone. The mystery of what happens to a candidate after they apply is gone. In their place: a single platform, 77 active users, and a team that knows exactly where every hire stands.

1. 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.
   
2. First applications arrive same day or next day: A faster publish time means the hiring cycle starts sooner, and the right candidates apply before they’ve moved on.
   
3. 25 hires completed via JOIN in the first full year: Roughly one in three hires across 85 open roles came through JOIN, in a year when the team was still onboarding partner companies.
   
4. Full GDPR compliance across a 1,000-person group: Role-based access controls replaced email forwarding, resolving the compliance risk that had been quietly building.
   
5. 5-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.”

“If JOIN disappeared tomorrow, we’d have a real problem. Our entire job and application management runs through it. We’d have to start over from scratch.”

Josephine Stresius

Recruiter at MARTENS & PRAHL Gruppe

Beyond the numbers, something quieter has shifted. Hiring managers who initially resisted the change now use JOIN because it saves them time too. “When it genuinely makes their life easier, there’s not much reason not to use it,” Josephine says.

Looking ahead, MARTENS & PRAHL has already expanded their setup with an Outlook calendar connection, giving the team a smoother workflow between scheduling and their existing tools. But the bigger reason they are staying is the relationship with the JOIN team. “The team at JOIN genuinely listens. You can say ‘this feature would be great’ and someone actually works on it. That matters to us.”

“Centralised, user-friendly, clear, and time-saving.”

Josephine Stresius

Recruiter at MARTENS & PRAHL Gruppe

Want to bring the same structure and visibility to your hiring process?