To get the right impression of the relaxed atmosphere in the company, Georg Pepping sometimes posts a photo of him sitting in sweatpants at home in front of his laptop.

As HR director at T-Systems, Pepping is convinced that the urgently needed specialists can no longer be lured in if they are paid well; everything else around them has to be right too.

"We're back on course for growth, and that also means increasing the workforce," says Pepping of the FAZ. In Germany alone, the subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom wants to hire around 700 employees this year, primarily cloud architects and cloud consultants, specialists in digital health , cybersecurity professionals and digitization experts for industry and the public sector.

Helmut Buender

Business correspondent in Düsseldorf.

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For T-Systems, this is not a sure-fire success.

The demand is huge everywhere, the market has been largely emptied.

The Bitkom industry association reports that there are almost 100,000 vacancies for IT specialists in Germany.

At T-Systems things had gone in the opposite direction for a few years.

Numerous jobs were cut, and around 3,600 employees were moved from the business customer division to Telekom Germany.

Almost 28,000 people still work for T-Systems around the world, almost 10,000 fewer than at the end of 2018, when the major restructuring began, with which Board member Adel Al-Saleh wants to get the company back on track.

lure 2500 euros

Now things should go up, again with the number of employees.

"The time for shrinking is over," Al-Saleh promised at a digital employee event for the new year.

In Germany, T-Systems had 11,900 employees at the end of last year.

They should now also attract new colleagues themselves.

“Experts Hire Experts” is the name of the program that Pepping uses to motivate employees to look for staff.

For every successful tip, T-Systems will pay a bonus of EUR 2,500 by the end of the year.

In the first week after the start of the program, around a dozen applications came in.

“We have to go to the communities where the experts we need are romping about.

And no one there has better access and can promote us better than our own people, who know the company and the issues from the inside,” says Pepping.

A major advantage of the process is the extraordinarily high hit rate for applications.

“If someone comes to us on the recommendation of a colleague, we and he or she can be pretty sure that it will fit.” T-Systems had good experiences with the first program of this type back in 2018.

Pepping sees a major advantage in the fact that many talented people who are not actively looking for a new job would be reached.

Around the world, the company needs around 3,500 new employees over the course of the year, the majority of them to compensate for the extraordinarily high fluctuation in countries such as India, Hungary and Slovakia and the departure of older employees, explained Pepping.

The bottom line is that the total workforce will grow by around 1,000 employees.

There will also be a slight net increase in Germany, so that the number of employees should level off at around 12,000 employees.

Another question is whether the employees will have a future under the umbrella of the parent company.

Speculations have been circulating for months that Telekom could sell all or part of the company.