For Allianz, the world’s largest insurance and asset management group with more than $1 trillion of assets under management, the task of reinventing its talent acquisition revolved around leaning into its historic strengths while embracing new technology and creating a new sense of unity.

Allianz SE’s Global Head of Group Talent Acquisition, Dominik A. Hahn, has been at the forefront of these strategic initiatives, overseeing everything along the candidate journey from employer branding and recruiting to onboarding University relations and scholarships.

But Hahn’s remit with the holding group of Allianz extends beyond talent acquisition strategy into employee engagement and determining tools, KPIs and processes.

Ahead of his session at UNLEASH World 2025 in Paris, Hahn sits down with UNLEASH to discuss how Allianz transformed from a fragmented, conservative insurer into a global employer brand leader using a unifying EVP, responsible AI adoption, and strategic partnerships to attract top talent at scale.

From patchwork to unity: Crafting a global EVP

Allianz can trace its origins back to Berlin and Munich at the end of the 19th Century and has since grown into one of the largest and most recognizable organizations in the financial services sphere.

Hahn explains that Allianz is “from a historical point of view, quite a heterogeneous kind of company”, having grown through various acquisitions and organic strategies.

However, this also created a fragmented organization – despite bearing the Allianz name these businesses had their own EVPs, creating a patchwork of identity that lacked unified coherence.

So, in 2020, the decision was made to build a new EVP, Hahn explains, that went “hand-in-hand with the approach from the global marketing colleagues that harmonized our brand landscape”.

The first step on this journey was a survey across 80,000 of its global employees and around 2,000 external candidates, with a specific focus on digital and technology, which drew more than 20,000 responses.

What we found is that no matter the country, the culture, the seniority or the functional area of expertise, the colleagues all landed on more or less the same kind of baseline of what is Allianz as an employer and what we stand for,” he says.

This, Hahn says, shows that the integration of all the different insurers Allianz has brought in has been successful and that employees regardless of background or geography “already feel kind of Allianz”.

All the insights generated led to the unifying claim of Allianz’s EVP ‘Let’s care for tomorrow’, encapsulating both the insurer’s commitment to care for its people and customers, and its future-facing nature.

But defining the EVP was just the first stage.

“We were quite structured in the sense of rolling it out,” Hahn explains. “Centrally we prepared, and are still maintaining, more than 300 templates for various HR marketing channels, purposes and locations.”

In addition, Allianz has created a repository of images and videos featuring employees around the world, further embedding the EVP across various social, digital, ATS and onboarding touchpoints.

To ensure that the unified messaging and understanding of Allianz’s EVP is sustained, a dedicated training module for people leaders was also introduced, embedded within the overall leadership learning program for around 15,000 people leaders throughout the business.

For Hahn, one of the major successes of the unified EVP was how it resonated with people outside the business.

“The funny thing is, all of those building blocks that ultimately led to that one claim, that was also shared by the external candidates, in the sense they found it relevant but also attractive,” he explains.

“Plus, there’s a third element, which is maybe even the most important thing because they don’t work at Allianz yet. So, they need to believe it. They need to trust that this is right. They all said it seems that Allianz can say that authentically.”

One template, one approach – uniting fragmented careers sites

Dominik A. Hahn, Global Head of Group Talent Acquisition at Allianz SE

While Allianz’s EVP is having an impact among prospective candidates hoping to join the insurer, Hahn acknowledges that the industry can be a hard sell when it comes to attracting new talent.

He says this is a “completely understandable” situation, as Allianz “don’t produce cars or any kind of sexy product – what we basically sell is trust”.

What sets Allianz apart in this regard is its partnership with the Olympics and Paralympics.

Alongside more common programs such as internships, graduate and trainee programs, Allianz can leverage its association with the Olympic and Paralympic games to attract new talent, something that Hahn says has been “a game changer” for the insurer in some regions.

“If you look into data in Germany, this didn’t really affect our brand, because Germans, are not so enthusiastic about the IOC, per se,” he explains.

“Whereas when you look to Australia, they are crazy about it. The attractiveness went up last year in France with Paris 2024 of course. So that is definitely a game changer for us.”

Alongside this, making the process of applying for roles at Allianz was also a focus of fusion, similarly to unifying its EVP.

While Hahn sits above the day-to-day hiring practices, he is very much focused on “what kind of features do we have? What kind of features do we need? What kind of AI direction do we want to go in?”

For us, there is one common vision across every entity, no matter how big it is, what kind of target groups they have or they need to recruit for – everybody is following the one template, one process approach,” he explains.

Based on a core ATS of SAP SuccessFactors, with Phenom AI functionality on top, this single technical template is used across all of Allianz’s recruiting, regardless of country or target group, because as Hahn says “95% of the processes are the same anyway, so the steps are the same.”

Similarly to Allianz’s EVP, bringing conformity to disparate regional or commercial line talent acquisition was a concerted effort, which Hahn calls an “interesting piece” because it “looks very simple but actually, from an operating model behind it, it’s a monster.”

This refers to the three layers of content on the recruitment portal – the organizational top level which speaks to all Allianz across all activities and locales, the dedicated national versions, and finally the ‘operating entity’ layer, a space for each individual business line in Allianz.

The new Allianz careers site is based on Phenom technology with AI functionalities built in, which made it the first global rollout of AI across the business.

More so, Phenom’s AI technology is classed as ‘high risk’ by the European Union AI Act, due to AI-driven assessment activity such as resume screening – a highly complicated prospect for heavily-regulated business like Allianz.

“Even in such a conservative kind of organization like Allianz, let’s face it, we are conservative, our main goal is to reduce risk, not to have risk, right?” Hahn says.

“That’s the best thing that happens to us in such an organization, showing that this is possible. I think that’s quite an achievement.”

Awareness, feedback and review – the basis of responsible AI use

Talent acquisition has been widely transformed through the introduction of AI, but there will always need to be guinea pigs to ensure standards are in place for further implementations.

Hahn describes going live with Phenom as a “global Big Bang” moment for Allianz, requiring significant time with data privacy colleagues, which he says was a difficult process but ultimately necessary.

He notes that responsible AI use was “a big portion of our discussions”, as were the guidelines set up by the data and privacy teams. However, as Hahn points out, these were just guidelines and it was “on us to take that and put it into something tangible and practically executable.”

Allianz’s responsible use of AI guidelines for recruiting is based on three building blocks, he explains, the first of which is awareness.

“That means you do training, not just once but a continuous training roadmap. You have recordings of those trainings available 24/7, with refreshers on specific AI elements on a regular basis,” Hahn details.

The second building block is feedback, using the tools with Phenom to evaluate the proposed actions from the AI and leave qualitative comments which the AI will learn from.

The final block is review, running surveys with recruiters to analyze factors such as the usefulness of the AI tools, whether they are impacting efficiency, and whether the AI tools are trusted.

But reviewing the use of AI internally is only one part of the equation; the other side is making sure candidates are confident and secure in undergoing an AI-enabled recruitment process.

Hahn explains there are two primary aspects to this. One is an upcoming dedicated landing page for Allianz’s careers site, which explains in simple language what AI features are used, how they work and what benefits they offer to candidates.

The other element is giving candidates the option to give consent to each individual AI feature or not, which in turn means that AI features in this process cannot be made mandatory.

“We ensure that your application is getting reviewed even if you opt out from any of those AI elements,” Hahn says.

That is super, super important from a trust building perspective.”

Dominik A. Hahn will be on-stage discussing AI’s role in smarter sourcing, recruiter evolution, and HR collaboration during this year’s UNLEASH World extravaganza in Paris. Make sure you’re part of Europe’s biggest HR conversations – get your pass today!