How people get to work with us (part 3)

Is there such a thing as a normal recruiting process at Edenspiekermann? Yes there is. (Just ask Elf Otterbach.) But mostly it is all kinds of incidental encounters that bring new people to the team.

Louise Fuglsang from Denmark and Katja Grubitzsch from our management team had already been colleagues at another Berlin agency. “In 2010 Edenspiekermann was asked to work on the Bosch Gender Diversity Campaign and needed a concept developer,” Louise tells me. “Katja brought my name up. Our very first meeting – with Oliver Schmidthals and, back then, Account Director Kristin Laufer, ended with a telephone briefing from the client … we pitched … we won … and I was working on the campaign for two years :-)”

Bastian Boss made contact via his professor at the KISD (Köln International School of Design): “I asked Dr. Oliver Baron about interesting agencies in Berlin. He told me about ESPI and that I could learn a lot about design here. I checked it out, applied, and here I am! :)” And you know what? When his ESPI internship ended and Bastian was offered a steady job, he decided to stay – and not go to India to work for the Goethe Institute. Must have something to do with Berlin …

Mike Smart put it smart:
“Hey Sonja,
pretty simple for me.
1. I saw this.
2. I sent an email.
3. We had a Skype call.
4. This happened :)”

Would you like to hear more?

Hans from our Amsterdam office told me about “a recent experience” (as recent as 20 years might feel when working for Edenspiekermann): “I met Arjen, a sleeping contact, at a MarCom seminar. I mentioned we’re working on interesting stuff. Would you like to hear more? Let’s make a date and see if it can help your business further.” Would you like to hear more, see if …? Contact Hans!

Conferences are quite useful actually. Christoph Rauscher went to Berlin’s front-end user group up.front in 2010, where “Sven and Alex were presenting their website redesign, a 2-day-marathon (which seemed like a fun run). I’ve been following the agency’s work since then, and finally joined in in 2013.”

From Amsterdam Esther de Meijere wrote: “Hi Sonja, my friend (a friend of Mirjam Lamark) spotted the vacancy for project manager on Facebook (which Mirjam posted) and told me to apply immediately because she thought the job matched me perfectly. She was right! Good luck! Groetjes, Esther.”

Exactly how I imagined my first job

Max Hoffmann (we have two Maxes here) had watched “some talks of Erik” at conferences, “but never knew that he had an agency.” So what happened? “One day a fellow student sent me a link to Harry’s post about being a web developer at ESPI. Harry described exactly how I imagined my first full-time job. So I applied by building a small website about me using the ESPI colors and Meta Serif. Next day I got a call from Robert Stulle.”

That was the day

Toshiya Izumo sent me his story carefully worded, in haiku-style rhythm. Beautiful. I didn’t have the heart to cut it down – please enjoy:

“That was the day that I was doing my Diplomarbeit __with Erik, he asked me what I will do after diploma. So I said that I will stay in Germany and find a job, without deep thought. Then he said, why not come to ESPI. I thought at that time that he wanted to say such thing just in order to be kind.

And I said ok, let’s see.

When I almost finished my Diplomarbeit he asked me again what I would do after that. And he said to me again, come to ESPI. I thought at that moment that he had already forgotten last time.

And I said again same thing.

When I finished my Diplomarbeit I continued to work on my book ‘Japanese Typography’. That is why I visited Erik sometimes, then he asked me again same thing. Then I finally thought that he was not cheating me :)

I answered him that time, ok ok.

Then what should I do for that? I sent my portfolio to ESPI and I got an interview with Katja and Fabian. Erik came across and he started to speak and he said everything about me and my work. After that I didn’t have anything to say about me. So I had a nice conversation with Katja and Fabian about Japan and my life in Germany, without talking about my work or my skills. This is how my ESPI experience started.”

This is how Toshiya described his story – first.

When I asked everyone at Edenspiekermann for just one or two sentences, Toshiya said sorry and came up with this version:

“Erik asked me what I’ll do after graduate.”

Thank you very much, everyone!

Learn more ways about how to get to work with us in part 1 – being cheeky on Twitter, being found out in the streets, for example – and part 2 of this series: wear Filzlatschen or Hawaiian shirts, or read our blog posts. Which is recommended anyways. There is even one in Japanese.