Welcome

Hello and Servus,

My name is Joachim Mekiffer. I am an business psychologist specialising in market and advertising psychology, as well as work and organisational psychology.

I have been working in the service sector since 2006, and since 2016, I have been active in the HR field as a recruiter, team leader, and HR officer.

Why am I creating this personal website?
In the course of my professional work in HR, I have been in contact with both applicants and companies for many years. Applicants, in particular, often ask me how they can improve their applications. Here, I would like to share my personal tips with you in a light-hearted way.

Please note: The following information is based solely on my own experience and should not be considered universally applicable.

The company:
We can’t find suitable candidates.

The applicants:
Why can’t I find a job, or why do I keep getting rejections?

I’d like to address these and other topics in the following pages to give you some tips from my personal HR perspective, which could help improve your chances when applying. Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee job offers, but based on my experience, these tips often lead to a higher response rate and can increase your chances of being invited to a phone or video interview. What I’m sharing here isn’t set in stone, but it’s something I encounter frequently in my day-to-day work.

In most cases, the challenges in recruitment or job applications—just like in everyday life—arise from communication issues. In other words, companies and applicants often end up talking past each other.

An example from practice:
An engineer reads a job advertisement in their field and thinks, "That’s obvious, it’s daily business." Since the required tasks and tools are part of their everyday work and communication with colleagues, they don’t include them in their CV. And this is where the mistake lies, because the HR department usually isn’t staffed by engineers but by people with humanities backgrounds. Of course, over the course of their career, a recruiter will gain various insights into different professions and their work, but never as deeply as the specialists being sought. That means you should always assume that your application will first land with someone in HR who doesn’t fully understand your profession. Your job is to convince this person quickly and in simple terms, through your application documents, that you are the right person for the role.

For ease of reading, I’ve used the masculine form here, but this website is intended for all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation, religion, background, etc.