Customer Stories 
Summary
Planning to welcome nearly 100,000 new employees in the coming years, Deutsche Bahn (DB) needed a solution that could ensure personalized onboarding experiences for managers and new joiners, while accommodating the breadth and diversity of its global organizational structure.
With Avature, DB implemented a dual-portal onboarding solution. The result is a scalable, structured approach that empowers managers, engages employees even before day one and supports the organization’s continued workforce growth.
About Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn is one of the world’s largest mobility and logistics providers, operating in over 130 countries across passenger transport, freight logistics and infrastructure services.
With a workforce of approximately 300,000—around 200,000 of whom are based in Germany—DB is one of the nation’s most prominent and diverse employers. Each year, the company recruits talent across more than 500 roles to advance its mission of connecting people and markets.
The Challenge
With ambitious plans to onboard nearly 100,000 new employees in the coming years to support business growth and replace retiring staff, Deutsche Bahn recognized the need for a more efficient, personalized and scalable approach. Compounding the challenge was the need to do so across multiple regions and businesses, as onboarding practices varied significantly between business areas and even within them.
Until that point, HR provided back-end support, but hiring managers were primarily responsible for coordinating onboarding, often without access to centralized tools. The result was an inconsistent and unstructured process that left managers overwhelmed by the volume of tasks, and new hires navigating their first days at the organization largely on their own.
To address this, DB needed an automated solution that could provide personalized onboarding experiences at scale while standardizing workflows across business areas.
The Solution
Since 2017, the organization has used Avature as a global solution for ATS, CRM and career site management, deploying a centralized recruiting platform that supports 40 countries and more than 25 languages, and enables regional workflows while preserving global consistency.
Building on this foundation, Deutsche Bahn partnered with Avature once again to overhaul its onboarding process and create a fully customized experience featuring two interconnected portals: one for new hires and one for managers.
The new hire portal plays a key role in making the most of the period between offer acceptance and start day. It delivers personalized, business unit-specific content such as contracts, training schedules, benefits information, organizational policies and legal documentation. This centralized hub ensures that new employees arrive feeling more informed, confident and connected to DB’s employer brand.
The second component, the manager portal, was built to support those responsible for onboarding execution. It provides a clear overview of all incoming hires, task lists and job-specific details. Tasks are automatically populated with data from the recruitment process, streamlining steps such as scheduling medical checks, assigning mentors and planning early-stage activities. Managers can also delegate responsibilities and track completion, enhancing efficiency and oversight.
Given the operational scale of an organization like DB, the portal also allows managers overseeing multiple hires for the same position to update information in bulk, eliminating repetitive work and ensuring consistency across high-volume onboarding.
The Results
With Avature, Deutsche Bahn introduced a standardized onboarding framework that adapts seamlessly to local and role-specific needs. The results include:
- Improved experience for new hires: Employees now receive timely, relevant and customized information that eases their transition and fosters early engagement.
- Empowered hiring managers: Managers are equipped with the tools, automation and visibility they need to orchestrate onboarding confidently and efficiently.
- Scalability and structure: The solution allows DB to support the demands of high-volume onboarding without sacrificing consistency or personalization.
From Attraction to Onboarding: Delivering a Consistent Talent Experience
Deutsche Bahn’s onboarding transformation is part of a larger, intentional effort to deliver a cohesive and meaningful experience across the entire talent journey. With thousands of roles to fill and a remarkably diverse candidate pool, DB places a strong emphasis on tailoring its employer brand and value proposition to resonate with different audiences.
Through its dual-portal onboarding solution, DB extends that same level of care and customization into the early employee experience, ensuring that new hires feel informed, supported and connected from day one.
In the words of Kerstin Wagner, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Deutsche Bahn is “not doing technology just for the sake of being awarded in some competition.” Instead, the organization invests in technology that simplifies complexity, empowers its people and makes space for the human connections that matter most.
To hear more about how Deutsche Bahn embraces talent transformation with creativity, flexibility and an innovation-first mindset, tune in to this episode of The Talent Transformation Podcast.
