Interview: Kirsten-Julie Boekel

Kirsten-Julie Boekel, head of HR and recruitment at Euro-Rijn Group, together with her colleague, makes sure we find the best new employees for our Euro-Rijn culture.

What does Euro-Rijn offer to create value for our employees?

Kirsten: Our focus is on trust and safety in the workplace, while also developing our staff. We offer opportunities for personal growth by stimulating our employees to keep training and educating themselves. The Euro-Rijn Group is a family business and its unique culture distinguishes it from other logistics competitors. We try to make new employees feel at home and we let people be themselves, while also working together as a team. We frequently organise personnel events for our team, including teambuilding exercises. We also utilise an on-site gym to promote physical and mental health.

How do we ensure we find the right fit for our Euro-Rijn culture and values?

Kirsten: We find most of our new employees by combining online advertising and word of mouth. When interviewing new talent we make sure to clearly communicate the values and culture of Euro-Rijn to be transparent about what working here will entail. We are also not scared to hire talent based on potential instead of experience. We regularly invest in educating and training new employees ourselves. So also without specific degrees or certifications, people can grow and develop at Euro-Rijn.

In what way did the challenges of the pandemic and the job market affect our recruitment strategy?

Kirsten: The pandemic definitely made the recruitment process more difficult. We mainly focused on advertising online through various campaigns and videos. We also expanded our HR and recruitment team. We offer flexibility in the way our employees want to develop themselves at the Euro-Rijn Group. This means that we retain many of our employees, which greatly helped us during this period. And yes, we also did online recruitment sessions, but now that things are back no normal, we prefer the face-to-face interviews much more, Kirsten adds.

What defines our Euro-Rijn culture?

Kirsten: At Euro-Rijn we are ambitious and we work hard, but we do this together as a team and we offer transparency to our employees. As a family company we put great trust in our team and also make sure they can trust colleagues and managers. Luckily, Euro-Rijn Group is a financially stable and constantly growing company, which means that we can keep expanding our business and job opportunities.

At the Euro-Rijn Group we are always looking for new talent at many of our group companies. We invite you to visit our website to find an overview of all our open vacancies: https://www.eurorijngroup.com/nl/vacatures/