XING Expert in Germany

• Active sourcing and recruiting for individual assignments (Finance, IT, Procurement)
• Training of recruiting departments
• Training of specialists and managers for job application situations and interview techniques
• Application coaching and CV consulting

Goal: Future readiness and succession readiness

• Business model assessment: Conducting Business Model Canva workshops to assess the current business model and understand collaboration (3 areas)
• Systemic structural and cultural pattern analysis & role clarification: Conducting employee interviews to clarify responsibilities, interfaces, and decision-making logic in depth.
• Strategy operationalization: Breaking down the company's strategy, mission, and vision into concrete principles and operational goals that can be lived in everyday work.
• Establishment of a feedback system

• Served as point of contact for Disney Studios GSA
• Identified growth hacks to increase cinema ticket bookings, maximize reach, optimize frequency, and achieve 100% VTR
• Managed stakeholder relationships and collaborated with an interdisciplinary team
• Performed hands-on optimizations based on operational implementations on Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Snapchat

• External support with filling positions in procurement (approx. 32 open positions in strategic and operational procurement)
• Conducting interviews and qualifying candidates
• Advising HR Business Partners and specialist departments on employment law topics
• Preparing works council consultations and offers under the IG Metall collective agreement

• Professional and disciplinary leadership, coaching and performance tracking of the Active Sourcing and Recruiting team
• Recruiting and Active Sourcing of specialists and managers in the tech sales sector, from Account Executive to CSO level
• Interim recruiter for various companies
• New customer acquisition by phone, email and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Process optimization through AI
• Optimization of the careers website and job profiles

• Orchestrate cross-functional delivery across organisational units in the Connectivity domain, aligning teams around integrated end-to-end, customer-testable value rather than isolated component delivery.
• Drive a shift from local component optimisation towards shared outcomes and a common delivery goal, increasing focus and enabling significantly faster integrated delivery.
• Coordinate across 15 cross-functional organisations in a highly complex OEM environment; bring Product, Engineering, Programme Management and specialist functions together to resolve dependencies and improve decision-making.
• Coach Product Managers, Product Owners and stakeholders on product responsibility, prioritisation, outcome orientation and aligned backlogs.
• Use Claude through an AWS Bedrock integration to analyse Jira and Confluence content, identify patterns, dependencies and quality gaps, and support structured product and delivery decisions.
• Establish AI-native requirements excellence with LLM-supported quality gates for epics, features, stories, acceptance criteria, roadmaps and task breakdowns; scale adoption through templates and prompt playbooks.

Full overall responsibility: product, technology, compliance and go-to-market

• Delivered an enterprise MVP in 54 days, exceeding scope and schedule.
• Won a 250k € ARR anchor customer and built a sustainable enterprise sales pipeline in the first quarter.
• Paid PoCs with Zalando (35k €) and tesa (26k €), validating product-market fit with Tier-1 enterprise customers.
• Initiated ISO-27001 and TISAX certification processes. Left when the venture entered its next organizational phase.

• Managing the operational back office
• Handling quotations and invoicing
• Supporting preparatory bookkeeping
• Coordinating appointments and operational discussions
• Coordinating between management, clients and external partners
• Organizing administrative day-to-day processes

Taking on operational back-office tasks significantly reduces the workload of executive management. Administrative processes run in a more structured, reliable and efficient way, freeing up more time for clients, projects and business decisions.

• Acting as a professional sparring partner for management and leaders on HR topics
• Advising employees on HR matters
• Maintaining department capability during transition
• Analyzing weaknesses in the performance appraisal process
• Integrating the SAP appraisal tool
• Negotiating and organizing short-time work
• Analyzing and consolidating employment contracts
• Preparing references and recruiting
• Advising on organizational development

Co-founded a software agency building custom web and cross-platform products. I owned the technical decisions across the whole portfolio and led 12 people, while carrying delivery planning, process and client relationships for 11 clients across 3 industries.

• Technical leadership: owned the technical decisions for the codebase across every project — stack, architecture, code conventions and the tooling the team worked with — and led the developers on how work got built through code reviews, pair programming and mentoring across a team ranging from junior to senior, keeping the codebase coherent as the portfolio and the team grew

• Delivery planning against the financial plan: built the company's financial plan and derived from it the billable hours each developer had to reach per month and the hours each project could absorb to stay within budget; planned capacity and scope against those figures and negotiated budgets and delivery dates directly with clients

• Client ownership: technical contact across the portfolio — requirements gathering and prioritisation, scoping and estimates, timeline communication, budget negotiation, and consistent transparency throughout delivery

• Team and people: owned the hiring and interview process end to end and took responsibility for offboarding where it was needed; designed an onboarding that got new developers productive within 1–2 days; cleared blockers daily and kept a close eye on where effort was creating value and where it was not

• Process ownership: consolidated a micro-service landscape spread over 15+ repositories into a single monorepo, cutting backend development time by ~40% and simplifying releases for 6 engineers; set up deployment pipelines with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI; ran retrospectives and turned the feedback into concrete changes; introduced AI agents into day-to-day development

• Delivered short-staffed: when the team shrank from 8 developers to 2, restructured scope, introduced AI-assisted development to hold the schedule and took on Go backend work alongside my own frontend scope

• Architecture and code: defined the architecture for every project in the portfolio — the structure the rest of the team built within — and wrote roughly 90% of the frontend code myself, from SSR applications with Next.js and Remix to cross-platform apps with Capacitor

• From zero to production: took a practice management platform — administration, inventory, integrated online shop, chat messenger — from an empty repository to production. Live in 7 markets with at least 7 more coming up, serving tens of thousands of users

• Delivery under pressure: built and shipped a replacement online shop for a Fortune 250 client in 4 days, restoring order intake while their global shops had been offline for several weeks

• Design system: built a cross-project design system used across 7 products, so new projects and features started from a shared, consistent base

• Cross-platform and real-time: built iOS and Android apps with Capacitor for a client live event with 1,000+ participants — web sockets and push notifications for real-time content, Stripe payments supporting PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and cards

Key technologies: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Remix, GraphQL, ConnectRPC, Redux, Zustand, Go, Node.js, Turborepo, Nx, Capacitor, Ionic, WebSockets, Stripe, PostgreSQL, Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Storybook, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot

Specialized headhunting and recruitment consultancy for cyber security in the DACH region.

• End-to-end recruitment of cyber security specialists and executives.
• Precise matchmaking for Security Engineers, CISOs, SOC Analysts & GRC Consultants.
• Direct sourcing via LinkedIn Recruiter, active sourcing & professional networks.
• Consulting on salary structures, talent analytics, and NIS-2 compliance skill sets.

• Scaled the sales organisation by hiring 60+ employees in 6 months across Sales, Account Management, Product Management and Head of Sales, with an average time-to-hire of 27 days
• Partnered with senior leadership to define role requirements and drive end-to-end hiring strategy
• Owned full recruitment lifecycle: sourcing, screening, interviewing, offer management and onboarding
• Built scalable talent pipelines to support rapid organisational growth across multiple functions

• 100% Remote | Germany & Europe
• Freelance and interim support in talent acquisition, recruiting and executive search
• Flexible and short-term support for companies during recruiting peaks, temporary resource shortages and project-based talent acquisition needs
• Fast assumption of operational recruiting responsibility through many years of experience in in-house recruiting, RPO and recruitment consulting
• End-to-end recruiting from requirements analysis through active sourcing, direct search and interviews to selection, offer management and onboarding
• Targeted support for hard-to-fill positions through active sourcing, direct search and executive search
• Advising HR and hiring managers on recruiting, sourcing and hiring strategies
• Support with recruiting process optimization, standardization and further development of existing recruiting processes
• Independent management of parallel vacancies and recruiting projects with a short onboarding period and a high degree of operational independence
• Project-based engagement without long-term headcount expansion – 100% remote and flexible in Germany and Europe

• Communication strategist and consultant with many years of corporate and agency experience.
• Development and implementation of demonstrably successful brand and communication strategies for B2B and B2C brands such as RINGANA, NIVEA, O2 Business, Florena, thyssenKrupp, BENTELER, BMI Group, Lexware, MTM, Simplicity, Haufe and many others, including the creation of brand and design guidelines.
• Development of differentiating brand language concepts and naming strategies for Siemens, NIVEA, Vodafone, Deutsche Glasfaser, RINGANA, BENTELER, BVR, MTM and many others.
• Workshops, market research projects and innovation development.
• 8 successful Effie entries in B2B (2 Gold Effies and 6 Bronze Effies) as well as various other awards.
• Talent acquisition through active sourcing, brand and communication consulting, employer branding, project management, recruiting and other services for @Carola Wendt Personalberatung and FA Business Solutions (Fabs)