Attracting Key Talent Information

adidas continued to face the challenge of competing for highly sought-after talent in a changing business landscape. In 2023, we hired over 9% more employees than in 2022, mainly driven by Retail hires. adidas remains a leading company to work for, with our ‘employer of choice’ status continuing to receive global recognition in 2023, as we topped our category in Forbes’ ‘World’s Best Employers’ list for the third year in succession and placed twelfth overall (2022:16th). We also remained in Universum’s ‘World’s Most Attractive Employers’ rankings in 2023 for business, engineering, and IT students worldwide. In addition, we were ranked fifth in ‘Stern Germany’s Best Employers,’ second in ‘Germany’s Most Popular Fashion Employers’ (‘Beliebteste Modearbeitgeber Deutschlands’) as part of the study ’Working in Fashion’ published by ‘TextilWirtschaft,’ and won the Association for Talent Development’s ‘Excellence in Practice Award’ for leadership development. We also received the ‘Handshake 2023 Early Talent Award’ and the ‘RippleMatch 2023 Campus Forward Award’ as winner in the category ‘Large Early Career Programs.’ 

To support our talent pipeline, we executed several programmatic interventions in 2023:

• ‘Unlimited’ program: Unlimited provides support and opportunities for retail staff who want to pursue a career in our corporate structure. North America continued the program with its sixth recruitment cycle in 2023, while EMEA completed its second cycle with employees who started their new roles in September 2023.
• Undergraduate and MBA internship programs: In 2023, we employed 283 interns globally (2022: 305). Students were provided with a three- to six-month work and developmental opportunity within adidas, accompanied by robust internship program elements that included professional development, mentorship, and networking events. Our goal is to ensure we retain top-performing interns and have them become full-time employees.
• Candidate experience: In 2023, we rolled out a global candidate experience survey for all applicants to our corporate roles (internal and external). This includes the overall candidate experience throughout the full application process, as well as aspects such as speed and inclusiveness. The feedback will help us to create a positive candidate experience. In 2023, we also optimized the end-to-end hiring process in key locations, including decreasing our time to hire through the delivery of ‘Program Diamond.’ As part of this initiative, several manual tasks were automated and the onboarding experience elevated, setting the foundation for a globally standardized hiring framework.