From white-collar to blue-collar: everyone applies via WhatsApp.

Every year, Zomer van Antwerpen turns the city into one big, buzzing cultural festival. But behind the scenes of these large-scale theatre, music and film productions lies an enormous HR challenge: how do you recruit dozens of temporary and permanent staff in a very short time, ranging from hospitality talent and logistics staff to technicians and executive level? General director Koen Bollen looks back on the transition from administrative chaos to a streamlined process, powered by Marcel, the conversational AI WhatsApp recruiter.

The administrative chaos of the scattered mailbox

“Before Marcel, our recruitment ran the way it does in so many organisations: organically, and therefore painfully fragmented,” Koen Bollen begins candidly. “Vacancies were posted online with an e-mail address at the end of the text. Candidates dutifully sent in their CV and cover letter, and that is where the administrative rollercoaster began. Communication was completely decentralised. The people in charge of production, communication, logistics and hospitality each managed their own inflow and mailboxes. At some point, keeping an overview simply became impossible.”

To bring some structure to it all, the team had no choice but to fall back on manual solutions. Spreadsheets were maintained by hand on a shared drive to compile candidate lists and keep them up to date. “Not only did that cost an immense amount of valuable time, it also meant candidates sometimes had to wait far too long for a decent, structured reply. In a tight labour market, that is fatal. On top of that, storing all those loose CVs in different mailboxes gave us the necessary GDPR headaches. We urgently needed a centralised, low-threshold and watertight system.”

They found that solution at Matcher.jobs. What immediately caught their attention was the innovative WhatsApp functionality of its AI recruiter Marcel. “In our sector we need to be able to move extremely fast with candidates. For almost everyone, WhatsApp is the most natural way to communicate, so that low threshold was a huge asset. But the real game changer was the integration of CFILytics® (Culture Fit Analytics). Traditionally we attract a great many people who would love to work for Zomer van Antwerpen. The passion is there, but in the past not everyone turned out to be the right match for the specific culture and dynamics of our festival. Marcel gave us the scientific tool to screen that match objectively, up front, at the gate.”

From hard-to-fill roles to the highest executive level

Today, Marcel manages some 11 different recruitment flows for the festival, and the results speak for themselves. To date, no fewer than 908 candidates have had a full screening conversation with the WhatsApp recruiter. What particularly surprises Koen Bollen is the enormous boost in spontaneous applications. “A third of our total inflow, exactly 282 candidates, came in through the open application flow that runs continuously in the background. Thanks to Marcel, we have at least doubled the number of open applications compared to the old e-mail method. Let’s be honest: with a static e-mail address on a website, we would simply never have reached these three hundred candidates.”

The massive digital inflow also translated directly into real, successful hires on the work floor. Within the hospitality flow, exactly 15 staff members started successfully, and across the other flows a total of 25 permanent and temporary staff were definitively hired. Even for notoriously hard-to-fill roles, the pool suddenly turned out to be less shallow. “Take the inflow of the specific profiles for ‘stage construction’, a group that is traditionally extremely hard to find and to screen. Marcel delivered a pool of 25 candidates there, 5 of whom proved to be of very high quality after screening. That exceeded all our expectations.”

The absolute showpiece of the project, however, was a recruitment at the other end of the spectrum: the search for Koen’s own successor. The entire selection process for the new general director and general coordinator of Zomer van Antwerpen was run through Marcel. A bold, innovative move at executive level, which drew surprisingly positive feedback from applicants in the senior management and C-level segment.

Science versus accessibility: white-collar versus blue-collar

The large-scale use of Marcel exposed a fascinating psychological difference between the various target groups on the labour market. “If you had asked our team beforehand who would be most enthusiastic about a WhatsApp chatbot, everyone would probably have bet on the operational profiles,” Bollen laughs.

According to Bollen, the two groups found what they were looking for in completely different aspects of the tool, which proves the platform’s versatility. The blue-collar profiles mainly praised the extremely low threshold and the ease of use. For them it was a relief not to have to fill in complicated online forms, create accounts or type formal cover letters. Applying was reduced to chatting on a mobile in a familiar interface, in between their everyday WhatsApp messages.

The white-collar profiles, on the other hand, looked well beyond the convenience of chat; they immediately saw the deeper, professional added value of the CFILytics® assessment. While they found the mobile approach efficient, what really won them over was the scientific grounding of the questions. In their later interviews, top managers said the assessment felt ‘perfectly logical’ and highly professional. “For a new general director, it gives an enormous sense of certainty to know that you match more than 90% with the norms, values and culture of your future organisation,” Bollen explains. “And not based on gut feeling, but guided by a reliable, scientific algorithm. That lifts modern recruitment to a superior level.”

Another major plus turned out to be the automatic filtering. Candidates who gradually realised that the job or the culture was not a fit for them simply did not complete the chatflow. This created a healthy, natural selection at the gate. As a result, the HR team no longer lost valuable time on manual pre-screenings or phone calls with irrelevant candidates.

An absolute no-brainer for the future

When Koen Bollen is asked to sum up his experience with Marcel in one powerful sentence, he does not hesitate for a second: “It is without a doubt the most efficient and accessible way to apply to us. For us, the biggest win lies in centralising the candidate flow and the enormous administrative time savings we achieve.” For organisations, governments or cultural institutions that are still hesitating to take the step today, his advice is crystal clear and resolute: “Just do it. It is an absolute no-brainer.”

Not only the product itself, but also the organisation behind Marcel earns high praise. Bollen looks back with great admiration on the collaboration with the team behind the platform:

Zomer van Antwerpen has no intention whatsoever of scaling back the collaboration — quite the opposite. Now that Marcel has more than proven itself on the website, the organisation wants to deploy the tool even more actively on its social media channels in the future. The idea is to link Marcel directly to videos, ‘stories’ and ‘reels’ on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Candidates can then land straight in an interactive recruitment conversation on WhatsApp with one simple tap from an atmospheric video.

“If Marcel were to disappear tomorrow, as a festival team we would immediately miss the central database, the clear dashboard and the constant inflow of quality candidates,” Bollen concludes. “Marcel has proven that innovation and recruitment go hand in hand, and is definitely here to stay in our HR strategy.”