Over the last decade, demands on design teams have increased, budgets have shrunk, and the fight for top creative talent has heated up. In this environment, merely filling design vacancies is not enough to rise to the challenges in an ever-changing landscape and stay ahead of the game.
At Konzepthaus, we understood that from the very start. Rather than only solving immediate needs for talent, we’ve shifted to consulting our partners in a holistic manner and building deep, trusted relationships with design teams across the globe that go far beyond a typical “recruitment” process. We strive to understand each company’s vision, studio goals, and long-term direction. That’s how we’re able to help shape sustainable hiring strategies rather than only react to short-term vacancies.
Just as importantly, we’ve come to know the teams themselves, the personalities, dynamics, and cultures that define successful studios. We’ve learned that finding the perfect partners and ensuring stronger, long-term successful teams is not only about the right “hard” skill sets, but about looking beyond the CV.
Today, our role has evolved into that of a strategic partner – into that of the Talent team. Studios involve us in workforce planning, succession strategies, future project forecasting, and decisions around how best to deploy headcount in line with upcoming programmes. For us, Recruiting is no longer about “who’s available,” but about “who’s right” – about evidence-based planning that supports creative excellence and business outcomes.
This past decade, we‘ve reimagined what „Recruiting“ means. And that exact revolution from recruiters to design talent partners is how we believe modern automotive recruiting needs to work moving forward.
The next decade in automotive recruiting will be shaped by speed, digitalisation, and broader thinking around talent.
Vehicle development timelines will continue to shorten, placing greater pressure on studios to access the right skills at the right moment. At the same time, more design work will move into digital-first environments, hyper-realistic visualisation, and real-time collaboration with increasingly advanced virtual tools becoming standard. How AI ultimately fits into this process is still evolving, but it will undoubtedly influence how teams work, iterate, and make decisions.
As university and design school cohorts grow larger, the industry will also need to think more laterally about career pathways. Not every graduate aspiring to be an exterior designer will follow that route. We expect to see designers moving into adjacent fields, from UX/UI and digital experience design to visualisation, mobility concepts, and strategic design roles.
This shift will be reinforced by a continued trend we already see taking form today: automotive studios hiring from outside the industry. Bringing in talent from gaming, consumer tech, product design, and digital industries will continue its path as a powerful way to inject new ideas and challenge established thinking.
Helping studios navigate these changes, anticipating future skill needs, widening the definition of “automotive talent,” and building teams that are both creatively ambitious and adaptable in a rapidly changing landscape is becoming more crucial than ever. And it’s exactly what the next years of our Talent team at Konzepthaus will be all about.
A good fit always starts with a deep understanding of both sides.
This means clarity around the wider business goals, the role design plays within them, and how hiring truly enables the studio to achieve those objectives. Sometimes this leads to uncomfortable but necessary conversations, when a studio’s ambitions don’t fully align with its hiring criteria.
But it also means understanding individuals as not just a CV, and design teams beyond being “just a place to work.” At its core, everything we do as the Talent team is about people. And when you take the time to understand personalities, motivations, dynamics, and cultures, you can bring the right people into the right environments, where both the individual and the studio can thrive.
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