FAQs

Usually we require good English (and German for our head office in Hannover/Germany), entrepreneurial thinking and customer- and quality-oriented thinking. It is also very important that you are motivated and willing to work hard, are team-spirited and willing to share your knowledge with your colleagues. Furthermore, you should be interested in a long-term working relationship with us.

Yes, professionals with insurance training or sound work experience in insurance have the same chance of starting here as academics do.

The all-important factors for a successful start are your competence and personality. An internship or a temporary job as a working student certainly gives you the chance to get to know our staff and management and to see what working here is like. Our employees also get the chance to get to know you and can put in a good word for you.

Unfortunately, we can’t give everyone the chance to work here while studying, so feel free to apply after finishing your degree, even if you do not know us yet.

It is of course advantageous to know about the world of insurance and it is a requirement for many jobs. However, it is often the case that if your other qualifications and personality speak for you, we can train you in the rest.

We know that reinsurance is a very special line of business. We act on this by offering every new recruit introductory courses which give information about the basics of reinsurance. After a comprehensive induction, the new recruit learns everything else by means on the job und off the job.

You will find all the vacancies at Hannover Re in our job portal. You can set up a job subscription in the job portal to ensure that you are always kept up to date with new job advertisements.

Our international offices may have additional vacancies which are not advertised in our job portal. You can find out about these vacancies by e-mailing the colleagues of the desired location directly. Contact information can be found at career worldwide.

The job portal is updated on a daily basis. The job ads remain online until we have selected a candidate.

If not mentioned otherwise in the job ad, the open position is permanent and full-time.

The open position advertised for is situated in Hannover/Germany - if not mentioned otherwise in the job ad itself.

If you are interested in Dual Study Programm, you must apply by the end of October to start on 1st September of the (following) year. There are no application deadlines for trainee programmes and other positions.

Browse the descriptions of the departments and read the reports from employees about their work. This gives you a good impression of the type of work Hannover Re has to offer.

If you want to apply for a job in Hannover/Germany, please register in our applicants' portal and apply for an open position you have found of interest in our job portal. More information can be found about applying for specific openings in the tips for your application.

The applicants' portal cannot be used for applying for vacancies within one of our international offices. Under the link worldwide application you find details about how to apply for one of our international offices correctly.

Please use only the applicants' portal for your application at our head office in Hannover/Germany. If you send your application via post or e-mail, you are making life unnecessarily difficult – for you and for us. We do, of course, accept your application and create an account for in our applicants' portal. Then, however, we ask you to complete your application in our applicants' portal and give your consent to the storage of your data. If you do not do this, we can unfortunately not consider your application.

The applicants' portal of Hannover Re is primarily for your application. To be able to submit one, you have to register and then start (and save or submit) your first application. By doing so, this application functions as a template which the system uses with your next application to fill in the details, but still offers the possibilities for changes.

The applicants' portal also includes an overview page, where the status of your applications is given, or a category where all the e-mails that you have received from us, are stored.

The job subscription in particular can be useful for you. If you are considering a career within Hannover Re but at the moment we don’t offer a suitable job, you can save your search criteria and will be informed on a regular basis, for example by e-mail, about new open positions that correspond with your settings.

In regular intervals of six months, you will automatically be prompted to the applicants' portal allocated privacy policy and give us your consent to store your personal data. These "personal data" are not only applications, but already log-in information, such as your e-mail.

All data provided to Hannover Re are protected according to German legal data protection regulations. Personal information is treated confidentially and used solely for application purposes. We only use contact details to get in touch with you.

Yes, you can save an application as a draft at any time and leave your applicants' portal. At your next log-in, your application is shown as within the recorded application area in your personal applicants' portal on the application status page. By clicking on the title of the recorded application, you can continue the application process at any time.

The cover letter tells us about your relevant experience, your motivation and professional goals. State what exactly interests you about Hannover Re and what you would like to do here. Also let us know what your earliest starting date is and what your current period of notice is.

To differentiate your language skills, we offer the following scale, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL or CEF):

• Basic user skills describes the use of simple expressions in a personal or well-known context, for example shopping or a description of your surroundings. This relates to the basic user level A1 and A2 of the common reference levels.
• Independent user skills includes understanding the most important information in a private, academic or professional environment, confident use of language in everyday situations, being able to talk about experiences and ambitions and write simple texts about yourself. This relates to the independent user level B1 and B2 common reference levels.
• Proficient user skills means understanding the most important content (both implicit and explicit) of complex texts, being able to conduct specialist discussions, interact spontaneously with native speakers and write complex texts with arguments and action options. This relates to the proficient user level C1 and C2 common reference levels.
• Native speaker skills means being able to interact in the foreign language with the same ability as in your mother tongue and with no foreign accent.

These four levels are used in the drop down menus in the application form.

You should apply to the open positions that catch your interest in our job portal. Use the link to the online application in the first job ad you want to apply for. You are then asked to create a personal account in the applicants' portal before filling in the application form as comprehensively and detailed as possible. When using the link to apply in a second job ad, the system will fill in the details for you by using the last saved or submitted application. You can still edit these details for the new application and upload new attachments.

Please send us copies of all relevant certificates and references, including school-leaving certificates and certificates from trainings/internships and your university degree(s). Relevant means that you do not send us a certificate from a 2-day excel course. If you do not send us all necessary certificates and references, we will get in touch with you.

If your certificates are not in German, please also send us a grading key so that we can evaluate the grades easier. Please do not send notarisations, we will ask for them if necessary.

You can use PDF, DOC/DOCX, RTF, JPG, or GIF format for any attachment.

You are asked to upload three different types of attachments separately: a cover letter, a current CV as well as certificates and references. Please take the maximum of 5 MB per file and 25 MB for all attachments into account.

Please inform our colleagues at the application management if you want to delete one or more applications. Contact details can be found here. Stating the number of the application(s) with your request would be very helpful for us. To delete your entire account, including the applications, go to access data in your personal applicants' portal and select delete account.

Yes, you can. Please note, however, that we cannot further process your application if you delete your access during an application process. Your application is then treated as "withdrawn". If you wish to delete your access, please log-in to your personal applicants’ portal, go to access data in the left menu and use the delete account function.

As soon as you have submitted your application, it will be reviewed and you will receive a confirmation via e-mail. Then the detailed assessment of your application begins. This includes checking that the application is complete and that you are suitable for the chosen position. If the answer to both these questions is yes, we forward your application to the respective department. If there are any documents missing, we will let you know.

We also check if you may be suitable for other positions. Should this be the case, we also forward your application to another department – if you give your consent.

Your application is important to us and we assess it carefully. Depending on how many applications we receive and how busy the involved colleagues are, it can be up to a month before we contact you again. We ask for your understanding. We do all we can to make the process as fast as possible.

We contact you via e-mail – whether it is to invite you to an interview or to let you know that your application was unsuccessful. Check your e-mails regularly. You can also access messages we have send you via your personal applicants' portal under correspondence. You can check the status of your application under application status.

The first interview is usually with someone from the department, generally the future line manager, as well as a colleague from the Human Resources Department. It can take up to two hours. We reimburse any travel costs. The final decision is made after a second interview or an orientation day (or half-day) in the department.

The video interview is an alternative to the job interview on site, which we are increasingly using since the "corona pandemic" started and we, as well as our applicants, see the advantages of it.

We ask you to make sure that your computer or tablet has a camera and that it is activated so that this interview can become a video conference.

A wired connection of your laptop/tablet to the Internet, i.e. no WLAN, can contribute to the stability of the video conference, as large amounts of data are exchanged via the network.

No sound over the microphone or acoustic feedback during the video conference?

If your microphone does not work or there is acoustic feedback during the conversation, please dial into the meeting using the chargeable dial-in number, which can also be found in the invitation link. Since prices of fixed and mobile phone often vary widely, we recommend calling via landline.

If you are asked for a conference ID, this can also be found in the invitation link.

If you were able to convince us of yourself in the interview, we invite you to the second step of our selection process, an orientation day in the department. You see your potential place of work, meet your future colleagues, and can get a taste of the working day in the department. So both sides can verify whether the chemistry is right.

If an application was not successful, we keep the documents for twelve months to be able to contact the applicant at a later date. We keep applicants with the appropriate qualifications and personality in an applicants pool – if consent to this is given by the applicant.

For a good start at Hannover Re, several things come together:

• a starting guide is on hand to help in the early days in the department
• an orientation plan, prepared by the department in the forefront of the first days
• various introductory courses, imparting a great variety of important information about the reinsurance business, the in-house processes and the scope of our services
• colleagues, who will help with the familiarisation with the new job environment, before starting to tackle new tasks together.

Read in more details on how we help our new employees to get a good start at Hannover Re.

No, not usually. You start as soon as possible, or as soon as your current period of notice allows you to. Starting dates are often stated in job ads for apprentices (dual studies students) as well as doctorate students or for temporary staff, as some of these jobs are project-related.

Further education and professional personal development are very important to us. You can attend internal and external courses, covering areas such as languages, IT and branch know-how. Read more about qualifications on the job and off the job.

Your salary depends on your job tasks as well as your qualifications and experiences. The wage agreements for insurance companies form the basis of your wage. Furthermore, we offer our staff a range of voluntary benefits. Read more here.