Introduction
On 14 September 2026, Stepstone celebrated 30 years in Germany with the first Stepstone next, a recruiting-tech event aboard the Oceandiva Nova event ship in Düsseldorf. According to Stepstone, around 400 people from recruiting and HR came on board.
Kini was there too. We connect applicant tracking systems with job boards such as Stepstone, so what talent acquisition leaders say about AI, trust and skills shapes the work we do. Here is what the day covered and what it means for the jobs and applications that move between your ATS and your channels.
TL;DR
- Stepstone next was the first edition of Stepstone's recruiting-tech event, held to mark 30 years of Stepstone in Germany.
- It took place on 14 September 2026 aboard the Oceandiva Nova in Düsseldorf, with around 400 people from recruiting and HR, according to Stepstone's recap.
- Fabian Scheib, Kini's co-founder and CEO, attended with colleagues from the Kini team.
- The programme combined a keynote by Jan Neumann, Stepstone's Managing Director DACH, the first Recruiting Rebels 30u30 award ceremony, and panels and masterclasses on skill-based hiring and AI.
- Stepstone's headline numbers: 40,000 fewer people in employment in Germany in 2026 than the year before, the first such drop in 30 years, and nine in ten recruiters caught deception attempts in the past 12 months.
- The keynote recording is free to watch on Stepstone's website and on YouTube.
What was Stepstone next 2026?
Stepstone next was a one-day event run by The Stepstone Group for HR and recruiting professionals. It marked the 30th anniversary of Stepstone in Germany, and its guiding question was in the name: what comes next for recruiting, now that AI sits on both sides of the application?
Places were limited, and guests had to apply or join a waiting list. The setting was unusual for an HR event: the Oceandiva Nova, a floating event venue on the Rhine in Düsseldorf. Robin Neeb, Stepstone's Director B2B Marketing EMEA, set the tone before the event:
„Nicht noch eine klassische HR-Konferenz. Nicht noch ein Networking-Abend."
Robin Neeb, Director B2B Marketing EMEA at Stepstone, on LinkedIn
In English: "Not another classic HR conference. Not another networking evening." (translated from German)
Fabian Scheib, Kini's co-founder and CEO, attended for Kini together with colleagues from the team.
What was on the programme?
The official agenda split the afternoon between a main stage and masterclass rooms, followed by an evening on the river.
| Time (CET) | Programme |
|---|---|
| 12:00 | Check-in |
| 13:00 | Welcome and Stepstone keynote |
| 14:00 | Recruiting Rebels 30under30 award ceremony |
| 15:00 to 17:15 | Panels, masterclasses and experience area |
| From 17:30 | Networking, dinner, Rhine cruise and after-party |
Speakers on the event page came from employers including AXA, Bayer, Bosch, DHL, Evonik, Fraport, Infineon, Metro, PwC, Uniper and Vodafone. One announced panel asked whether skill-based hiring is becoming the new gold standard, with Nick Fleischer (Infineon), Louisa Bock (Bayer), Moritz von Schaumann Werder (Metro) and Stefanie Wild (Evonik).
The Recruiting Rebels award is a new Stepstone initiative for 30 recruiting talents under 30. The talents worked in teams of three on a recruiting challenge and presented their ideas to a jury at the award show on board.
What did Stepstone's keynote say about the labour market?
Jan Neumann, Managing Director DACH at Stepstone, opened with "State of German Recruiting", a keynote about what remains when everything changes. Stepstone's recap page lists three numbers from the day:
- 40,000 fewer people in employment in Germany in 2026 than the year before, the first drop in 30 years.
- Nine in ten recruiters uncovered attempts at deception in the past 12 months.
- One third of the labour force will leave the labour market by 2040.
Stepstone's reading is that AI is here to stay, but trust is missing on both sides. The event page described the same pressure from the recruiter's side: a flood of applications of seemingly equal quality that is hard to handle by hand. Stepstone calls this the "Filter Economy".
The keynote also covered how AI changes recruiting processes in quality and quantity, and how a job board turns into what Stepstone calls an operating system for the labour market. The recap puts it in one line: the difference between recruiting today and tomorrow comes where clean data, good processes and the right context meet.
Why does this matter for ATS and job-board connectivity?
Clean data between systems is the part we work on every day. When a job leaves your ATS for Stepstone, it has to arrive with the right fields and screening questions. When a candidate applies, the application and the answers have to come back into the right record in the ATS.
That return leg gets harder as volume rises. Stepstone's apply integration supports text, date, numeric, select, multi-select, attachment and branching screening questions. Personio, for example, has no structure to receive a branching path, so the answers arrive flattened, usually into a notes or attachment field. We walk through this in our guide to connecting Personio with StepStone, Indeed, LinkedIn and XING.
Kini is a managed connectivity layer for recruiting. It connects ATS, job boards and recruiting agencies and runs the ATS connections as an ongoing service, with monitoring, retries, recovery and connector maintenance included. Jobs go out of the ATS to the channels, applications come back with a sync status on every record, and the ATS stays the system of record. You can see which systems we connect in our integration library, and why we run integrations instead of handing over an API in Managed Recruiting Connectivity explained.
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Where can you watch the keynote?
Stepstone has published the keynote recording and a short recap:
- State of German Recruiting: keynote recording and recap on stepstone.de, in German
- The same keynote on Stepstone's YouTube channel
- Stepstone next event page with agenda and speakers
- 30u30 Recruiting Rebels, Stepstone's award for recruiting talents under 30
Where can you meet Kini next?
Our next stop is STAFFINGpro Expo 2026 on 21 October at the RheinMain CongressCenter in Wiesbaden, where Kini exhibits at booth C.08-C. The fair is built for staffing agencies, recruitment consultants and contracting specialists. Details are on the STAFFINGpro exhibitor list.
