Vitamin B: Why Who You Know Matters More Than You'd Expect in Germany

What the Data Actually Shows About Vitamin B

Vitamin B is a German colloquialism, the capital B stands for Beziehungen, meaning relationships or connections, and it describes using personal networks to get ahead, most visibly in hiring. It isn’t a euphemism invented by frustrated expats. Researchers studying informal practices worldwide catalog it as Germany’s specific entry in the same family as blat in Russia, guanxi in China, and wasta in the Middle East and North Africa, all describing how trust between people who already know each other routes around formal, open competition. The mechanism is simple: if person A trusts person B, and person B vouches for person C, person A extends some of that trust to C before ever meeting them directly. In hiring, that shortcut regularly beats a stack of anonymous applications.

How big is the effect, really? Germany’s own labor market institute has been measuring this for over a decade, and the real numbers are both smaller and steadier than the figure most newcomers hear first. The Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) runs a quarterly survey of thousands of employers, and its most recent published data (June 2026) shows personal contacts or referrals from existing employees were the single decisive hiring channel in 27% of all 2025 hires, and were used at some stage of the process in 48% of them. That’s down slightly from 2023, when the same survey found personal contacts decisive in 30% of hires and used in 52% of them, and it lines up closely with a much older data point: an IAB-Kurzbericht covering Q4 2015 found personal connections decisive in 29% of new hires. Across a full decade, in other words, this channel has stayed remarkably close to somewhere between a quarter and a third of all hires, even as online recruiting has visibly grown around it (combined online channels, job boards, company websites, and social media, became decisive in 52% of 2025 hires, up from 47% in 2024).

So where does the “40% of jobs, 70% of management roles” figure everyone repeats actually come from? It shows up constantly, The Local cites it directly, and it isn’t fabricated, but it doesn’t trace to one clean, current, methodologically transparent study either. An independent analysis of hidden-job-market claims traced similar 60-85% figures through years of career blogs and coaching sites that cite each other in circular chains rather than primary research, often repackaging estimates that originated in the early 2000s. Treat any round number above roughly 50-55% for a specific role category as a claim worth a skeptical eyebrow unless the source names its actual data and year. The honest summary: connections are a real, substantial, and remarkably stable channel, not a myth, but the specific dramatic percentages that circulate in listicles are softer than they sound.

The Global Informality Project’s research adds one more layer worth knowing: Vitamin B isn’t only a white-collar, executive phenomenon. Its entry on Vitamin B notes that around a third of unskilled or low-qualified workers in Germany got their job through friends or relatives, citing IAB-linked research, and that a majority of Germans surveyed had used informal contacts to land at least one job across their working life. It shows up across the entire qualification spectrum, not just in boardrooms, which matters for a newcomer because it means the network-building described below is worth doing regardless of what kind of role you’re chasing.

What Real People Say

Expat and jobseeker forums tell a more grounded, less dramatic story than either the scary 70% figure or a purely official statistic can. On Expat.com’s Germany forum, a longtime contributor answering a “how do I find a job here” thread described their own search as roughly 50 applications across 5-6 months, and that was while already leaning on an established industry network and LinkedIn contacts, not starting from zero. Their core advice echoed the official data’s shape rather than the inflated version: identify target employers directly through your network, your own research, or job boards, then go to the company’s own website, since unpublished openings sit there that never make it to a portal. The forum’s overall tone toward job hunting in Germany is patient and procedural rather than despairing, repeatedly steering people toward direct outreach and away from treating job-board applications as a full strategy on their own.

The expat career-advice layer, sites written specifically for people relocating to Germany rather than German nationals, converges on a similar practical picture. Expatrio’s guide to networking in Germany estimates referrals run four to ten times more effective than cold applications and flags a genuinely useful, Germany-specific detail many newcomers miss: XING, with roughly 22.5 million DACH-region members, still outperforms LinkedIn’s 28 million for Germany’s small and mid-sized company (Mittelstand) hiring, even though LinkedIn dominates the international-company and startup end of the market. Both the forum accounts and the career-guide advice agree on one more point: the follow-up matters more than the first conversation. Contacting a new connection within 24 to 48 hours, referencing something specific from the actual conversation rather than a generic “great meeting you,” and not asking for a job in that first message, comes up repeatedly as the difference between a real professional relationship and a one-time exchange of business cards.

Step by Step

1. Reset your timeline before you start. Real accounts on expat job forums describe 50+ applications over 5-6 months as normal, even for people already networking well, not a sign of failure. Budget for months, not weeks, especially if you’re starting with zero local contacts.
2. Build a real profile on both LinkedIn and XING, not just one. LinkedIn wins for international firms, tech, and startups; XING still wins for Germany’s Mittelstand-heavy small and mid-sized company market, and skipping it means missing a channel most newcomers never even consider.
3. Pick one recurring, structured venue and actually show up monthly. An IHK (Chamber of Commerce) event, an industry-specific Meetup group, or a professional association meetup builds the kind of repeated, low-pressure contact that turns into a real reference over several months, better than a single big networking event you never repeat.
4. Use Munich’s general expat layer as a warm-up ground before diving into industry-specific rooms. SettledIn’s guides to Munich’s Meetup groups and Facebook and WhatsApp expat networks are lower-stakes than a professional event and a reasonable place to get comfortable making small talk in a new city before you’re doing it in front of people who might hire you.
5. Follow up with any new contact within 24 to 48 hours, and reference something specific. Don’t ask for a job in that message. A specific question or a relevant article tied to what you actually discussed builds the relationship; a generic “nice meeting you” and an immediate ask reads as transactional and rarely leads anywhere.
6. Go to target companies’ own websites, not just job boards. Unpublished openings and roles that never make it to a portal sit there, and applying directly after a warm introduction, even a loose one, outperforms a cold application through a portal by a wide margin according to expat career guides.
7. Stack purposes if your time is limited. A Tandem language exchange or a Volkshochschule course builds German fluency and a room full of people also new to Munich at the same time, useful even when it’s not directly professional.

Compliance Note

This page describes Germany’s connections-based hiring culture (Vitamin B), current labor market survey data, and general newcomer networking strategies as of mid-2026, based on the IAB’s own published quarterly employer survey data, independent analysis of hidden-job-market claims, and genuine expat forum and career-guide sources. Recruitment-channel percentages shift from year to year as the IAB publishes new survey rounds, and the weight of personal connections varies meaningfully by industry, company size, and specific region within Germany. Verify current figures directly against IAB’s own published reports before relying on any specific percentage here, and treat all of this as cultural and strategic context rather than a guarantee of any particular outcome.