Build a Talent Acquisition Ecosystem from Scratch
After growing through acquisition and going through changes in ownership, PACCOR sought to build a mature recruiting function. When Marcel Rütten joined as the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding in 2020, PACCOR had no systems in place for hiring. The company lacked an ATS, hiring guidelines, and a careers page.
The absence of existing IT infrastructure led Marcel to decide on the key requirements for a new ATS: it had to be a standalone solution, offer support for all the languages in the 17 countries in which PACCOR operates, and be quick to implement. Additionally, the new system had to be easy to understand for recruiters and hiring managers who had not used a hiring tool before.
About PACCOR
- Industry: Manufacturing
- Region: EMEA
- Employees: 4,000
- Offices: 24
- Headquarters: Düsseldorf, Germany
- Hiring Model: Centralized
PACCOR, now part of the Faerch Group, creates innovative and sustainable packaging solutions for the consumer, food, and food service market. As a global player in the packaging industry, PACCOR contributes to the protection and hygienic safety of valuable products and leads the transition toward a circular economy.
Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding
End-to-End Recruitment Transparency Aligns Teams
After signing the contract with SmartRecruiters, Marcel’s team took the first step of building a careers page so candidates could find open positions at PACCOR. While preparing for the SmartRecruiters implementation, he filled out the SmartRecruiters Hiring Success Business Assessment. The assessment evaluates companies’ TA function end-to-end to help them prioritize improvements and get a benchmark for progress over time.
To ensure a successful rollout of SmartRecruiters across PACCOR’s 24 locations, Marcel set up regular meetings and workshops with each country to understand the nuances in their ways of working and gather input for effective employer branding at the local level.
A talent acquisition heat map that identifies every touchpoint in the candidate journey was used to educate team members and monitor progression after the implementation. His team also implemented company-wide recruiting guidelines that offered do’s and don’ts for hiring teams.
With SmartRecruiters, “we can view the process from the time someone visits a job ad or our career site,” Marcel said. “We know 99% of our source of hire, the performance of every team member, and can see the bottlenecks per job family or location.”
PACCOR also used detailed visibility into the candidate journey with SmartRecruiters to refine its hiring practices in pursuit of making more equitable hires. “The system creates transparency about how we evaluate candidates in a structured way,” Marcel said. “It helps us make fair decisions across international hiring teams because everyone has all the needed information at the same time.”
Key Outcomes
With no baseline metrics to start from, in the first year PACCOR achieved:
- 100 hiring managers and 40 recruiters trained in 24 locations prior to launch
- 67% positions filled on time
- 12,000 applicants managed through the system per year
- Fully modernized recruitment function built from scratch
A Modern Recruitment Process Offers a Great Candidate Experience
Just over a year after the rollout of SmartRecruiters, PACCOR successfully built a modern recruitment process. “We have increased the maturity level within the whole organization so that everyone is capable and can use every available function,” Marcel said. “We have full transparency about our needs. We have a clearer picture of our target groups and what we need to say to them from an employer branding perspective. And we know what we need to budget.”
As with all organizational changes, there is still room to evolve. So far, PACCOR’s data-driven approach has resulted helped the company manage 12,000 applicants per year and fill two-thirds of its positions on time.
“When you have a system that’s data-driven,” Marcel said, “nothing is unclear afterward. It makes the points of collaboration visible and easy to discuss. In the end, the candidate benefits from improved collaboration.”
Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding
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