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Case Study

PACCOR Builds Mature Recruiting Ecosystem in Less Than One Year

Summary

Challenge

  • No existing recruiting infrastructure (no ATS, no careers page, no hiring guidelines).
  • Need for a multilingual, easy-to-use system across 17 countries and 24 locations.
  • Lack of transparency and consistency in hiring processes across regions.
  • No baseline metrics to measure recruiting performance or effectiveness.

Solution

  • Implemented SmartRecruiters ATS as a standalone, multilingual, quick-to-deploy solution.
  • Created a careers page to centralize job postings and candidate access.
  • Introduced company-wide recruiting guidelines and conducted training workshops in each country.
  • Built a talent acquisition heat map to track candidate journeys and improve transparency.

Results

Positions filled on time in the first year

67%

Applicants managed annually through the system

12,000

Hiring managers and recruiters trained across 24 locations before launch

140

About PACCOR

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.

EMEA

Region

4,000

Employees

Industry

Manufacturing

Hiring Model

Centralized

Headquarters

Düsseldorf, Germany

Locations

24

The Challenge

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.

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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.

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.”

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 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.”