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With over 100 years as a leading coffee roaster delivering premium blends across America, Farmer Brothers knows great flavor starts with great people. However, locating specialized technicians and operations roles crucial for providing our customers with the right equipment and coffee production running was a steady challenge. We sat down with Marcia Torres, Director of Talent Acquisition at Farmer Brothers and she shared her department’s struggles with recruiting for certain service and manufacturing roles and how FactoryFix has been able to address these struggles.
“We were struggling...in filling a Field Service Technician role in Detroit. Then we had a couple other difficult locations in North Dakota.” Marcia noted. She emphasized how these Field Equipment Service Technicians are particularly critical, as they are relied upon for installation and maintenance of coffee and tea brewing machines - a core service offered by Revive, a division of Farmer Brothers. With these essential operational roles sitting vacant, Farmer Brothers urgently required a talent solution to keep business flowing smoothly.
As Torres explained, “We attempted to search for different platforms that might help solve some of the struggles we were finding in these tougher areas.” After piloting FactoryFix, built specifically for industrial and skilled trades hiring, Farmer Brothers discovered a talent platform that fit exactly what they were looking for.
“FactoryFix in comparison to some of the other tools is a very specific niche that other tools like ZipRecruiter or LinkedIn are not able to offer. None of those have that specific ability to find folks that had more of that technical background. So that's really the area that we've used FactoryFix and found a benefit in adding them to our stack of tools.”
Fresh Pipelines for Hard-to-Fill Roles
For Marcia and Farmer Brothers, the value they’ve seen with FactoryFix has stemmed from their ability to fill those roles they’ve consistently struggled with before. So far, Farmer Brothers has addressed 5 difficult technician vacancies they had been struggling to fill for months. They were having trouble filling these roles not only because of some of the specialized skill sets required, but because of the shortage of talent at these various locations. With access to FactoryFix’s network of over 1.4 million manufacturing professionals, these obstacles were no longer an issue.
“We found great success in hiring warehouse associates in addition to other roles, such as equipment handlers and refurbishment technicians and more of the roles that we were struggling with before. Plus they're qualified as well, which is great!”
The Partnership
She also emphasized the human partnership FactoryFix provided that made implementation smooth and their entire team's success with the platform possible.
As Torres noted, "The best part of FactoryFix has been the partnership with the team. When we were piloting and onboarding, they made it very easy by ensuring we understood how to use the tool through tailored training sessions. Then they actively looked at additional roles we could source for and provided guidance around effectively leveraging their network."
For TA leaders like Torres driving manufacturing hiring velocity at iconic brands like Farmer Brothers, recruitment partners that provide both effective technology and attentive personal enablement are truly differentiating. FactoryFix combines both, helping companies like Farmers Brothers achieve people-powered manufacturing excellence.
Want to supercharge your manufacturing recruiting? Book a demo with an account manager to get started.
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