Company: Freudenberg Group
Industry: Diversified Manufacturing (Seals, Filtration, Chemicals, Medical, Consumer Products)
Headquarters: Weinheim, Germany | North American operations across 20+ U.S. sites
Size: 52,000 employees globally | 8,500+ in the U.S. | €11.9B in annual revenue
Contact: Darby Mroz, Talent Acquisition Expert
Key Hiring Needs: Maintenance Technicians, Shipping & Receiving, Machine Operators, Plant Controllers, Quality Directors
Freudenberg Group is a 177-year-old, family-owned manufacturing powerhouse. With nine distinct business groups operating across 60 countries—producing everything from automotive seals and industrial filters to medical devices and household cleaning products—the company’s breadth is extraordinary. But that breadth also creates a unique recruiting challenge.
Darby Mroz joined Freudenberg as a Talent Acquisition Expert in March 2025, responsible for hiring across all nine business groups throughout North America. With nearly six years of recruiting experience, she understood the landscape. But the scale of what Freudenberg needed was different from anything she’d encountered before.
The company was opening new plants and consolidating existing facilities at an accelerating pace. Each transition created a surge of open positions—maintenance technicians, shipping and receiving workers, machine operators—the kinds of skilled blue-collar roles that keep manufacturing floors running. And Freudenberg was struggling to fill them.
The core problem was reach. These candidates simply weren’t where traditional recruiting tools expected them to be. “These people aren’t on LinkedIn,” Darby explains. “I’ve had maintenance techs tell me, ‘I deleted my LinkedIn years ago. Why would I ever need that?’” Indeed delivered inconsistent results. And the company’s career site wasn’t generating enough inbound traffic for roles where the candidates spend their days on a plant floor, not behind a screen.
The hiring gap was serious enough that Freudenberg created an entirely new headcount: a dedicated blue-collar recruiter stationed inside one of their plants, supporting two business groups full-time. Even with that investment, the team needed a better way to find candidates who weren’t actively job searching on conventional platforms.
FactoryFix came to Darby’s attention through word of mouth—an HR colleague at Freudenberg Household Products who was already using the platform mentioned it during one of the company’s quarterly North America hiring calls. At the time, Darby hadn’t heard of FactoryFix, but the recommendation prompted her to do her own research.
“I looked it up and did my own research,” Darby recalls. “I put together a business case for my manager, and he had to approve the budget.” The timing was right—Freudenberg’s innovation-first culture extended to talent acquisition, and the team was actively looking for tools purpose-built for the types of roles they were struggling with most.
Once Darby got into the platform, her expectations were exceeded. “I was super impressed. I’ve used LinkedIn for years and consider it very advanced, but seeing everything FactoryFix had to offer was really impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
For Darby, the most impactful feature has been FactoryFix’s mobile-first, text-based candidate engagement. In manufacturing, the people you need to hire aren’t sitting at a computer during the workday. They’re on the floor, running machines, troubleshooting equipment. Even hiring managers are hard to catch at a desk.
“I can understand that these people aren’t sitting behind a computer like you and I are,” Darby says. “Half the time I have to call the hiring managers on their cell because they’re not in front of their computer. So the fact that candidates can use FactoryFix on their phone—it’s like texting—that’s huge. Everyone always has their phone.”
This simplicity of engagement has made a measurable difference. People who weren’t actively looking for jobs were receiving outreach from Freudenberg’s AI recruiter via text and responding. The barrier to engaging dropped from “log into a laptop after a long shift” to “text back yes.”
Manufacturing doesn’t run on a 9-to-5 schedule, and neither does FactoryFix. The platform’s AI recruiter engages candidates around the clock—reaching second and third shift workers at times a human recruiter simply can’t.
Darby laughs recounting one memorable interaction: “The AI recruiter reached out to someone at midnight. The candidate wrote back, ‘It’s midnight.’ And I’m thinking—well, you’re still responding, right? That’s the whole point. I’m not going to be up messaging someone at 3 a.m. when they get off second shift. The AI can catch them at the right time.”
That always-on capability has surfaced candidates Darby wouldn’t have found otherwise. One candidate, currently in the Army and preparing to relocate to Indianapolis, was reached through passive outreach and expressed interest in a conversation—even though he wasn’t actively job hunting. “People who were not even looking were getting these messages from our AI recruiter and responding,” Darby notes.
Beyond outreach, FactoryFix’s AI provides candidate summaries after its initial engagement—giving Darby a clear picture of each person before she picks up the phone. “It’s so helpful when the AI reaches out and then provides a summary: ‘From our messages, here’s what we’ve gathered about this person.’ That saves me time,” she explains.
For Darby, who supports hiring across nine business groups with notoriously particular hiring managers, having a wider variety of pre-screened candidates to present is critical. “Our hiring managers are picky. They want this specific unicorn person. The fact that the AI opened up a bigger pool of candidates I could send their way—that was really helpful and builds credibility with the hiring manager.”
If one feature stands above the rest for Darby, it’s FactoryFix’s labor market reports. For a recruiter who coordinates across nine different business groups with dozens of hiring managers, having third-party market data to back up compensation recommendations has been invaluable.
“The market analysis reports are amazing,” Darby says. “I used one for a maintenance technician role and they raised the pay. But even when they don’t adjust salary, the data is still a win—because if you’re not going to pay more, then the position requirements need to be tweaked. The data gives me credibility.”
For Darby, the reports aren’t just about securing higher salaries. They’re a tool for having honest, productive conversations with hiring managers—especially those who believe the recruiter isn’t doing enough or that the market should bend to their expectations. “Everyone likes seeing the numbers. Your hiring manager’s manager wants to see the numbers. Having real market data backing up what I’ve been saying is a huge help.”
In just the first two months on the platform, Freudenberg has already seen measurable returns:
1 Hire
For a maintenance technician role that had been sitting open with no viable path to close
5–10 Interviews
Sourced from FactoryFix candidates—a significant number for roles with extremely particular hiring managers
Passive Candidates Engaged
Including a candidate relocating from the Army who wasn’t actively searching
Non-Posted Role Sourcing
Using the platform to identify talent for plant controller and director of quality positions that aren’t even posted
“One hire doesn’t sound like a lot,” Darby acknowledges. “But that’s a huge win because we couldn’t close that position to save my life. And between five and ten interviews from FactoryFix—for roles where hiring managers are this particular—that’s a really good amount of people.”
The platform has also expanded how Freudenberg thinks about sourcing. Beyond filling posted jobs, Darby’s team is now using FactoryFix’s talent pool to proactively search for candidates in senior and specialized roles—positions like plant controller and director of quality that require a different kind of outreach.
Darby’s plans for FactoryFix at Freudenberg are expanding. The company’s newly hired blue-collar recruiter will be a heavy user of the platform. Darby is pursuing a subscription upgrade to maintain access to labor market reports. And she’s eager to explore the customizable AI recruiter capabilities—comparing specialized AI configurations against the general setup to see which delivers stronger results for specific role types.
“I wish I had more time to play in the system because there’s so much to offer,” she says. “I’d love to test the specialized AI recruiter on a certain position versus the general one and compare the results. The system is super clear, super easy to use—I’ve really never seen anything like it.”
Darby also credits the FactoryFix team for making adoption smooth. “Halle was so awesome. She was great at explaining the platform in a way that wasn’t overwhelming. When there’s this much to a tool, sometimes you’re like, ‘How am I supposed to use all this?’ She was so thoughtful about how she walked through everything.”
For a platform she’d never heard of just months ago, FactoryFix has quickly become a tool Darby considers essential to how Freudenberg recruits skilled manufacturing talent across North America.
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