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.
