Inquiring Minds Want to Know: What Do Packaging Manufacturing Recruiters Look For?

The complete package.

We’re definitely using a play on words here, but when it comes to recruiting for executives and leadership positions in the packaging and manufacturing industry that’s exactly what companies want.

The complete package.

But what does that look like in packaging?

Let’s start with what the packaging industry actually is.

Google it and you get a variety of results.

Food packaging. Carton manufacturing. Corrugated industry. Global packaging solutions.

Packaging is all that, and more. Simply put it’s all the stuff that things are stored and shipped in.

It can be plastics, metal, paper and other materials.

What’s exciting about the packaging industry, Wes Ashworth, Vice President of Lee Group Search, will tell you is the innovation that’s built into its very culture.

With some manufacturing industries, the work is a little more linear. You create a thing. You build the thing on an assembly line. You put the completed thing in a box and ship it out.

With the packaging industry, they are constantly looking to innovate.

Take coffee as an example. It used to be that you could just get coffee in a can. Now you can get it in a pouch, a cup, a bag, a box and a can.

That took someone in the packaging industry innovative thought to come up with. It took someone who was cutting edge, who wanted to do things differently, who wanted to find solutions, who wanted to innovate.

When recruiting in that space, Ashworth said, you have to be equally innovative and modern in your tactics.

“You recruit differently for a state-of-the-art packaging plant, one that has the latest in robotics and automation and is pushing sustainability efforts with a focus on new product development because you want to make sure the candidate folds into that cutting edge culture,” Ashworth said.

You look for candidates who are progressive, growth oriented, entrepreneurial even.

“You want to find people who are hungry,” Ashworth said. “That’s part of the magic of working with a recruiter who knows that industry and the right type of person for it.”