Client

Providing A Complete Recruitment Solution for Crown Holdings’ New Manufacturing Plant

With all day-one roles fulfilled and over 119 roles hired, discover how Adecco’s tailored recruitment outsourcing offering provided the ideal solution for a high-volume recruitment campaign that included securing hard-to-find specialist engineering talent.

About the client

Crown Holdings, Inc., through its subsidiaries, is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and sale of packaging for consumer and industrial products. Crown have a 133-year history, and currently operate in 195 plants across 39 countries with 25,000 employees globally. They service global markets with products including sustainable beverage cans, food cans, promotional and transit packaging.

The Challenge

Crown first approached Adecco in 2022 to assist with staffing their landmark 625,000-square-foot manufacturing facility under construction in Peterborough.

The plant would become Crown’s largest recyclable beverage can manufacturing facility in Europe, with production set to commence in Q2 2023. But with no employer presence or existing infrastructure in the local area, staffing the facility represented a distinct geographical challenge.

A high volume of diverse roles was required – including engineers, warehouse workers, and managerial staff – with many vacancies requiring hard-to-find engineering expertise. With a pronounced STEM skills gap in the UK market, the client needed a specialist recruitment solution to help fill these niche roles and get the plant ready for production. The project is expected to require roughly 300 jobs in total as the facility continues to scale up.

During a two-day scoping session, we presented a structured plan to increase Crown’s employer presence and attract candidates from the local area and beyond, utilising the latest technology and recruiter expertise.

Having initially planned to manage multiple agencies, the client ultimately decided it would be more efficient to work exclusively with Adecco, employing our full-scale outsourced permanent recruitment solution.

Our Solution

We conducted site visits and meetings with business stakeholders to establish key workstreams and worked in partnership to develop the employee value proposition in line with the culture and values Crown wished to promote.

We then designed a high-volume recruitment campaign to reach and engage the right candidates across multiple phases, developed using our local knowledge of candidate pools, skills, and competitors. Our dedicated Account Director oversaw the campaign, supported by experts in our national delivery centre, the local Adecco Peterborough team, and specialist recruiters across the company.

As most vacancies were niche roles with precise skill requirements, we knew the number of candidates with the exact skillset would be minimal – so the team focused on identifying candidates with transferable skills in similar industries and professions.

As the plant was built from scratch by the client and can-making is such a niche skill set, hiring started a year in advance of site completion. This meant that candidates could be onboarded in stages and were sent to other Crown sites across the world to complete comprehensive training to learn about the sustainable beverage can manufacturing process.

This required a high level of commitment from candidates, with Adecco team members working to promote and sell the opportunity to those who were successful.

Speaking about the strategic partnership, Catherine Peach, Talent Acquisition Manager at Crown Holdings said, “Adecco have collaborated with our teams effectively and seamlessly to promote our employer brand, attract and assess good quality candidates for the volume required, and coordinate the entire selection process. The hard work put in by the teams at Adecco allowed us to hire on time and in full at each stage of the project, and we were thrilled with the results. We would recommend them to any business.”

Overcoming Challenges

Throughout the project, our dynamic team of recruitment experts were able to overcome various challenges. These included:

Switching virtual interviews to on-site interviews where possible – this enhanced engagement and reduced historical no-show rates.
Sourcing higher-calibre candidates by implementing strategic breaks in interview schedules to allow for market replenishment.
Exploring additional sourcing options using our Insights Team following a reduction in Level 3 NVQ-qualified engineers in the local area.

“Our work with Crown Holdings is a testament to the strong relationship we have built,” said Jo Speak, Client Solutions Director at Adecco. “By employing creative solutions, we were able to source quality candidates, overcome resourcing hurdles, and strategically deliver the skills their organisation needed.”

Key Results

Provided candidates for over 119 positions to date via a 90% primary fill.
Achieved 100%-day one fulfilment across all roles.
Successfully achieved a 5:1 application-to-offer ratio thanks to advanced candidate sourcing.
Met all onboarding requirements with a varied selection of entrants with transferable, industry-ready skills.
Continue to generate quality applications to support Delta Park’s scale-up. Roughly 300 roles are expected to be filled for the plant to achieve full operative status.

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