Stop Hiring the Wrong People: A Manufacturer's Guide to Getting It Right with Friddy Hoegner

Lisa Ryan welcomes Friddy Hoegner, founder of Scope Recruiting and a former procurement and supply chain leader. Friddy helps manufacturing and supply chain companies build the teams that actually keep operations moving and he does it from a perspective most recruiters simply don't have: he's lived the job himself.

From Global Supply Chain to the Recruiting Desk

Friddy's career began in Germany with ABB in a global rotational supply chain program, where he eventually became a global commodity manager following ABB's acquisition of Thomas & Betts. He later moved into a supply chain manager role with a furniture manufacturer in North Carolina before co-founding Scope Recruiting in 2017 with his wife, who had already identified a critical gap in the market: recruiting firms that specialized in supply chain were staffed almost entirely by people with HR backgrounds, not supply chain experience.

That insight became Scope's founding principle. Rather than teaching supply chain professionals how to recruit, Friddy and his wife hired people with supply chain backgrounds and taught them the recruiting side of the business. The result is a firm that clients and candidates alike describe as refreshingly different, because the recruiters actually understand what the job requires.

The Hiring Mistake That's Killing Retention

Friddy's most consistent finding across years of working with manufacturers is that retention problems almost always start with the hiring process; specifically, with a failure to define who you're actually looking for before you start looking.

The pattern is predictable: a hiring manager submits a generic job description, different stakeholders have entirely different ideas about what the role should accomplish, and the organization moves forward without alignment. The hiring manager wants procurement expertise. The director of operations wants logistics. No one compared notes. The wrong person gets hired. And months later, the company wonders why they have a turnover problem.

Friddy's solution is to work with all stakeholders upfront to build an ideal candidate profile; a detailed picture of the skills, experience, and behaviors the role actually requires, along with a clear definition of what success looks like at 6 months and 12 months. From that profile comes a scorecard, submitted with every candidate, that creates a consistent and less biased basis for evaluation.

Why ChatGPT Can't Save a Bad Interview Process

Candidates today can walk into any interview with a ChatGPT-prepared answer to every standard question. Friddy argues this makes the ideal candidate profile and structured interview process more important than ever, not less. When you know the job deeply, you can ask follow-up questions that no AI can prepare someone for. The first answer is rehearsed. The second and third follow-up questions reveal whether someone actually knows what they're talking about.

This is precisely where Scope's supply chain background pays off. Generic recruiters can be fooled by a polished surface. Recruiters who've done the job can dig into the weeds and expose the gap between what someone says and what they actually know how to do.

Hiring for an AI-Disrupted Future

As automation and AI reshape manufacturing operations, Friddy cautions against hiring for narrow, specific skill sets that may be obsolete in two to three years. The manufacturers best positioned for the future aren't hiring for what they need today; they're hiring for adaptability, mental aptitude, and a demonstrated willingness to embrace change.

Friddy points to a striking example from his time at ABB: a football field-sized factory in Germany producing miniature circuit breakers at the same cost as factories in Indonesia and Argentina, because there were almost no people on the floor. A handful of engineers and maintenance staff. That future, he argues, is closer than most manufacturers realize, which means the people you hire now need to be able to pivot as the environment shifts around them.

Competing for Talent When You Can't Win on Salary

The majority of Scope's clients are mid-market and family-owned manufacturers who will never outspend a Fortune 500 company on compensation or benefits. Friddy's advice: stop trying to compete on salary and start competing on impact.

The candidates most valuable to smaller manufacturers are often the ones who've grown frustrated with corporate bureaucracy: the pace, the layers of approval, the distance from real decision-making. Smaller companies can offer something larger ones genuinely cannot: the ability to talk directly to the owner, change something meaningful in a day, and actually see the results of your work. That's a powerful draw for the right candidates, and it costs nothing to offer.

Why the Best Candidates Aren't on Job Boards

Friddy is direct about the limits of posting and praying. The top 10% of talent in any field are rarely browsing job boards. Many have never applied for a job in their lives; they get recruited from one role to the next. Reaching them requires dedicated outreach to passive candidates: contacting 100, hearing back from 15 to 20, submitting 3 to 4. It's time-intensive, unglamorous work — but it's how you find the people who are genuinely performing in their current roles rather than actively looking to leave.

Red Flags That Signal the Wrong Hire

Two interview warning signs Friddy's team watches for consistently:

• The "my way or the highway" attitude. Candidates who are so confident in how they've done things before that they can't adapt to a new environment. You can hear it in interviews: an overconfidence that signals they'll push their previous playbook regardless of context, without the sensitivity required to build buy-in.
• The inability to get specific. Candidates who speak in broad strokes about what "we" accomplished but struggle to articulate their own role, the steps they took, or the details of how it actually worked. Behavior-based questions that require specifics will surface this every time.

Friddy's Mic-Drop Closing Tip

When you've done the work of defining your ideal candidate profile and you find someone who checks every box, don't hesitate. Don't manufacture reasons to interview three more candidates. The right people are rare, and the hiring process itself can cost you them.

Actionable Takeaways for Listeners

• Align all stakeholders before you write a job description. Disconnected expectations between hiring managers and leadership are one of the most common and costly hiring mistakes in manufacturing.
• Build an ideal candidate profile, not just a job posting. Define what success looks like at 6 and 12 months before you evaluate a single resume.
• Use a scorecard for every candidate. Consistency reduces bias and helps you make better decisions — especially when interviews are spread over days or weeks.
• Ask behavior-based questions and follow up twice. The first answer is rehearsed. The follow-up questions reveal whether the knowledge is real.
• Hire for adaptability, not just current skills. In a rapidly automating environment, the ability to pivot matters more than a narrow set of technical expertise.
• Lead with impact, not salary, when competing against larger companies. Speed of decision-making, access to leadership, and the ability to drive real change are advantages small manufacturers genuinely have.
• When you find the right person — move.

Connect with Friddy Hoegner: scoperecruiting.com: hiring resources, candidate scorecards, and contact info