Episode Details

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 mai