Labor shortages and skills gaps plagued many sectors in the last few years—and the quickly changing manufacturing industry is certainly no exception.
Shifting patterns in talent pipelines, new competition and tech advances have redefined the landscape for hiring in manufacturing, says Jennifer Weber, chief people officer at Archer-Daniels-Midland, a multinational supply chain manager and processor employing 44,000.
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Weber joined the firm in 2020 after a career that included HR leadership roles at organizations like Lowe’s, Scripps Networks and Duke Energy. Now, she’s leading a team that is confronting head-on the modern challenges of hiring in manufacturing with a deep investment in frontline worker experience. Here’s how she says the company is doing it:
Weber: One of our biggest challenges is the real evolution in U.S. manufacturing over the years. At one time—a long, long time ago—you had people in high school going to shop class and learning mechanics or working in a garage with their parents. That’s not the kind of workforce we’re producing in the U.S. anymore. Also, at one time in manufacturing, you competed with other manufacturers for that talent, and this sector was the go-to for earning a healthy hourly wage. As we built out the supply chain infrastructure in this country and opened call centers, we now have non-traditional competitors like Amazon and Walmart.
Access to a ready supply of talent for the manufacturing industry in the U.S. has become a real challenge. Turnover is a challenge. The focus of leaders and of our HR team is to make sure we’re meeting our frontline colleagues where they are, make sure they’re feeling safe, well-trained and proud to work for ADM.
HR Executive: How are you reaching that talent?
Weber: Partly through partnerships within our local communities. We have leaders and colleagues who get into those communities—in the high schools, the community colleges—so that we’re exposing the talent to the opportunities within the manufacturing sector early and often. The other thing is that we pay close attention to where the pools of talent might become available. As companies exit certain markets or have reductions, we make sure we’re partnering with organizations to have access to that talent and help them land in jobs that pay healthy hourly wages.
HR Executive: How are you working to keep turnover down?
Weber: We want to provide a realistic sense of the environment they’re going to walk into when they join ADM. We’ve done a lot with videos educating people on the front end during the recruiting process about what to expect. If someone watches and says, “That’s not what I’m looking for at this point in time,” that helps with turnover. We want them to have a sense of what to expect and then what the opportunities are to increase skills and pay once they join. We’ve done a good job of ramping up on the front end to make sure we’re narrowing the talent pool to those who are truly interested in coming in and building a career with ADM.
HR Executive: Is communication with a frontline workforce an obstacle at ADM?
Weber: We’re making sure that, from a corporate communications standpoint, we’re drawing the connection from the work they do day in and day out to the overall enterprise priorities. We’re focused on helping them understand their most essential goals, and we have a framework in place to make sure frontline leaders have that information. We’re also training them in the skills of leadership, including communication; we rolled out our Leadership Essentials Program, which has a big focus on clear and ongoing communication, setting expectations, managing performance, motivating our colleagues.
We’re also removing the noise that can sometimes enter the plant environment. We have a very complex and diverse manufacturing environment. I led HR at Duke Energy and those were more standardized plants; that’s just not the environment we’re in. As a result, there are a lot of priorities across the organization we can sometimes throw to our plant managers, and we have to make sure our leaders can sort through all of that and focus on effectively and safely running their plant and leading their teams.
We also rolled out a more robust listening strategy globally, which has been essential. Things like predictable scheduling, developing leadership skills—our areas of focus have come directly from the feedback our colleagues have given us. That’s allowing us to chart our course and overall strategy in a way that’s responsive to their needs.
HR Executive: How did you get leadership buy-in for making those shifts?
Weber: Every manager got specific reports from the global colleague engagement survey about the results in their areas. We looked at the results in a global, aggregate sense and then we drilled down plant by plant, business by business, country by country. What are the unique nuances in this facility or this county that I have to be paying attention to? We spent a lot of time talking about these results, dissecting what they meant. And the first stop was for the CEO to go through the results very thoroughly and then expose the senior management team and cascade from there. The data has been able to get refined in insights and observations as a catalyst for buy-in and change.
HR Executive: How are you bridging gaps between leadership and frontline workers?
Weber: We have a safety program where we take the top 20 facilities that have opportunities from a safety standpoint and pair them with an executive council safety champion. Each of us on the executive council takes on a safety site. We travel there, we engage on a monthly basis. We meet them, we support them, we remove barriers and help improve their focus on safety. One of the things that came from one of my site visits were improvements to a piece of equipment; that was essential for improving the safety environment of the plant, and I helped them champion that. Every year, we go through the process to assign a plant to an executive council member so they’re feeling our support.
HR Executive: What are some of your priorities for 2026?
Weber: We’re continuing to make sure we’re making meaningful progress in creating an engaging frontline experience. They represent the heartbeat of the company.
Another area is the general environment of uncertainty we’re operating within. We’re an incredibly global company, with 42,000 colleagues, and we’re all operating in an environment of uncertainty related to the geopolitical environment, the tariff environment, biofuels policy, etc. We have a workforce operating in an uncertain environment, and an environment where business planning is hard until there is more clarity.
What I think about is making sure we’ve got all of our colleagues engaged and focused on what we can control, and making sure we’re communicating with a degree of focus and clarity. There is a lot of noise in the environment but we’re an incredibly essential business with a noble purpose, and we have to make sure everyone is rallying around how they can meaningfully drive impact on what we can control as we get clarity on how things shake out externally. We have to focus on the controllables.
We will continue our journey to enhance our frontline colleague experience through investments in robust technology training and development as well.
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