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The challenge

Our Partner is a private-label pet food manufacturer based in Germany. It’s one of Europe’s market leaders, but it was experiencing significant staffing challenges and impacts on productivity and operations.

With state-of-the-art logistics and packing facilities across two locations, our Partner required high volumes of temporary operational workers. Attracting and hiring dependable employment seekers, of which there are many readily available around the broader European region, was, however, proving problematic. Language barriers and complex regulation hurdles increased the administrative burden and difficulties in recruiting and filling vacancies, with a fulfilment rate of under 92%.

Furthermore, employee absenteeism and turnover rates were running rampant, particularly at our Partner’s largest facility.

The solution

Beginning in 2024 our Partner chose Gi Group’s Onsite solution so that it could address these issues with recruiting and fulfilment, and rein in disruptive workforce gaps.

Our Onsite team embedded with our Partner from a nearby site serving its two locations, where we tailored our approach to the Partner’s specific situation and challenges. We fully handled sourcing on a zero-marketing budget, using our effective “employees recruit employees” method, as well as reliable contacts that had been cultivated over the years for recruiting foreign employees, our Partner’s primary source of temporary workers.

In order to facilitate the successful integration of these employees, most of whom are new to the realities of living and working in Germany, our multilingual Onsite team—with native speakers in over eight languages—personally escorted all the candidates from their arrival point, provided information, and arranged lodging at the accommodation premises we manage. During onboarding days at our Partner’s two locations, we ran selection interviews and ensured employees could start work the following day.

And, in order to address location-specific staffing problems, we guided our Partner through improvements to internal processes and personnel selection, raising the fulfilment rate from 92% in 2023 to 97% in 2024.

The results

In the first two years of our ongoing Onsite partnership, we achieved significant workforce management improvements for our Partner.

From 2023 to 2024, we enabled our Partner to stabilise employee turnover and improve retention, increasing to nearly 40% the number of temporary employees who stay over six months, at which point the majority are hired by our Partner. In 2024, we onboarded over 1,000 temporary workers, reflecting a 97% fulfilment rate, and actively managed a headcount at year-end of over 800 employees.

By customising our approach to each location’s unique concerns, we sustained positive practices while tackling pain points. For example, in 2023 the smaller location’s sickness rate was under 2.5% and required no action the following year. The other facility, with three times as many workers, faced a huge burden from medical absences. By proactively addressing and tracking campaign responses, we reduced sick hours by roughly 25% in 2024, laying the foundation for sustainable cost avoidance.

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