What Sonoco Talent Leader Jon Chin Looks For In Job Candidates

I've been tracking the hiring profiles coming out of major industrial players lately, particularly those focused on advanced materials and packaging solutions. It’s easy to get lost in the buzzwords HR departments churn out, but sometimes you find a genuine signal hidden within the noise. Sonoco, a name that's been around the block a few times in that space, has a Talent Leader, Jon Chin, whose stated preferences offer a surprisingly clear window into what operational excellence actually looks like on paper—and, more importantly, in practice. I wanted to dissect this a bit, moving beyond the standard corporate boilerplate to see what actual competencies are being prioritized in their candidate pools right now.

What strikes me immediately is the emphasis not just on technical knowledge—which is a given in engineering and manufacturing—but on a specific type of applied problem-solving orientation. Chin seems less interested in candidates who have merely *read* about Lean Six Sigma, and more interested in those who have demonstrably wrestled with a real-world constraint and engineered a quantifiable improvement, even if that improvement was initially small scale. We are talking about the ability to trace a process failure back through three or four disconnected systems to find the root cause, rather than just patching the symptom that management immediately flags.

This requires a specific kind of intellectual tenacity, I think. It’s the willingness to sit with ambiguity until the data forces a clear path forward.

I’ve observed that candidates who can articulate a failure—not just a success—with precise data points about what they learned and how they adjusted their approach tend to fare better in these assessments.

They are looking for individuals who view data not as a reporting exercise, but as the primary diagnostic tool for operational health.

It’s about establishing a baseline, rigorously testing variables, and then documenting the deviation from that baseline when a process change is implemented.

This isn't just about process engineering; it spills directly into supply chain thinking, where minor variations in input quality can cascade into major production delays downstream.

The candidate needs to understand the material science well enough to predict when a supplier’s slight deviation from specification will translate into a physical defect on the assembly line weeks later.

This predictive capacity, grounded in empirical observation, appears to be a non-negotiable filter in their evaluation matrix.

Let's pivot for a moment to the organizational fit aspect, which often gets vaguely described as "cultural alignment." In Chin’s articulation, this translates into a very specific form of cross-functional fluency. He isn't looking for generalists who dabble in everything; he seems to be seeking specialists who can effectively communicate their specialized domain knowledge to non-specialists without resorting to jargon that obscures the actual issue.

This means a materials scientist needs to be able to explain the tensile strength concern to a finance analyst in terms that impact the quarterly budget projection, for instance.

It is the active translation of technical findings into business outcomes that seems to hold considerable weight in their assessment process.

Furthermore, there's a noticeable preference for candidates who demonstrate self-directed initiative in bridging these communication gaps proactively, rather than waiting for a formal committee meeting to bring disparate teams together.

They want people who see the friction point between departments as a solvable engineering problem, not just an administrative hurdle.

This suggests a high value placed on organizational agility—the speed at which an individual can navigate and influence organizational structures that were likely designed for stability, not rapid iteration.

The ability to build trust quickly across technical and operational divides, often by demonstrating competence in areas just outside one’s primary job description, seems to be a recurring theme in the desired profile.

It suggests that for roles at Sonoco, particularly those with strategic operational impact, the best candidates are those who operate as connective tissue within the wider organizational structure.

They are looking for doers who can also effectively map out the political and procedural terrain necessary to get complex, multi-departmental projects across the finish line.