How to Apply to Archer Daniels Midland

Key Takeaways

ADM's career portal runs on IBM Kenexa BrassRing (sjobs.brassring.com, partnerid=25416, siteid=5998 for the primary external site). Expect a structured application, a resume parser that benefits from clean formatting, and a candidate profile you will reuse.
The company is organized around three segments: Ag Services and Oilseeds, Carbohydrate Solutions, and Nutrition. Tailor your resume and interview narrative to the segment and function, not to ADM generically.
ADM is operating under heightened governance and internal-controls scrutiny after the January 2024 Nutrition segment accounting restatement and related SEC and DOJ investigations, which is a real and acknowledgeable context for candidates, not a reason to avoid applying.
Juan R. Luciano continues as Chair, President, and CEO. Monish Patolawala serves as CFO and is leading the internal-controls remediation. The three-segment strategy and Nutrition growth thesis remain in place.
Headquarters is Chicago (77 West Wacker Drive), but an enormous share of the company's jobs, especially in engineering, operations, and R&D, are based in Decatur, Illinois and in plants across the Midwest and globally. Location flexibility matters.
Interviews are practical and evidence-driven, structured around behavioral competencies and a role-appropriate technical or commercial deep dive. Bring numbers.
Safety, integrity, operational rigor, customer orientation, and continuous improvement are the through-lines in ADM's hiring criteria. Stories that demonstrate these beat adjectives that claim them.
Keep your BrassRing profile updated even between active job searches; ADM recruiters source from the internal BrassRing database for roles that are never posted externally.

About Archer Daniels Midland

Archer Daniels Midland Company, known almost universally as ADM, is one of the oldest and largest agribusinesses in the world. Founded in Minneapolis in 1902 by George A. Archer and John W. Daniels as a linseed crushing operation, the company has grown into a Fortune 100 food processing, commodity trading, and nutrition giant with operations in roughly 200 countries and annual revenue that has hovered around 85 to 90 billion dollars in recent years. ADM moved its corporate headquarters from Decatur, Illinois to 77 West Wacker Drive in Chicago in 2014, though Decatur remains an enormous operational, research, and manufacturing anchor and is still where many of the jobs actually live. The global workforce is roughly 40,000 people spread across grain elevators, oilseed processing plants, ethanol and biofuels facilities, flavor and ingredient R&D centers, animal nutrition blending plants, trading desks, and corporate functions. The business is organized around three reporting segments. Ag Services and Oilseeds is the commodity trading and processing engine, moving soybeans, corn, wheat, and other grains through origination, storage, transportation, and crush operations. Carbohydrate Solutions converts corn and wheat into sweeteners, starches, flour, ethanol, and industrial feedstocks. Nutrition, which ADM has spent the better part of a decade acquiring and building, houses human nutrition (flavors, plant proteins, edible specialty oils, botanicals, probiotics, health and wellness ingredients) and animal nutrition (feed additives, pet food ingredients, aquaculture, premixes). The Nutrition segment is the strategic growth story ADM has been telling investors for years, and it is also the segment at the center of the company's most significant recent governance challenge. In January 2024, ADM disclosed that the SEC was investigating accounting practices in the Nutrition segment, placed then-CFO Vikram Luthar on administrative leave, and delayed the filing of its annual report. Subsequent restatements adjusted how intersegment sales between Ag Services and Oilseeds and Nutrition had been recognized, which had the effect of making Nutrition's standalone margins look healthier than they actually were. Luthar left the company, the Department of Justice opened a parallel probe, the stock dropped sharply on the initial disclosure, and ADM committed publicly to remediating material weaknesses in internal controls. Monish Patolawala, previously CFO at 3M, was appointed Executive Vice President and CFO to lead that remediation work. Juan R. Luciano has continued to serve as Chair, President, and Chief Executive Officer throughout the episode and is still in the role today, and the company has framed the path forward as a refocus on core productivity, cost discipline, and rebuilding trust through the Nutrition segment's unit economics. None of that changes the fact that ADM remains one of the few companies in the world that can move grain from a farm in Iowa to a feedlot in Vietnam, a bakery in Germany, or a protein bar plant in California, and it continues to hire aggressively across trading, engineering, operations, food science, commercial, and corporate functions. If you are considering ADM, you are considering a company with remarkable physical infrastructure and global reach that is simultaneously in a public rebuild mode. Both are true at once, and both matter for how you position yourself as a candidate.

Application Process

1
Start at adm
Start at adm.com/en-us/culture-and-careers/ to read about the segments, benefits, and employee stories, then follow the Apply or Job Portal links from there. ADM routes candidates through its secure external applicant portal rather than collecting applications directly on the marketing site.
2
The actual application portal lives on BrassRing at sjobs
The actual application portal lives on BrassRing at sjobs.brassring.com with partnerid=25416 and siteid=5998 for the primary external site. You will also see ADM BrassRing instances for specific populations such as Corporate, Professional, Student/Intern, Production/Plant/Hourly, and Internal, each with its own siteid, but the external search hub at siteid=5998 is the front door for most candidates.
3
Create a BrassRing candidate account with a long-lived personal email address, n
Create a BrassRing candidate account with a long-lived personal email address, not a school or current employer email. You will reuse this account for every ADM job you apply to and for any future applications across other companies that use IBM Kenexa BrassRing, so treat the login credentials as a long-term asset.
4
Use the job search filters deliberately
Use the job search filters deliberately. Filter by country, state, business segment (Ag Services and Oilseeds, Carbohydrate Solutions, Nutrition, Corporate), and job category. For plant and hourly roles, filter by location first because most of ADM's production hiring is geography-constrained. For commercial, trading, and corporate roles, filter by segment and function.
5
For each application, upload a tailored resume as a clean
For each application, upload a tailored resume as a clean .docx or PDF. BrassRing runs a resume parser on upload that pre-fills the structured application form. Review every parsed field before you submit because the parser will misread dates, split employers, or drop bullets if your formatting is complex.
6
Expect to fill in a structured Work History, Education, and Skills section in ad
Expect to fill in a structured Work History, Education, and Skills section in addition to uploading the resume. This is not optional formatting theater; recruiters search the structured fields, not the attached document, when they build candidate shortlists.
7
Answer the screening questionnaire honestly
Answer the screening questionnaire honestly. ADM commonly asks about work authorization, willingness to relocate, availability for rotational programs, shift preference (critical for plant roles), and specific technical certifications such as commercial driver licenses, refrigeration certifications, or process safety credentials.
8
Complete the voluntary self-identification (EEO, veteran status, disability) and
Complete the voluntary self-identification (EEO, veteran status, disability) and the consent and data privacy acknowledgments. ADM is a US federal contractor and collects these for compliance reporting; your answers do not reach the hiring manager.
9
Submit, then confirm you see the BrassRing confirmation page and a confirmation
Submit, then confirm you see the BrassRing confirmation page and a confirmation email. If you do not receive the email within an hour, check spam and then log back in to verify the application is listed under My Submissions. BrassRing has known cases where a session timeout during submission leaves an application in draft; re-submitting is safer than assuming it went through.
10
Track next steps through the portal
Track next steps through the portal. ADM recruiters use BrassRing's status fields to move candidates through stages, and you will often see updates there before email. Set a reminder to check the portal weekly for the first four weeks after applying.

Resume Tips for Archer Daniels Midland

recommended

Put the segment-appropriate keywords in the top third of the resume

Put the segment-appropriate keywords in the top third of the resume. A trading candidate should have commodity names (soybeans, corn, wheat, soybean meal, soybean oil, ethanol), desk terms (origination, basis trading, hedging, futures, CBOT, ICE, freight), and risk language (VaR, position limits, margining) visible before the fold. A food scientist should have ingredient categories, regulatory frameworks (FSMA, HACCP, SQF, GFSI), and lab instrumentation named explicitly. A plant engineer should have unit operations, utilities, safety systems, and PSM language visible early.

recommended

Lead every bullet with a verb and end with a quantified outcome

Lead every bullet with a verb and end with a quantified outcome. ADM is an operationally rigorous company and recruiters read for scope, scale, and impact. A bullet that says 'Managed oilseed crushing operations' is weaker than 'Led 24/7 soybean crush operation (3,500 MT/day throughput) across 42 hourly employees and 6 salaried supervisors, improving yield by 1.2 percentage points and reducing unplanned downtime 18 percent year over year.' Volume, headcount, and percentage deltas are the currency.

recommended

Use the plant-speak, desk-speak, or function-speak that the job description uses

Use the plant-speak, desk-speak, or function-speak that the job description uses. BrassRing's resume parser and recruiter keyword search both reward exact matches. If the posting says 'SAP S/4HANA', do not write 'SAP ERP'. If it says 'basis trader', do not write 'grain trader'. If it says 'Nutrition commercial', include the phrase Nutrition commercial somewhere it would fit naturally.

recommended

Keep formatting BrassRing-friendly

Keep formatting BrassRing-friendly. Standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications), single-column layout, no text boxes, no images, no icons for bullets, common fonts (Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Helvetica), and consistent date formatting (Month Year - Month Year). BrassRing's parser is older than most modern ATS systems and it chokes on creative resumes.

recommended

Put certifications where they belong

Put certifications where they belong. For plant and operations roles, list OSHA 30, PSM, HAZWOPER, RETA, Ammonia Operator, CDL, Lean Six Sigma, and PMP in a dedicated Certifications section with issuing body and year. For food science, list PCQI, HACCP, SQF Practitioner, and relevant IFT credentials. Recruiters filter on these.

recommended

For commodity trading roles, show your P&L history if you can disclose it, plus

For commodity trading roles, show your P&L history if you can disclose it, plus the products, geographies, and venues you traded. If a confidentiality clause prevents exact P&L, use ranges or relative performance (top quartile of desk, exceeded internal benchmark by X percent). Do not hide your book; it is the single most scrutinized line on a trading resume.

recommended

For R&D and food science roles, include a short Publications and Patents section

For R&D and food science roles, include a short Publications and Patents section or Selected Projects section. A single line citing a patent application or a peer-reviewed paper does more than a paragraph of adjectives.

recommended

For recent graduates applying to ADM's rotational and early-career programs, lea

For recent graduates applying to ADM's rotational and early-career programs, lead with the rotational relevance: coursework in agricultural economics, food engineering, chemical engineering, supply chain, commodity markets, or analytical chemistry; any internship at a grain handler, CPG, ingredients, or animal nutrition company; and leadership in relevant student organizations (Ag Business Club, IFT student chapter, AIChE). Include GPA if it is 3.3 or higher.

recommended

Match the resume length to the role seniority

Match the resume length to the role seniority. Hourly and early-career: one page. Salaried professional and mid-career: one to two pages. Director and above: two pages, occasionally three if patents or publications are dense. ADM recruiters do not penalize length when it carries information, but they do penalize filler.

recommended

Proofread twice and have a second reader proofread once

Proofread twice and have a second reader proofread once. ADM's culture is meticulous about operational detail, and a typo in a cover email or a date inconsistency between the resume and the BrassRing structured form is a legitimate reason recruiters drop candidates from a shortlist in a company with this many applicants.

ATS System: IBM Kenexa BrassRing (Talent Suite)

ADM's external career portal runs on IBM Kenexa BrassRing, one of the longest-running enterprise ATS platforms still in wide use among Fortune 500 industrials. The candidate-facing URL pattern is sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/Home/Home with partnerid=25416 identifying ADM and a siteid parameter (5998 for the primary external career site, with additional siteids for Corporate, Professional, Student and Intern, and Production and Plant populations). BrassRing parses uploaded resumes into structured candidate records, routes applications to requisitions through configurable workflows, and is the source of truth recruiters search when they build shortlists. The system is older than Workday, iCIMS, or Greenhouse and its parser is less forgiving of unusual formatting, so candidates benefit from designing their resumes around the parser rather than fighting it.

Save your BrassRing account credentials. You will reuse them for every ADM application and for other BrassRing-based employers, and a lost password is harder to recover than on modern ATS platforms.
Upload a clean .docx or PDF that parses cleanly into Experience, Education, and Skills. After upload, manually correct any field the parser got wrong; the structured fields are what recruiters actually search, not your attached file.
Avoid resume formatting that defeats older parsers: two-column layouts, text boxes, tables used for layout, graphics, icons, headers and footers containing data, non-standard fonts, and section headings that are not the expected words (Experience, Employment, Work History, Education, Skills, Certifications).
Match keywords from the job description into your resume body in a way that reads naturally. BrassRing supports recruiter keyword searches across structured and full-text fields, and exact phrase matches outperform paraphrases.
Apply to fewer roles, more carefully. BrassRing retains your full submission history under a single candidate profile at ADM; applying to twenty loosely-matched requisitions looks like noise to a recruiter reviewing your profile holistically, while three well-targeted applications look like a serious candidate.
When the portal offers a Job Alert, create one. BrassRing's alerts are reliable and arrive in email before most requisitions trend on external aggregators, which gives you a meaningful time advantage on competitive roles.
If the submission confirmation screen does not appear, do not assume the application submitted. Log back in, check My Submissions, and resubmit if the record is missing. BrassRing session timeouts are a known cause of silently lost applications.
Keep your BrassRing profile current even when you are not actively looking. ADM recruiters source from the BrassRing internal candidate database for roles they have not yet posted externally, and an out-of-date profile is invisible to that search.

Interview Culture

ADM interviews are practical, evidence-driven, and lean heavily on behavioral questions structured around competencies the company publishes in its talent frameworks: integrity, customer focus, collaboration, accountability, continuous improvement, and safety. Expect a first-round phone or video screen with a recruiter focused on work authorization, willingness to relocate or work a specific shift, compensation expectations, and a handful of high-level behavioral questions. A qualified recruiter screen moves to a hiring manager interview, usually video, that digs into your most recent role, your specific technical or commercial depth, and how you have handled scope, ambiguity, and failure. Strong candidates then advance to a panel or a series of back-to-back interviews that in most cases total three to five people across the hiring manager's peers, a cross-functional partner (supply chain, finance, quality, EHS, depending on the role), and a skip-level leader. For commercial and trading roles the final round almost always includes a case-style discussion where you are asked to walk through a market view, a position sizing decision, or a customer negotiation; for plant and operations roles the final round typically includes a site visit with a walk of the facility and safety briefing; for R&D and food science roles expect a technical deep dive on your project history and a discussion of applied problems the team is currently working on. Dress is business casual for corporate and commercial interviews and appropriate PPE (safety glasses, steel-toed boots, hairnet as required) for any plant site visit, which ADM will either provide or tell you to bring. Compensation conversations are generally handled late and through the recruiter rather than the hiring manager. End-to-end timelines run three to eight weeks for most roles; trading and executive roles can stretch longer because of the panel depth and additional reference and background checks. Offers come from the recruiter with base salary, target bonus (a meaningful component at ADM, typically expressed as a percentage of base tied to a combination of company, segment, and individual performance), relocation package if applicable, long-term incentive for leadership roles, benefits summary, and start date. Background checks and drug screens are standard and non-negotiable, particularly for plant, driving, and safety-sensitive roles.

What Archer Daniels Midland Looks For

Demonstrated safety mindset. ADM operates grain elevators, crush plants, ethanol facilities, and chemical processing sites where safety failures have severe consequences. Candidates who cannot speak to specific safety practices, near-miss reporting, or how they have personally stopped unsafe work do not make it past operations interviews.
Operational and commercial rigor. ADM rewards candidates who think in throughput, yield, margin, basis, and working capital. Generic leadership language without numbers behind it is treated as a warning sign.
Integrity and judgment under pressure. Given the company's public commitment to strengthening internal controls after the 2024 Nutrition segment restatement, hiring managers are more explicit than they used to be about probing ethical decision-making, willingness to escalate concerns, and comfort challenging a boss or a counterparty. Have at least two stories ready.
Willingness to be where the work is. ADM's production, commercial, and trading work is geographically distributed. Candidates open to Decatur, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, Erlanger, Rolle (Switzerland), Singapore, Shanghai, and dozens of smaller plant towns have materially more options than candidates who will only work in a handful of coastal cities.
Customer orientation. The Nutrition segment in particular sells into large CPG, food service, and pet food customers whose expectations are exacting. Candidates who can describe specific customer programs they have run, losses they have recovered, and wins they have captured stand out against candidates who describe themselves generically as commercial.
Continuous improvement discipline. Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and TPM are living vocabulary at ADM plants, not resume decoration. Candidates who can describe a specific project, the baseline, the intervention, the result, and the sustainment mechanism have a large advantage in operations interviews.
Global fluency. Even domestic US roles at ADM touch international commodity flows, regulatory regimes, and colleagues in multiple time zones. Candidates comfortable with currency, trade policy, cultural context, and asynchronous collaboration have an edge for roles above entry level.
Technical depth that matches the role. A trader needs to speak fluently about basis, spreads, carry, hedge ratios, and freight; an R&D scientist about sensory, shelf life, protein functionality, and regulatory; a plant engineer about unit operations, control systems, and reliability. Breadth without depth is a frequent rejection reason.
Coachability and learning velocity. Many of ADM's early-career rotational programs deliberately move people across unfamiliar segments and geographies. Hiring managers prioritize candidates who can show they have moved from novice to competent quickly in a prior role, and who ask for feedback in a specific and useful way.
Evidence that you have done your homework on ADM specifically. Candidates who have read the most recent annual report, understand the three-segment structure, can talk intelligently about the Nutrition rebuild, and have a point of view on where the company is going stand out sharply from candidates who treat the interview as a generic Fortune 100 conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does ADM use and where do I actually apply?

ADM uses IBM Kenexa BrassRing. The external career portal lives at sjobs.brassring.com with partnerid=25416 and siteid=5998 for the primary external site. Additional siteids exist for Corporate, Professional, Student and Intern, and Production and Plant populations. You can reach the portal through the Apply and Job Portal links on adm.com/en-us/culture-and-careers/. The careers.adm.com domain currently redirects to the company's unrelated e-ADM customer portal, so do not try to apply there.

Should I be worried about applying to ADM after the 2024 accounting investigation?

It is a fair question and worth treating honestly. In January 2024, ADM disclosed an SEC investigation into accounting practices in its Nutrition segment, placed its CFO Vikram Luthar on administrative leave, and subsequently restated intersegment sales. A DOJ probe followed, and the company committed to remediating material weaknesses. Juan Luciano has remained CEO, Monish Patolawala was brought in as CFO, and the company is publicly focused on internal-controls remediation and productivity. For candidates this means two things: the company is still hiring at scale across all segments, and hiring managers are more attentive than ever to integrity, escalation behavior, and controls mindset. It is a legitimate company to join, and it is also a company in rebuild mode. Both can be true.

Where are most ADM jobs located?

The corporate headquarters is at 77 West Wacker Drive in Chicago, but the operational center of gravity is still Decatur, Illinois, where ADM runs one of the largest soybean and corn processing complexes in the world and a major global R&D center. Beyond Chicago and Decatur, large employee populations are in Minneapolis, Omaha, Overland Park, Erlanger, and dozens of plant towns across the US corn and soybean belt, plus international hubs in Rolle (Switzerland), Singapore, Shanghai, Rotterdam, and across Latin America. Plant and commercial roles are highly geography-specific; corporate roles concentrate in Chicago and Decatur with a growing share of hybrid and remote flexibility.

What is the interview process like and how long does it take?

Plan on a recruiter screen, a hiring manager interview, and a panel or a series of back-to-back interviews with three to five additional people, for four to six total conversations. Commercial and trading roles typically include a case-style discussion; operations roles typically include a site visit; R&D roles include a technical deep dive. End-to-end timelines run three to eight weeks for most roles and longer for trading and leadership roles. Background checks and drug screens are standard, especially for plant, driving, and safety-sensitive roles.

Does ADM hire interns and new graduates?

Yes, aggressively. ADM runs structured internship and early-career programs across Ag Services and Oilseeds, Carbohydrate Solutions, Nutrition, and corporate functions including finance, IT, supply chain, and commercial. Many programs rotate participants across locations and segments over their first one to three years. These roles are posted in BrassRing under the Student and Intern site and also appear in the primary external search. Applications open on a predictable academic calendar; the strongest candidates apply in the early fall for the following summer.

How should I format my resume to get through BrassRing?

Use a single-column, standard-section-heading resume in .docx or PDF, with common fonts, consistent Month Year date formatting, and bullets that lead with verbs and end with quantified outcomes. Avoid text boxes, tables used for layout, icons, graphics, and two-column designs. After uploading, manually correct any field the BrassRing parser got wrong because the structured fields (not the attached file) are what recruiters search. Match keywords from the job description into your resume body naturally.

Is ADM a good place to work in commodity trading?

ADM is one of the ABCD (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus) firms that dominate global agricultural commodity trade, so for traders in grains, oilseeds, vegetable oils, ethanol, and related products, it is among the largest and most globally connected platforms available. Expect rigorous desk-specific interviews, meaningful bonus opportunity tied to desk and book performance, and access to physical, financial, and freight markets at a scale few non-ABCD firms can match. The career path is real and the mentorship from senior traders is real. Expect also the honest trade-offs: commodity markets are cyclical, bonuses follow that cyclicality, and the trading organization is not immune to the broader company's governance and controls focus.

What salary and benefits should I expect?

ADM compensation is competitive for its peer set, with a base salary plus target bonus structure for most salaried roles. The bonus at ADM is a meaningful component (typically expressed as a percentage of base tied to company, segment, and individual performance), and leadership roles include long-term equity incentives. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with company match, pension for some grandfathered populations, employee stock purchase program, paid time off, parental leave, tuition assistance, and relocation packages for eligible roles. Exact numbers vary by role, geography, and segment; treat the recruiter conversation as the source of truth and be prepared to discuss expectations clearly.

Does ADM sponsor work visas?

ADM sponsors work visas for specific roles where the requirements justify it, particularly in R&D, commercial, trading, and senior technical positions. It does not sponsor broadly for hourly, plant, or most entry-level corporate roles. The BrassRing application will ask about work authorization early and the answer affects which requisitions you remain eligible for. If sponsorship is essential for your situation, filter your search accordingly and raise it with the recruiter on the first screen.

What is the culture like day to day?

ADM's culture is Midwestern-industrial in character: practical, understated, safety-conscious, and driven by operational and commercial metrics rather than by buzz. It is a 123-year-old company with a deep plant and trading heritage, a growing nutrition-and-ingredients business that brings a different cultural flavor (more CPG, more lab, more customer-program-oriented), and a corporate center in Chicago that is actively modernizing digital, data, and governance capabilities. People who thrive at ADM tend to like concrete problems, numerical precision, and the long arc of building in physical businesses. People who expect the pace and aesthetics of a consumer technology company generally do not.

Open Positions

Archer Daniels Midland currently has 10 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 10 open positions at Archer Daniels Midland

Related Resources

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Sources

ADM Culture and Careers —
ADM Senior Leadership —
ADM External Careers Portal (IBM Kenexa BrassRing) —
ADM Classic BrassRing Career Portal —
ADM Company History —
ADM Investor Relations —
ADM Corporate Sustainability Report 2024 —