Tractors, tillers, sprayers and harvesters sell when farmers have money and need them, so orders rise and fall with crops and rain. Fabrication, assembly and field service teams must flex with that cycle.
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Share your requirementsA maker of agricultural machinery builds implements and equipment from steel: cutting, bending, welding, machining, painting and assembling. Demand follows the monsoon, crop prices and loan seasons, so order books swell before sowing and harvest, and thin in between. A dealer network sells and services the machines, and field engineers go to farms to commission, repair and demonstrate. Breakdowns in season must be fixed quickly because a farmer loses a crop day by day. Plant crews, dealer mechanics and field engineers need different skills, yet farmers judge the brand as one. Welders and fitters are scarce and often move between local workshops. See also HR for manufacturing.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in agricultural machinery makers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Before sowing, the plant needs overtime and extra hands. Out of season, work falls and skilled people look for other jobs.
A weak weld shows up on a farm as a failure. Good welders are limited and can leave for another workshop at short notice.
Breakdown calls rise together. Engineers travel long distances, work long days and get little rest.
They service your machines without product training, and mistakes reflect on your brand.
A good demo sells machines. A poor one, with an unprepared operator, loses a village.
Field engineers see repeat failures, but the feedback seldom reaches fabrication or design in usable form.
Extra hands start on moving machinery and welding without a proper briefing, and safety slips.
Travel to farms, poor roads and irregular meals affect health and morale of field staff.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Recruitment and Talent Acquisition; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a agricultural machinery makers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A calendar of orders, overtime and extra hands, with a bench of known welders and fitters.
A calendar of orders, overtime and extra hands, with a bench of known welders and fitters. The recruitment process supports it.
A short practical test and a record per welder, with a pay step for those who pass.
A short practical test and a record per welder, with a pay step for those who pass. See compensation benchmarking.
A call roster, travel records and rest days in peak season.
A call roster, travel records and rest days in peak season. The attendance, shift and leave process covers off-site staff.
A practical course on assembly, adjustment and fault finding for each machine family, with attendance recorded.
A practical course on assembly, adjustment and fault finding for each machine family, with attendance recorded. See learning and development.
A monthly list of repeat failures with photos, reviewed by plant and field leads, and actions assigned.
A monthly list of repeat failures with photos, reviewed by plant and field leads, and actions assigned.
A short safety briefing and supervised first shifts for new hands, using the employee onboarding process.
A short safety briefing and supervised first shifts for new hands, using the employee onboarding process.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A bench of known welders, fitters and seasonal hands ready before the order peak.
Product courses for dealer mechanics and a ladder for welders and field engineers.
Pay for scarce welding and service skills compared with local workshops and rivals.
A fast but proper induction for seasonal hands joining moving machinery.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in manufacturing, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why the best operator often struggles as shift supervisor, what it costs the line, and a practical way to choose, prepare and back new supervisors in any kind of plant.
7 min readRead article
How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
6 min readRead article
How a D2C founder can test a performance marketing hire on real work, ignore weak signals such as dashboard screenshots, and run a fair process.
7 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Keep a core team on steady terms and use the slack months for training, maintenance and development work. Extra hands are for peak weeks only.
Use a short practical test and record results. Pay a step for those who pass and re-test periodically.
Plan call rosters, ensure rest days, pay allowances on time and give them a clear person to call. Overload is the main reason they leave.
Yes. A short practical course for each model reduces repeat failures and protects the brand. Check dealer agreements with a qualified professional.
Collect repeat failures with photos, review them monthly with plant leads and track the fix. Feedback that does not reach the plant is wasted.
We would ask how you staff the season, how welders are assessed and how field engineers are rostered. A good opening project is a seasonal headcount plan plus a welder skill record. Scope is then written down for you to accept or change.
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