Adhesive makers blend resins, solvents and fillers into glues and sealants for packaging, footwear, wood and construction users. The people strain is kettle discipline, tacky clean-up and application engineers who live at customers' lines.
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Share your requirementsAn adhesive plant blends resins, polymer emulsions, solvents and fillers in mixers and kettles to make water based, solvent based and hot melt grades. The lab checks viscosity, solids and bond strength before a batch goes into drums, pails, cartridges or sachets. Packaging, footwear, wood and construction customers reorder the same grade and also ask for trial lots when their line changes. Bags are charged by hand, mixers are scraped clean of cured glue and full drums are moved on trolleys. Application engineers spend most days at customer plants solving bonding faults. Filling and packing run in shifts with permanent and daily wage hands. Related reading: 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 adhesive manufacturers. 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.
Two operators add the same filler in a different order or at a different pace, and the lab reads two different viscosities for one grade.
The slow, sticky job falls to the newest helper, who walks out within weeks and takes the lesson along.
A bond failure found at a footwear or packaging line seldom reaches the formulation lab or the kettle crew who made the batch.
Ahead of footwear or construction demand, extra filling hands are hired in days and put on sachet or cartridge machines with a quick demonstration.
Lifting resin bags onto the mixer and tilting full drums by hand brings shoulder and lower-back complaints that appear as absence.
Operators meet the new grade's quirks by trial and error, because nobody wrote the mixing notes while it was still a trial.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Recruitment and Talent Acquisition; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
How many people, in which roles, by when, and what they will cost.
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.
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 adhesive manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Charging order, stirrer speed and hold time on one card per grade.
Charging order, stirrer speed and hold time on one card per grade. Operators earn sign-off through the learning and development process before they run that grade unsupervised.
Put the clean-up on a visible rota across the crew, with a word of thanks from the supervisor, and keep it in the attendance, shift and leave process.
Put the clean-up on a visible rota across the crew, with a word of thanks from the supervisor, and keep it in the attendance, shift and leave process.
Each application engineer files a half-page note after every visit.
Each application engineer files a half-page note after every visit. The production head and the lab go through the notes together once a month.
Fix the headcount and the briefing day a month ahead.
Fix the headcount and the briefing day a month ahead. Sourcing and screening steps sit in the recruitment process consulting work.
Drum trolleys, a sensible bag weight per person, two people for the heaviest charges and a short break pattern for the kettle crew.
Drum trolleys, a sensible bag weight per person, two people for the heaviest charges and a short break pattern for the kettle crew.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. Work through the checks using a recent operating period. The time needed depends on the records you hold; note missing evidence and use the findings to choose a priority.
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.
Grade by grade sign-off so one grade is mixed the same way on every shift.
A plan to hire and brief filling hands and kettle helpers before the busy months.
Lifting routines for resin bags and drums, and care around solvent fumes.
Rosters that rotate the tacky jobs and put enough hands on filling lines at peak.
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 can struggle 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
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 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 shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Print charging order and hold times on a card for each grade and sign operators off before they run it alone. Share the lab's viscosity results with the shift that mixed it.
Rotate the scraping, thank people for it and show a route to kettle operator for those who do it well. Most leave because the job looks like a dead end.
Agree visit targets, a short report after each call and a monthly sit-down with the lab and the plant. They should not feel cut off from the factory.
Run a one day briefing, put each new hand beside a buddy and start them on the simpler machines. Note who was briefed and on which machine.
It lifts output but can hurt fill accuracy and safety. Some plants pay a fixed wage with a bonus that rewards good fills as well as the count.
Two operators mixing one grade, how many mixer-scraping helpers stayed, and where customer visit notes end up. We would likely start with grade cards and operator sign-off, then a hiring plan before the season. After the first conversation we put the proposed scope on paper for you to approve.
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