A cable and wire maker draws copper or aluminium rod, strands it and sheathes it in insulation on lines that seldom stop. Extruder and drawing operators hold the skill, and heavy drums bring real lifting danger.
Not sure what you need? Tell us about your business in six short steps and we will come to the first meeting prepared.
Share your requirementsRod goes through drawing dies to finer gauge, is annealed, then bunched or stranded into conductors. Extrusion lines apply PVC or XLPE insulation, cores are laid up, sheathed, tested and wound onto wooden or steel drums. A cold start or a long stop wastes conductor and compound, so lines run round the clock. Drums and coils travel by overhead crane, hand trolley and sling. The operator watches diameter, melt temperature and line speed, and a good one catches an eccentric core before it becomes a drum of scrap. Orders are cut to length and specification, and drum handling is a daily hazard. 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 cable and wire 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.
Choosing zone temperatures, line speed and cooling trough length for each cable is slow to master, and a poor set-up wastes metal and compound.
Die sizes, speeds and faults pass between shifts by word of mouth, and details such as a worn die are dropped on the way.
Full drums are heavy, and slings, trolleys and overhead cranes call for trained, named hands rather than whoever is free.
A line cannot be slowed without good reason, and tired hands slip near the end of a night shift.
Cut ends and rejected lengths gather beside the lines, and nobody ties them to who ran the machine or what was changed.
A neighbouring plant offers slightly better pay, and the steady operators who know the lines are the ones who go.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
How many people, in which roles, by when, and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
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.
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 cable and wire manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A scale showing who can run drawing, stranding or extrusion alone, and who can set up a new cable size.
A scale showing who can run drawing, stranding or extrusion alone, and who can set up a new cable size. See compensation benchmarking.
Die sizes, speeds, faults and pending jobs written down and signed by outgoing and incoming operators.
Die sizes, speeds, faults and pending jobs written down and signed by outgoing and incoming operators. See attendance, shift and leave process.
A short list of trained people for slinging, crane and trolley work, with a check before each shift.
A short list of trained people for slinging, crane and trolley work, with a check before each shift. See health, safety and wellbeing.
A one-line note per line showing metres rejected and the likely cause, shared with operators so patterns are talked over calmly.
A one-line note per line showing metres rejected and the likely cause, shared with operators so patterns are talked over calmly.
Steps from helper to operator to setter with a sign-off at each stage and a senior operator as named mentor.
Steps from helper to operator to setter with a sign-off at each stage and a senior operator as named mentor.
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.
Rosters and handovers for lines that must run through the night.
Authorisation and pre-shift checks for heavy drums, slings and cranes.
Line grades that value setters and extruder operators against nearby plants.
A staged path to grow extrusion setters from your own crew.
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 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 article
Simple variable pay structures for product and engineering teams: four options, why individual metrics backfire, a build plan and a one page outline to adapt.
6 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.
Use one written format covering die sizes, speeds and faults, signed by both operators, and keep a few minutes of face-to-face overlap at the line.
Give skill a grade and pay of its own, ask them to train others and offer a setter role. Compare your pay with nearby plants.
Name the authorised people, inspect slings each day and keep walkways clear. Retrain the crew after any near miss.
Count it by line and shift, look for set-up and material causes and talk the results through with the team. Blame hides problems.
Keep rotations predictable, limit runs of consecutive nights and place demanding jobs away from the early-morning dip.
With last night's handover notes, the list of people cleared for crane work and a count of who can set up a new cable size. A written line handover and a line-by-line grade scale would be a sensible opening, with scope put in writing after a first conversation.
All 8 business types in electrical equipment manufacturing · Find another business type
Tell us your industry, team size and the issue you want to address. Bring one example of where work gets delayed or ownership is unclear, and the deadline or decision you are working towards.
