A heat treatment company hardens, tempers and anneals other firms' parts in furnaces. The people problem is trust in batch records, furnace operators who know each load, and hot, night-time work.
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Share your requirementsA heat treatment company takes parts from engineering firms, loads them into furnaces, heats them to a set temperature and time, then quenches, tempers or cools them. Processes include hardening, tempering, annealing, carburising and nitriding. Each customer has a specification for case depth, hardness and distortion. Loads vary from a few kilos of fasteners to heavy shafts. Batches run for hours, often at night, and the furnace log is the proof of work. One wrong load, set point or quench delay can ruin a customer's parts. Operators who know what a load will do are few. 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 heat treatment companies. 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.
How to stack a load, when to quench and how to avoid distortion sits in memory, not on paper.
One slip costs the whole load and the customer relation, yet logs are filled in after the event.
Long soaks mean quiet hours, and attention drops with no clear rule on who is on watch.
Burns, fire and fumes are real, and training for oil and gas handling is passed informally.
Case depth and hardness requirements are lost between sales and furnace, and disputes follow.
Hardness results from the lab are questioned by operators, and re-runs are argued over.
Customers want parts back quickly, and soak or temper time gets squeezed.
Daily labour loads trays and fixtures with little training, and damage to parts is not traced.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Operations and Governance; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
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.
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.
The pieces a heat treatment companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Fixture, stacking pattern, set point, soak and quench, kept at the furnace and signed by the operator.
Fixture, stacking pattern, set point, soak and quench, kept at the furnace and signed by the operator.
A habit of recording at the time, with supervisor checks, as covered in HR documentation process.
A habit of recording at the time, with supervisor checks, as covered in HR documentation process.
A named person on watch during each soak, a clear handover and a record of rounds, tied to shift and attendance process.
A named person on watch during each soak, a clear handover and a record of rounds, tied to shift and attendance process.
Quench oil, gas and burn handling with drills and a record of who was trained, as set out in health, safety and wellbeing.
Quench oil, gas and burn handling with drills and a record of who was trained, as set out in health, safety and wellbeing.
A job sheet filled when the order is taken and passed to the operator, signed on receipt.
A job sheet filled when the order is taken and passed to the operator, signed on receipt.
Grades from loader to quench operator to furnace lead with sign-off on real loads and a clear pay step.
Grades from loader to quench operator to furnace lead with sign-off on real loads and a clear pay step.
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.
Fire, oil, gas and burn routines with drills and training records.
Clear job sheets, logs and handover records that stand up to a customer audit.
A planned route from loader to quench operator and furnace lead.
Night shift cover, watch rules and rest records.
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.
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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.
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Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
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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.
Name a person on watch for each soak, record rounds, keep cover for sickness and share the load fairly. Fatigue and unclear ownership cause most night errors.
Keep the furnace log, load card and test result together for each batch, filled at the time. Complete files reduce disputes.
Trained and authorised operators only, with drills and kit. Ask a qualified professional which safety and fire requirements apply.
Give a clear ladder, pay for the responsibility and recognise good batches. Operators leave when the work is hot and thankless.
Brief them on fixtures and stacking, pair with a regular loader and record who loaded each batch. Confirm engagement terms with a qualified professional.
We would ask who knows each load best, who is on watch during night soaks and how customer specs reach the furnace. A good first piece of work is a load card routine and an operator ladder. Scope is agreed in writing after we talk.
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