An industrial furnace maker builds heating equipment from steel shells, refractory linings, burners and control panels. The people problem is bricklayers for refractory, wiring and control skill, and site commissioning at high temperature.
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Share your requirementsAn industrial furnace manufacturer builds batch and continuous furnaces, ovens, kilns and heating chambers for forging, heat treatment, ceramics, casting and process industries. The steel shell is fabricated and the inside is lined with brick, castable or fibre. Burners, blowers, thermocouples, controllers and safety interlocks are fitted, and the control panel is wired. The furnace is then dried out, tested and commissioned at the customer's site. Refractory work needs experienced masons who know curing, joints and expansion. Control and safety wiring needs care, because a mistake can cause fire or an explosion. Site work takes crews away for long stretches. 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 industrial furnace 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.
Experienced masons are few, and young hands rarely learn the craft.
Cutting, mixing and lining cause dust exposure and heat strain, and kit is used unevenly.
Burner and interlock mistakes are costly, yet who is trained to do them is not always recorded.
Long heating schedules run through night and weekends, and the engineer in charge is exhausted.
Accommodation, food and allowances at remote client plants are arranged in a hurry.
Site engineers meet problems that the workshop never sees, so the same fault repeats.
Panel quality differs with the wireman, and testing is done by the same person who wired.
Gang leaders manage pay and conduct, and the unit has little say in training or safety.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Career and Succession Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
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.
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 industrial furnace manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A planned route of paired jobs on castable, brick and fibre, with a sign-off, set out in learning and development.
A planned route of paired jobs on castable, brick and fibre, with a sign-off, set out in learning and development.
Who is trained and authorised, with refreshers noted, and an independent check of safety circuits.
Who is trained and authorised, with refreshers noted, and an independent check of safety circuits.
Respirator fit, shift limits and shade and water on site, in line with health, safety and wellbeing.
Respirator fit, shift limits and shade and water on site, in line with health, safety and wellbeing.
A roster for dry-out and commissioning with relief for the lead engineer and clear handover notes.
A roster for dry-out and commissioning with relief for the lead engineer and clear handover notes.
Lodging, travel, food and overtime set before the job and tracked through the attendance and shift process.
Lodging, travel, food and overtime set before the job and tracked through the attendance and shift process.
After each commissioning, a short review of faults found and corrections passed to design and workshop.
After each commissioning, a short review of faults found and corrections passed to design and workshop.
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.
Paired learning for refractory masons, burner fitters and commissioning engineers.
Dust, heat, gas and hot work routines with training records.
Site stints, dry-out shifts and rest records.
Pay and allowances for rare refractory and control skills.
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
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
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
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Recruit helpers with steady hands, pair them with a senior mason and give a pay step at each skill level. The craft is learned slowly, so patience is part of the plan.
Agree conduct, safety and attendance rules with the gang leader, keep a list of who is on site and brief every person. Confirm the arrangement with a qualified professional.
Who is trained, who is authorised, test results and an independent check. Ask a qualified professional which standards apply.
Plan relief, set a handover note and limit continuous hours for the lead engineer.
Hold a short review after each commissioning, record faults and assign fixes to named people.
We would ask who is learning refractory work, who is trained on gas safety circuits and how site allowances are agreed. A good first piece of work is a mason learning route and site rules. Scope is agreed in writing after we talk.
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