Machine tool builders make lathes, machining centres and grinders that must hold accuracy for years. Hand scraping, spindle assembly and alignment checks take about a decade to learn.
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Share your requirementsMachine tool builders produce lathes, machining centres, milling machines and grinders for other factories. Beds and columns start as castings and weldments and are machined; guideways and shafts are hardened and ground. Spindles and slides are assembled, drives and controllers fitted, and the machine is checked for geometry, alignment and cutting accuracy before it ships. Some firms still hand-scrape mating surfaces to flatness, and others have moved to automated finishing. Either way, a few senior fitters judge accuracy by touch and by indicator, and the control engineers who tune each machine have several offers. For the wider sector, read the manufacturing overview.
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 machine tool builders. 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.
A senior fitter who can read flatness by touch cannot be hired off the market, and the craft is thinning.
Young fitters trained at the firm's cost move to CNC or automation roles with bigger names.
People who tune drives and clear controller faults are courted by larger machine tool and electronics firms.
Inspectors need hours to certify one machine, and the push to ship sparks arguments with the assembly floor.
Boring and milling large beds needs careful setting, and one mistake wastes costly material.
The people who install machines and train customers' operators come out of the shop, which leaves assembly short.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Career and Succession Management; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Who leaves, when, why, and which of them mattered.
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.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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 machine tool builders business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A named grade, an apprentice for each senior fitter and a written list of what the apprentice must master.
A named grade, an apprentice for each senior fitter and a written list of what the apprentice must master. Link it to a training plan.
A multi-year path with grades, pay steps and a mentor, so trained fitters see a future here.
A multi-year path with grades, pay steps and a mentor, so trained fitters see a future here. The first year can follow an onboarding structure.
A career ladder and market-matched pay for control staff.
A career ladder and market-matched pay for control staff. Pay benchmarking supplies the numbers.
A reporting line for geometry inspectors outside the shipping schedule, with respected authority to hold a machine.
A reporting line for geometry inspectors outside the shipping schedule, with respected authority to hold a machine.
Dedicated staff for installing machines and training operators, so assembly keeps its strength.
Dedicated staff for installing machines and training operators, so assembly keeps its strength. Workforce planning sizes both teams.
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.
A formal craft path for scraping and spindle assembly, with a named apprentice for each senior fitter.
A structured first year for apprentices and new fitters, with a mentor and clear checks.
Market-matched pay and grades for control engineers and master fitters.
Why trained apprentices and engineers leave, and what to change.
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
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 article
What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Give it a formal grade, assign an apprentice to each senior fitter and write down what must be learned. Otherwise the craft leaves with the person.
Because they see no path or pay step after training. A written grade ladder and a mentor make staying look worthwhile.
Show a career ladder, match market pay and trust them with whole machines. People leave when they feel like a support function.
Better outside the shipping schedule, so a failed accuracy check is respected. Assembly and inspection should still review failures together.
Sometimes, but habits differ, so give a short trial and a mentor. Have any restriction on joining checked by a qualified professional.
We would ask who holds each core craft and who is learning it, trace what became of recent apprentices and see how failed accuracy checks are handled. A formal apprenticeship path with a fitter grade scale is a practical first job. Scope is written down once we have talked.
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