Mineral trading companies buy and sell ore, aggregates and processed minerals between suppliers and industrial buyers. This is how to run traders, stock clerks, weighbridge staff and accounts teams around thin margins, credit and price swings.
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Share your requirementsA mineral trading company buys material from mines, crushers or processors and sells to cement, steel, ceramic, glass and construction buyers, usually without processing it itself. The business runs on knowing who has stock, who needs it, what price is fair and who will pay. The team has traders or sales executives who hold relationships, a stock and yard clerk, weighbridge operators, a transport coordinator, an accounts staff who invoice and chase money, and a small owner-led management. Margins are thin and prices move. Credit given to buyers can sit for weeks. Trader relationships are personal and go with the person. Records of stock, weights and dues are often in notebooks or personal phones. For the wider sector, read HR for professional services.
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 mineral trading 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.
A buyer and supplier follow a trader to a rival, and the firm loses the business with him.
What the yard clerk counts, the weighbridge shows and the trader promises are three different numbers.
A trader paid on volume sells to risky buyers or at a loss, and the firm absorbs the cost.
Traders do not want to chase their own buyers, and accounts staff do not know the relationship.
Drivers, suppliers and buyers argue weights, and the operator is under pressure to favour one.
Teams are hired and let go with the market, and trust falls when layoffs follow a slow month.
Quotes, chats and photos sit on staff devices and leave with them.
Staff wait for approvals and cannot close a deal quickly, which frustrates good traders.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Compensation, Payroll and Benefits; Employee Administration; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
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.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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 mineral trading companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A shared trade sheet with buyer, supplier, quantity, price, terms and due date, filled the same day.
A shared trade sheet with buyer, supplier, quantity, price, terms and due date, filled the same day. Keep it under documentation.
Pay on collected margin, not volume, with a clear rule on bad debt.
Pay on collected margin, not volume, with a clear rule on bad debt. See compensation benchmarking.
Yard count, weighbridge ticket and trade sheet reconciled weekly by a person who is not the trader.
Yard count, weighbridge ticket and trade sheet reconciled weekly by a person who is not the trader.
Set credit limits, assign a collection owner and review dues in a weekly meeting.
Set credit limits, assign a collection owner and review dues in a weekly meeting.
A company phone or shared system for buyer and supplier contacts, with a written rule on use.
A company phone or shared system for buyer and supplier contacts, with a written rule on use. Use HR policy packages.
Write down what each trader may agree on price and credit without asking, and review the limits yearly.
Write down what each trader may agree on price and credit without asking, and review the limits yearly. See performance management.
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.
Commission design that rewards collected margin.
One trade sheet and stock reconciliation record.
Clear limits and review of trader decisions.
Rules on contacts, devices and confidentiality.
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 professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
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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.
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Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
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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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Record relationships in company systems, introduce a second person to key accounts and reward long-term collected margin. Confirm any restraint terms with a qualified professional.
Link pay to collected margin and add a bad-debt rule. Volume-only pay encourages risky sales.
Reconcile the yard count, weighbridge tickets and trade sheet every week with someone independent of the trader.
A shared job: the trader opens the conversation, accounts follow up and the owner steps in on large dues. Make ownership clear.
Plan a core team, use variable pay for upside and tell staff early about slow periods. Surprise exits damage trust.
We would sit with a trader, a clerk and accounts for a day, then draft a trade sheet, commission rule and role limits. We do not do legal advice or payroll filings, and scope is written down after we talk.
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