Rice, flour, pulses, edible oil and feed mills buy in one season and sell all year. Work comes in bursts of unloading, milling and loading, and much depends on gangs of heavy-lifting workers. This page covers the people side.
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Share your requirementsA staples, oil or feed processor buys grain, oilseed or pulses when the harvest arrives, stores it and mills it through the year. The plant has a few operators for cleaning, hulling, grinding, expelling, refining and packing, and a large pool of loaders, stitchers and truck handlers. Work peaks at procurement and at dispatch, and is slow between. Weighing, moisture checks and stock records matter because a small error multiplies across tonnes. Dust, noise, belts and steam create risk, and fire is a worry in dusty rooms. Many hands come through a mukadam or contractor and are paid by the bag or the truck. Quality and pilferage are daily concerns. 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 staples, oils and feed. 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.
For a few weeks trucks queue at the gate and unloading, drying and storing need many hands. The same hands are not needed later.
Piece rates reward speed, and injuries from heavy sacks and rushed truck loading are common and rarely recorded.
Gang leaders recruit, pay and discipline their people, so you know little about who works in your yard or how they are treated.
A mismatch between weighbridge slips, stock registers and dispatch leads to accusations of theft, and weighbridge staff are under pressure.
Fine flour, husk and feed dust are flammable and harm lungs. Housekeeping, masks and fire drills depend on the shift.
A mill or expeller operator knows the sound of the machine. When he leaves, yield and breakage change and no one can explain why.
Trucks load after dark with few seniors present, and counts, damage and pilferage are only noticed later.
With less work after the season, good operators and stitchers leave for other jobs and are hard to bring back.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Employee Administration. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
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.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
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.
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 staples, oils and feed business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A headcount plan for procurement and dispatch peaks that shows how many hands, when and from where.
A headcount plan for procurement and dispatch peaks that shows how many hands, when and from where. The recruitment process helps keep a bench of known workers.
Each gang member is entered at the gate and matched to the leader's bill, with agreed bag rates in writing.
Each gang member is entered at the gate and matched to the leader's bill, with agreed bag rates in writing. See attendance, shift and leave.
Set a bag-carry limit, rest rhythm and a stop-work call, and review any injury.
Set a bag-carry limit, rest rhythm and a stop-work call, and review any injury. The workplace health, safety and wellbeing work covers it.
Different people weigh, record and reconcile, with a simple weekly matching of slips, registers and dispatches.
Different people weigh, record and reconcile, with a simple weekly matching of slips, registers and dispatches.
Daily housekeeping, masks, extinguisher checks and a drill each quarter, signed by the shift in charge.
Daily housekeeping, masks, extinguisher checks and a drill each quarter, signed by the shift in charge.
Settings, sounds, checks and fixes for each machine, taught to a second person.
Settings, sounds, checks and fixes for each machine, taught to a second person. See learning and development.
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.
A bench of known seasonal and skilled hands, ready before procurement begins.
A gate record for loaders and gang members that matches the leader's bill.
Lifting, dust, belt and fire routines with records of who was trained.
A second person trained on each critical machine, so one resignation does not stop output.
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
How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
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
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.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Piece rates are common, but add safe-carry limits and rest rules so speed is not rewarded at the cost of injuries. Whichever method you use, keep a clear written rate.
Keep the gang leader but record every worker at the gate, agree rates in writing and check that wages reach the workers. Confirm contractor obligations with a qualified professional.
Separate weighing, recording and reconciling between different people, and match slips and registers each week. Clear systems protect honest staff.
Use the period for maintenance, training and cleaning, and offer retention terms for a small core team. Letting them go each year means rebuilding skill each season.
Dust, belts and manual lifting. Machine guarding, housekeeping, masks and lifting rules cut most of it.
We would ask how many people you use at peak, how gangs are recorded and how stock is reconciled. A good opening project is a seasonal plan plus a gate record for gangs. Scope is then written down for you to accept or change.
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