Looms, spinning frames, knitting machines and processing equipment are machined, assembled and installed in mills. This page covers fitters, machinists, erection engineers, service staff and the long cycle from order to commissioning.
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Share your requirementsA textile machinery maker builds complex machines with many moving parts. Machinists turn and mill shafts, rollers and frames, fitters assemble heads, gearboxes and drives, electricians wire panels, and testers run the machine before dispatch. Then erection engineers travel to the buyer's mill to install, align and commission it. Orders arrive in lumps, from mills that expand when cotton or fabric demand is good, and sit quiet when it is not. A machine can take weeks to build, so planning headcount is hard. Service engineers support customers across mill clusters and are valued by those customers, who may hire them away. Related reading: 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 textile machinery 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.
Order books swell and thin with textile sentiment, and headcount planning is a guess.
Alignment and fine adjustment are learned by hand, and retirement risk is high.
Months at customer sites strain family life, and allowances and rest are unclear.
Mills offer steady jobs to engineers who know their machines, and the maker loses field knowledge.
Parts that do not fit are traced slowly, and teams argue.
A delay in one part stalls the whole machine, and the responsible team is unclear.
Buyers visit to watch trials, and testers work under watchful eyes without clear checklists.
Site notes sit in personal phones and diaries, and new engineers repeat old errors.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Career and Succession Management; Retention and Attrition Management. 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.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
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.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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 textile machinery manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A simple plan for core, flexible and contract capacity at low, medium and high order levels.
A simple plan for core, flexible and contract capacity at low, medium and high order levels. See recruitment process.
A buddy system, photo and note libraries for alignment steps, and a skills grid by machine.
A buddy system, photo and note libraries for alignment steps, and a skills grid by machine. See the learning and development process.
Length of site stays, rest periods, travel allowances and home leave in a written policy.
Length of site stays, rest periods, travel allowances and home leave in a written policy. See attendance and leave.
A path to lead engineer and area manager, with fair pay checked through compensation benchmarking.
A path to lead engineer and area manager, with fair pay checked through compensation benchmarking.
Machining, assembly and stores meet on parts that do not fit, so fixes happen at source.
Machining, assembly and stores meet on parts that do not fit, so fixes happen at source.
One format for each install and service visit, stored centrally.
One format for each install and service visit, stored centrally. See HR documentation.
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 way to capture fitter know-how and bring juniors up.
Planned hiring across cycles for machinists, fitters and engineers.
A view of pay and allowances for field and service roles.
Travel, site stay and home leave rules for erection teams.
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 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.
Keep a core team, a trained flexible pool and a plan for each order level.
Offer growth, fair pay and recognition, and use clear agreements drafted by a qualified professional.
Limit consecutive site days, give rest and pay allowances on time.
Pair juniors with seniors, document steps and reward teaching.
Hold weekly reviews between machining and assembly and log the cause.
We would ask how orders move headcount, who holds fitter know-how and how field staff are managed. A good first job is a skills grid and field policy. After a first talk, scope and fee are put in writing.
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