Starting up a greenfields mine is a high-stakes balancing act. While construction, procurement, and permitting dominate early planning, there’s one foundational question that often gets overlooked: who’s building your workforce?
Recruiting 500+ people to a remote site in six months is a logistical nightmare that becomes even more complex when you factor in multiple stakeholders, tight timelines, and local regulations.
Mining recruitment specialist Lisa Paluzzi Blignaut sees too many project teams underestimate the scope until it’s too late. “People think hiring starts with advertising. But it doesn’t,” she says. “It starts with a signed-off labour plan, stakeholder alignment, and a clear project plan to manage who’s arriving on site first, and when.”
That foundation work, the unglamorous planning that happens months before the first job ad goes live, can make or break your entire recruitment timeline.
Here are six tips to successfully build a large mining workforce from scratch for a greenfields mine or project ramp-up.
1. Start at the top, not the bottom
The first step in any large-scale workforce build? Appoint leadership and get their buy-in.
“Your structure should work like a pyramid. You hire from the top down,” says Lisa who has spent the last five years leading various RPO teams in Africa.
“If it’s an expansion, you bring in a project manager to oversee it. For a new mine, the general manager needs to be appointed first. From there, you build out your middle management. They’re the ones who’ll carry the responsibility on the ground, and ensure they’re building a team that falls in line with their vision, the company culture, and the project goals.”
This top-down approach ensures clear chains of approval. Without those key decision-makers in place, recruitment stalls.
Just as critical is having an approved labour plan. This outlines the full workforce structure: roles, numbers, reporting lines, and timing. While talent acquisition (TA) teams don’t usually create the labour plan, they rely on it to deliver.
“A hiring manager will call and say, ‘I need 10 operators next week.’ But if there’s no job description, no salary range, and no idea how they’ll be accommodated on site, it all unravels fast.”
2. Run a kickoff meeting that sets the tone
Before advertising any roles, Lisa recommends a structured TA kickoff meeting.
“That meeting is where you make sure everything’s ready: job descriptions, rosters, salary bands, and your start date for the first new hires. It’s surprising how many people skip this and try to hire on the fly.”
This meeting should include all departmental stakeholders: HR and payroll, supply chain (for uniforms, PPE, equipment), IT (for onboarding systems and email setups), camp management (for housing and meals), and site operations leadership.
“If the first 50 guys arrive on site and they don’t have PPE, somewhere to sleep, or even food, it can be a negative candidate journey and ultimately a negative vibe to your project,” she says.
This is also the time to confirm whether the site has an HRIS or applicant tracking system (or needs one), whether onboarding materials exist (manuals, travel plans, camp policies), and how candidates will be mobilised (flights, transport, visa process).
“Just something like an onboarding manual helps the candidate know what to expect. It tells them who’s meeting them at the airport, what to pack, where they’ll sleep. Without that, the candidate’s journey starts off on the wrong foot.”
3. Prepare for full-scale mobilisation, not just hiring
When recruiting for a greenfields project, HR’s role goes well beyond posting ads and processing paperwork. Every candidate is part of a logistics chain that includes accommodation, meals, uniforms, transport, IT setup, and often immigration or visa support.
“You’re mobilising people and onboarding them into a half-built mine,” Lisa says. “If you tell them in the interview they’ll be staying in a tent for six months until the camp is finished, and they’re okay with that—fine. But if they arrive and find that out on day one, they’ll quit.”
Even small oversights can quickly damage reputation.
“The candidate journey is everything, from the first ad they see to the moment they arrive on site. If I’ve recruited someone and they get there and nothing’s ready, it reflects badly on the company. It breaks trust.”
Lisa also stresses the importance of clear communication around camp readiness, especially in the early phases of construction.
“The mine gets built first, not the camp. So you’ve got to plan for people working in rough conditions. Are the showers operational? Is catering ready? Who’s doing the laundry? These are basic questions that affect retention.”
4. Build a system to handle the screening avalanche
Once advertising begins, things escalate fast, particularly in remote or high-demand projects.
“For new mine projects, we can easily get 500 applicants per role. Most of them won’t be suitable. In some cases we’ve had people with no mining experience say they’ll pick it up because they’re a quick learner. But your management team doesn’t have time to teach the skills, they need people who can hit the ground running. The volume is overwhelming if you don’t have a plan.”
That’s why screening is one of the most time-consuming and high-risk steps in the process.
Lisa outlines a typical screening workflow for multiple-role recruitment: initial filter using keywords and mandatory criteria (e.g. gold plant experience), top three technical requirements scan, CV pattern review (job duration, career progression, red flags), shortlisting down to around 50 candidates, and phone screening for language fluency, roster acceptance, and basic role understanding.
“Just calling those 50 people can take a couple of days. And sometimes you pick up things you missed in the first scan. For example, someone says they’ve got a month’s notice, but they’ll just ghost their current employer and start next week. That’s not enthusiasm, it’s a red flag on their company loyalty.”
An RPO model makes this scalable.
“Our applicant tracking system can de-dupe applications, filter by experience, and manage hundreds of applicants from multiple job boards. We also train our recruiters on how to scan a CV in under 30 seconds to pick up what matters.”
5. Master local realities and logistics
Greenfield projects in regions like Africa come with additional complexities, especially around immigration, travel logistics, and security.
“The first time I arrived in the DRC, a security guy took my passport and disappeared into the crowd. No one told me that’s normal—it’s how the mine avoids visa bribes. But it’s terrifying if you don’t know.”
Globe’s RPO teams create custom travel and mobilisation plans for each hire: visa and work permit processing, flight and airport pickups, hotel or camp transit arrangements, medicals and background checks, and security briefings and cultural orientation.
“When someone’s flying into Burkina Faso or the DRC for the first time, every detail matters. If one thing goes wrong, like a missed visa step, or a forgotten pickup, it delays mobilisation and shakes their trust.”
These aren’t just ‘nice-to-haves.’ They’re essential to avoid disruptions.
“I’ve had guys show up on site and ask where their uniform is. If you don’t have your PPE, you can’t work. If your IT account’s not set up, you can’t access site systems. It’s that simple.”
Once you make the offer, the real logistical lift begins, and it’s where even well-resourced internal teams can fall behind. Mobilising hundreds of people to remote sites involves dozens of moving parts. Miss one, and everything slows down.
“You’re arranging medicals, reference checks, background checks, flights, visa applications, police clearances. All of that has to happen after the offer,” says Lisa. “And if someone’s relocating with a family, you’re also looking at containers, accommodation, sometimes even schooling plans.”
In many organisations, these tasks fall between the cracks. No one quite owns them, and they’re often delegated late. An RPO model prevents that because it has oversight of every aspect of the candidate journey.
“We hand over a complete candidate pack to the onboarding team: CV, qualifications, references, police clearance, medical clearance, everything in one place,” Lisa explains. “And if we’re embedded from the start, we can own the mobilisation process end to end.”
RPO providers can arrange and track pre-employment medicals, conduct and verify reference and background checks, coordinate visa/work permit applications (especially in Africa/Asia), support mobilisation plans (flights, accommodation, security), manage family logistics for expats or long-term hires, and ensure candidates are fully briefed and ready before they arrive.
“This goes beyond filling roles. It’s about making sure every candidate has what they need to walk onto site on day one: safely, legally, and ready to work.”
6. When to use RPO
Could you build your own internal TA team to manage all this? Sure. But according to Lisa, you’re creating a second operation inside your main one.
“If you’re hiring 1000 people in six months, you’d need at least six full-time recruiters for your delivery team: one recruitment manager, two senior search consultants, and three local recruiters. And that’s the bare minimum.”
With an RPO model, you get a delivery team plus overflow support, multiple global job boards, and strategic insight baked in.
“We’ve got a bench of 12 more recruiters across our single-search division. If someone’s sick or there’s a backlog, we can scale up overnight. And we bring all our own systems, from applicant tracking to interview scorecards to contract templates.”
RPO also provides interview training for hiring managers, standardised employment contracts, salary benchmarking (especially helpful for new markets), and pre-written onboarding and mobilisation documents.
“Your GM doesn’t want to spend their time setting up interviews or checking if candidates have uniforms. They’re building a mine. We build the workforce to match their vision.”
Build it right the first time
When you’re building a mine from the ground up, your workforce becomes a critical success factor. If recruitment is treated as an afterthought, the consequences ripple through operations, safety, culture, and reputation.
“This is a no-brainer,” Lisa says. “You’re building your operation from the ground up. Hiring the right people at the right time is part of that construction process.”
By embedding an experienced RPO team from day one, mining leaders can de-risk the process, speed up mobilisation, and make sure every hire arrives ready for work to hit the ground running, and stays.
