Is your mine site’s recruitment process a bit broken? It’s pretty normal across the industry. Over the years, your mine’s growth can outpace a system that was once good for a smaller operation. Whether that’s because of higher churn, production pressures, or tighter labour markets.
In the early part of a mine’s life, recruitment is simple. HR teams can track everything through spreadsheets and conversations, make decisions quick, and keep turnover low.
But then your mine grows. Attrition increases and production pressures intensify. New superintendents arrive with their own preferred ways of hiring. Your corporate HQ starts asking for more reporting and consistency. Meanwhile, the talent market tightens.
Before you realise it, your mine has become a patchwork of inherited habits and its size is structurally misaligned with the system supporting it.
This is when you need a process reset. A deliberate rebuild of your recruitment process that reconnects people, production, and capability.
Here’s how the mines that succeed actually do it:
1. Start with a diagnostic: identify where the real friction sits
When hiring slows down, leaders often blame the wrong things: a weak candidate pool, a slow HR team, or an ATS “nobody uses properly”. But these are downstream symptoms.
A real diagnostic maps the process as it happens on site, rather than how the policy describes it.
On most sites you’ll see:
- Hiring managers raising roles verbally because the form is too slow.
- Outdated job profiles being re-used.
- Corporate HR and site HR working in parallel rather than together.
- External recruiters briefed differently.
- Offers passing through five or six approvers, often off-site or on leave.
And the variation between different sites is striking. Each method does solve a local need but collectively, your organisation loses the ability to run a predictable, consistent recruitment process.
Justin Campbell, Head of Projects at Globe 24-7, sees this pattern repeatedly. “Different departments or jurisdictions develop their own ways of doing things,” he says, “which doesn’t necessarily deliver the right talent acquisition outcomes for the business.”
A proper diagnostic captures these realities and asks hiring leaders the right questions:
- What slows you down?
- What don’t you understand about the process?
- What, if removed, would make hiring easier?
The answers reveal the true friction points: unclear salary bands, long approval chains, inconsistent shortlists, limited manager training, and candidates being lost because no one followed up in time.
This baseline becomes the foundation for your reset.
2. Identify the structural gaps
Once the process is mapped, the same five structural gaps appear across almost every site:
- No single owner of the workflow.
Too many hand-offs mean nobody is accountable for moving roles forward. - Different processes by department.
Each team hires according to inherited habits rather than shared standards. - Misalignment between site HR and corporate HR.
Local practices evolve to solve local problems, but they clash with central policy. - Inconsistent communication with candidates.
Candidates drop out because they receive mixed messages about the role, timeline, or conditions. - Approvals and salary decisions stall.
No clear alignment on internal decision-making.
Now you’ve identified them, your reset will need to address them.
3. Create a future-state process that matches how mining works
A common mistake is to design a textbook HR process and apply it to a mine. But this rarely survives on-site reality. Mines operate around shutdowns, weather delays, FIFO cycles, shift patterns, expansions, and skills shortages that stretch across countries.
A future-state process must reflect this context.
It should include:
- One entry point for role requests
- Clear ownership of briefing and sourcing
- Mandatory vs flexible steps so hiring managers know what’s non-negotiable
- Short, predictable offer-approval chains
- A staffing model for surge periods
- One communication trail
- A single coordinator that bridges site and corporate
Importantly, it should also introduce two lanes:
A fast lane for high-volume operational roles
For trades, operators, engineers, planners, or roles where speed and clarity matter most.
A deliberate lane for leadership roles
Where assessment depth, cultural alignment, and long-term risk matter more than urgency.
This structure gives managers clarity and prevents every hire being treated the same way.
4. Fix the points that kill speed and consistency
Every mine has pressure points that slow hiring, and they rarely sit in sourcing.
Job profiles that are vague or outdated, create misalignment from the start. Salary uncertainty leaves managers unsure what to tell candidates. Offer approvals stretch across too many people and take too long. Communication breaks down between HQ and site. And information lives across email, Teams, phone calls, and personal notes, leaving no single source of truth.
These issues are not difficult to solve. If you standardise the top recurring job profiles, create clear salary bands, shorten the approval chain, and appoint one coordinator across site and corporate. By doing so, you can remove 30-40% of cycle time almost immediately. These changes have more impact than hiring additional recruiters. Rather than add effort, they remove friction.
5. Run capability training
Even the best-designed process collapses if people don’t have the capability to use it. Most mining leaders are technical specialists, not trained interviewers. Without support, your hiring reverts to gut feel, inconsistent questioning, and decisions that can’t be defended.
Training doesn’t need to be complex. A half-day session on structured interviews, behavioural assessment, panel calibration, and candidate communication can align an entire leadership group. It gives managers a shared method and reduces the reliance on informal judgement.
6. Create dashboards that make recruitment performance visible
Mining leaders respond to data that links directly to production. When they can see vacancy ageing, approval delays, candidate drop-offs, or interview-to-offer ratios, the conversation changes immediately.
Campbell sees the consequences of low visibility firsthand. “Some companies come to us with no visibility over hiring metrics or meaningful reporting,” he says. “They are literally working off a whiteboard in the HR office.”
Those that already use an ATS, still have widespread issues. “If they do have an ATS, it’s common for us to see companies without consistency in how their applicant tracking system is used, and very little training around it.” A reset doesn’t demand perfect compliance; it simply defines where key information is stored so that the process can function.
Remember, visibility drives accountability. When a GM sees that half the cycle time sits in offer approvals, the focus shifts away from labour market blame. Instead, toward fixing internal bottlenecks.
7. Roll out the process in stages
Mine sites rarely have clean windows for major change. Shutdowns, inspections, weather, and labour shortages disrupt even well-planned initiatives. This is why big bang rollouts almost always fail.
A reset works best when rolled out in stages:
- Stabilise the high-churn operational roles first
- Fix approvals and salary clarity
- Align corporate and site through a single coordinator
- Train hiring managers
- Then introduce more advanced elements like competency frameworks or psychometric tools.
This phased approach models the operational rhythm rather than competes with it.
8. Embed the reset into governance so it doesn’t unravel
Without governance, mines drift back into old habits. The operations that sustain a reset hold monthly recruitment reviews and run quarterly alignment sessions with corporate. They also examine each hire for speed and long-term success.
“A coordinated talent acquisition function isn’t about control,” says Campbell. “It’s about delivering hiring outcomes the business can rely on. Over time, recruitment becomes a stable operational rhythm rather than a reactive scramble.”
Reset and remove friction
For many mines, a broken recruitment process is normal. Hiring habits built for a smaller workforce go unchallenged, and outpaced by growth.
But a recruitment reset standardises the recruitment process. With clear visibility of structural gaps and friction points, HR teams can operate proactively
A reset brings your organisation back into alignment with the mine it is today. It reconnects your work with your workforce, and positions your mine for future success.
