HR Manager - Manufacturing Operations

Key Responsibilities:

Site HR Leadership & Workforce Strategy:

• Serve as the senior HR leader for the MMC manufacturing facility.
• Partner with Plant Leadership to align workforce planning with production forecasts and expansion plans.
• Develop scalable HR processes to support rapid growth from 500 to 1,000+ employees.
• Drive workforce structure, headcount planning, and labor allocation aligned to shift-based production demands.
• Support organizational design and leadership capability as the facility scales.
• Reinforce structured, production-oriented workforce management practices.

Talent Management & Performance Discipline:

• Lead execution of performance management cycles, ensuring completion, calibration, and accountability.
• Facilitate structured talent reviews and succession planning for frontline, supervisor, and management roles.
• Drive adoption of career frameworks and development planning within a production workforce.
• Strengthen performance documentation practices across frontline supervisors.
• Build supervisor capability in coaching, feedback, and performance accountability.
• Ensure training compliance and workforce capability tracking aligned to production standards.

Talent Acquisition & Workforce Scaling:

• Oversee recruiting strategy and execution for high-volume hourly hiring and skilled production roles.
• Partner with Corporate Talent Acquisition to align hiring plans with workforce forecasts.
• Monitor and improve hiring metrics including time-to-fill, quality of hire, early-stage turnover, and ramp-to-productivity.
• Ensure structured interview and selection processes are consistently applied.
• Support workforce forecasting aligned to production growth and expansion timelines.

Employee & Labor Relations Leadership:

• Serve as the primary advisor to plant leadership on all employee and labor relations matters within a non-union manufacturing environment.
• Ensure consistent, fair, and legally compliant application of company policies, procedures, and disciplinary standards.
• Lead and/or oversee workplace investigations, ensuring timely resolution, proper documentation, and mitigation of organizational risk.
• Oversee investigation protocols that align with corporate standards and the operational cadence of a shift-based manufacturing environment.
• Proactively identify employee relations trends and workforce risks, including attendance patterns, supervisor inconsistency, turnover hotspots, and morale indicators.
• Implement preventive strategies to mitigate risk, including supervisor coaching, policy clarification, and targeted training.
• Monitor ER-related metrics (disciplinary trends, turnover, absenteeism, complaints) and report insights to plant and corporate HR leadership.
• Ensure compliance with federal, state, and local employment regulations impacting manufacturing operations (wage & hour, FMLA, ADA, OSHA coordination with EHS, etc.).
• Partner with legal and corporate HR when escalation is required.
• Develop frontline supervisor capability in managing performance, attendance, conduct, and documentation with consistency and confidence.
• Train supervisors on progressive discipline, corrective action processes, and difficult employee conversations.
• Support leaders in navigating high-risk employee relations scenarios while maintaining partnership and operational stability.
• Promote a fair and respectful workplace culture that minimizes union vulnerability through proactive engagement, transparency, and policy consistency.
• Ensure leaders understand early indicators of employee dissatisfaction and respond appropriately.
• Partner with plant leadership to reinforce positive employee engagement practices aligned with manufacturing discipline.
• Maintain readiness to respond effectively to labor-related risk exposure.
• Support the cultural transition from construction-based workforce norms to a structured manufacturing environment.
• Align employee relations practices with the repeatable, shift-based cadence of manufacturing operations.

Learning & Workforce Capability Development

• Collaborate with the Education team and operations leadership to support site training programs, including onboarding, production bootcamps, skills certification, and supervisor development.
• Contribute to aligning workforce development initiatives with production, safety, quality, and operational excellence.
• Support scalable training processes, including skills gap identification, structured documentation, and coordination of a site-wide training schedule.
• Support tracking and maintaining accurate workforce capability data, including certification status, training completion, and time-to-productivity metrics.
• Partner with Education and Operations to ensure training compliance requirements are met and documentation standards are upheld.

Cultural & Operational Transition:

• Support the continued transition from a project/construction-based workforce model to a disciplined, production-driven manufacturing culture.
• Reinforce standardization, process adherence, and operational accountability.
• Partner with operations leaders to drive consistency in shift management and workforce expectations.
• Strengthen aligbment between production metrics and workforce performance expectations.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of progressive HR experience with a bachelor's degree.
• 3+ years supporting manufacturing, industrial, or production-based workforce environments.
• Experience supporting hourly-heavy workforces (300+ hourly employees strongly preferred).
• Significant employee relations experience in non-union environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading investigations and mitigating workforce risk.
• Experience executing performance management and succession planning processes.
• Experience supporting or overseeing high-volume recruiting.
• Demonstrated success coaching frontline supervisors in performance discipline and documentation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience serving as the senior HR leader at a plant or site level.
• Experience supporting workforce growth or facility expansion.
• Experience aligning workforce planning with operational forecasting.
• Experience in shift-based manufacturing environments.

Leadership Profile:

The successful candidate will be:

• Operationally grounded and comfortable on the plant floor.
• Structured, disciplined, and process-oriented.
• Confident managing complex employee relations matters.
• Skilled at building credibility with production leaders.
• Capable of scaling systems and teams during rapid growth.
• Able to balance strategic workforce planning with tactical execution.
• Proactive in identifying workforce risk and union vulnerability signals.

Career Progression:

This role is expected to evolve into the Site HR Director as the MMC facility expands to 1,000+ employees. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to build and lead the HR function for a large-scale manufacturing operation.

Abilities:

• Exposure to computer screens for an extended period of time.
• Sitting for extended periods of time.
• Reach by extending hands or arms in any direction.
• Have finger dexterity in order to manipulate objects with fingers rather than whole hands or arms, for example, using a keyboard.
• Listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
• Apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Identify and understand the speech of another person