Composite example · Architecture → Intervention → Result
“We cannot find people” is almost never the problem
A precision manufacturer under institutional ownership needed to double direct-labor capacity. Every conversation began with the wage. The read found the constraint somewhere else entirely — and the actions that resolved it cost almost nothing.
This page answers one question: When an enterprise says it cannot hire, where is the economic truth — and what does the operating system do with it?
The stated problem
“We cannot find machine operators.” Every conversation started and ended there.
What the numbers said
The requisition count was not the binding constraint. Time-to-productive was. Hires arrived and then waited on setup availability, so each new operator consumed senior-operator hours before returning any.
Where the loss was booked
The loss did not appear in a recruiting line. It appeared as overtime, expedite freight, and jobs held for the three people qualified to set up the constrained cells.
The single number that reframed it
Cost per productive operator — fully loaded through the first ninety days — was several multiples of the posted wage gap the team was arguing about.
Three commute rings, each with a different supply, a different cost to reach and a different retention behavior. Select a ring or an institution to open its record.
Pipeline institutions
0–25 minutes
The dependable core
- What it supplies
- Most of the current workforce lives here. It is the only band where second and third shift hold without a wage premium.
- What it costs to reach
- No commute premium. Referral hiring works. Onboarding no-show risk is lowest.
- Retention behavior
- Strongest. Tenure past twelve months is materially higher than in the outer bands.
The same three rings, on the ground
The drawn figure holds the logic; the map holds the geography. Both read from one record.
0–25 minutes · within about 13 miles
The dependable core
- What it supplies
- Most of the current workforce lives here. It is the only band where second and third shift hold without a wage premium.
- What it costs
- No commute premium. Referral hiring works. Onboarding no-show risk is lowest.
- What it retains
- Strongest. Tenure past twelve months is materially higher than in the outer bands.
Every conversation began with the wage, so the wage is worth reading properly. Move the selector and watch the only two figures that decide capacity move with it.
Wage position selector
Where the enterprise chooses to sit in the local market
50thpercentile
Hourly rate
$19.05per hour
The reference position — the market midpoint.
Days to first start
47elapsed days
Offer acceptance 58% at this position.
12-month turnover risk
34.0%separations
The reference separation rate.
The market midpoint. This is the reference position every other scenario is measured against.
Wage anchors: BLS May 2023 Dayton–Kettering, OH MSA (19430), operator family, uprated 11% cumulatively to a 2026 planning basis on an ECI trajectory. Acceptance, elapsed days and the 12-month separation rate are modeled planning elasticities, not measured facts — one completed hiring cycle replaces them with actuals.
The wage is only one line of the bill. Read the premium, the open seats and the leavers in one total, and the cheaper path is rarely the lower rate.
Sensitivity — total annual sourcing cost
What a hiring year costs when wage premium and time to fill are read together
Each cell is one year of total sourcing cost for 100 hires: the wage premium above the market midpoint, the contribution lost while seats stay open, and the replacement of the cohort that separates inside twelve months. Rows are the wage position; columns are the process running faster or slower than the modeled days.
| Wage position | −20% days | −10% days | As modeled | +10% days | +25% days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25th$17.10 /hr | |||||
| 40th$18.27 /hr | |||||
| 50thmidpoint$19.05 /hr | |||||
| 60th$20.39 /hr | |||||
| 75th$22.40 /hr | |||||
| 90th$26.15 /hr |
Lighter = lower totalDarker = higher total
The reading
Across the modeled range, time to fill moves total annual sourcing cost by $882K and wage position by $550K. The cheapest cell on the grid is the 50th percentile at −20% days ($2.07M); the most expensive is the 90th at +25% days ($3.55M). Paying a premium is only the cheaper path when the days and the leavers it removes are counted in the same total.
Cell detail
Select any cell to open its three cost lines and its difference against the midpoint at the modeled days.
Basis: BLS May 2023 Dayton–Kettering, OH MSA (19430) operator wage percentiles, uprated 11% cumulatively to a 2026 planning basis; 2,080 straight-time hours. Acceptance, days to fill and 12-month separation are modeled planning elasticities, replaced by the Post-Hire Worksheet actuals once one hiring cycle is measured.
- 01Requisition to offer ran through nine hand-offs across four functions, and no one owned the whole line.
- 02Two approval steps existed only to confirm an approval already given upstream.
- 03The written job requirements had not been rewritten in years; they screened out the exact population the region actually produces.
- 04Background and drug screening ran sequentially rather than in parallel, adding days for no added assurance.
- 05Onboarding began on a fixed calendar date, so a candidate who accepted on day two waited up to three weeks to start.
- 06No step in the process created a trained setter — the constraint that everything else queued behind.
The brown paper shows what happens. The SIPOC states what the line is: where it starts, where it ends, who supplies it, who receives it, and one owner accountable across all of it. Without this boundary, every improvement argument becomes a departmental one.
Boundary — starts
A production plan change creates a validated direct-labor requirement.
Boundary — ends
The hire is productive at standard on a qualified machine and retained at day 90.
Owner
One value stream owner for the hiring line (not recruiting, not the plant alone).
Process 01
Define the requirement
- Supplier
- Production planning
- Value stream owner
- Finance
- Input
- Demand plan and takt
- Current setter and operator capacity
- Approved wage band
- Output
- Written requirement with skill floor and start date
- Customer
- Talent acquisition
- Hiring manager
- Measure
- Requirements released complete on first pass (%)
Process 02
Attract and source
- Supplier
- Technical colleges and workforce centers
- Referring employees
- Job boards
- Input
- Role posting written to the skill floor
- Wage position vs market percentile
- Output
- Qualified applicant flow
- Customer
- Screening
- Measure
- Qualified applicants per open seat per week
Process 03
Screen and assess
- Supplier
- Talent acquisition
- Hiring manager
- Assessment instruments
- Input
- Written job requirements
- Structured interview guide and scorecard
- Output
- Ranked, evidenced shortlist
- Customer
- Interview panel
- Measure
- Screen-to-interview conversion and rater agreement
Process 04
Decide and offer
- Supplier
- Interview panel
- Compensation
- Value stream owner
- Input
- Scorecard evidence
- Wage band and premium rules
- Output
- Signed offer with a firm start date
- Customer
- Candidate
- Plant scheduler
- Measure
- Offer acceptance rate and decision-to-offer days
Process 05
Onboard to standard
- Supplier
- HR onboarding
- Safety
- Cell lead
- Input
- I-9 / W-4 and background clearance
- Machine and safety curriculum
- Output
- Cleared, badged, safety-qualified new hire
- Customer
- Cell lead
- Setter
- Measure
- Offer-to-start days and day-1 readiness complete (%)
Process 06
Qualify and retain
- Supplier
- Setters
- Cell lead
- Training pathway
- Input
- Setup capacity
- Sign-off standard per machine
- Career ladder
- Output
- Operator productive at standard, retained at day 90
- Customer
- Production
- The customer of the product
- Measure
- Time-to-productive and day-90 retention at standard
Measure pair for the whole line: Lead time (requirement to productive) paired with quality (day-90 retention at standard).
Non-value-add
Duplicate approvals and re-keyed candidate data
Days of elapsed time and two systems that disagreed about the same candidate.
Non-value-add
Sequential screening and paperwork collection
Offer-to-start stretched past the window in which candidates stay available.
Non-value-add
Requirements that over-specified experience
The largest local supply — trained entrants — was filtered out before a human read the application.
Bottleneck
Setup-capable operators
The true constraint. Three people gated schedule, training and quality response for the whole plant.
Bottleneck
Fixed-date onboarding
A queue of accepted candidates waiting, with the highest drop-out rate in the process.
Bottleneck
One person owning both sourcing and interviewing
Throughput capped by a single calendar regardless of demand.
Strengths
- Real technical work that skilled people want to do.
- A dependable workforce core living inside twenty-five minutes.
- Leaders who knew the shop cold and answered questions with facts.
Weaknesses
- No owner of the hiring line end to end.
- No internal progression path, so the only way up was out.
- Requirements written for the market of a decade ago.
Opportunities
- Two nearby institutions able to supply a scheduled intake rather than a scramble.
- A registered apprenticeship structure already available to carry the internal ladder.
- Parallelizing screening removes days without spending a dollar.
Threats
- Larger employers on the same corridor setting the wage.
- Knowledge concentrated in three retirement-eligible operators.
- Wage inflation absorbing the growth thesis if the answer stays “pay more, farther out.”
A hiring plan is a conversion claim. Enter the volume each channel can actually put into the line and the rate at which each stage passes candidates through; the model states what that produces in retained hires and where the mix falls short. When the number is short, the answer is usually the weakest conversion, not more volume.
| Channel | Sourced | Screen % | Interview % | Offer % | Accept % | 90-day % | Offers | Starts | Retained | Target | Gap | Remove channel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 12 | 11 | −1 | |||||||||
| 18 | 13 | 11 | −5 | |||||||||
| 15 | 10 | 7 | −5 | |||||||||
| 12 | 7 | 5 | −5 | |||||||||
| All channels | 780 | Blended sourced → retained: 4.4% · 22.9 sourced per retained hire | 60 | 42 | 34 | 50 | −16 | |||||
The number the plan has to deliver in this period.
Top of funnel required
1,144
Sourced candidates needed at the current blended conversion of 4.4%.
Plan against target
−16
The channel mix is short of the per-channel targets. Fix the weakest conversion before adding volume.
Assumptions only — nothing is saved. Replace them with your own stage history before the plan is committed.
| # | Action | Why it ranks here | Horizon | Owner | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Name one owner for the whole requisition-to-productive line. | Nothing else in the list holds without a single accountable line owner. | 0–30 days | Operations leader | Weekly review of time-to-productive, by cell. |
| 02 | Rewrite the job requirements to the population the region actually produces. | Removes the filter that was rejecting the largest available supply. | 0–30 days | Line owner with the lead setter | Qualified-applicant rate per posting. |
| 03 | Collapse the nine hand-offs and run screening in parallel. | Buys back days of elapsed time with no added spend and no lost assurance. | 0–30 days | Line owner | Offer-to-start days. |
| 04 | Move to rolling start dates. | Removes the queue where accepted candidates were lost. | 30–60 days | Plant supervision | Accepted-offer fall-off rate. |
| 05 | Stand up a documented setter progression on a registered apprenticeship structure. | Attacks the real bottleneck, and converts the ladder from intention to standard. | 60–90 days | Operations leader and the college partner | Count of setup-qualified operators. |
| 06 | Sign a scheduled intake calendar with the two anchor institutions. | Turns the annual scramble into a known, dated supply. | 60–90 days | Line owner | Co-op and completer starts per term. |
| 07 | Put the whole line on the ARC™ loop. | Analyze, Refine, Commit on a cadence, so the gains do not decay after the first quarter. | Ongoing | Operations leader | Cycle completed each quarter, with recorded decisions. |
Architecture
The hiring line was treated as a value stream with one owner, a measured lead time and a named constraint — not as a recruiting activity.
Intervention
Economic truth pass, brown paper of the current state, NVA and bottleneck identification, SWOT of the process, and a ranked action set with owners and measures.
Result
The argument moved off wage and onto lead time and setter capacity. The measures the enterprise now reviews weekly — time-to-productive, offer-to-start, setup-qualified count — did not exist before the read.
Evidence tier: composite example. This record is assembled from the pattern of the work and is de-identified — no client, city or institution is named. Verified client case studies and anonymous client stories are labelled separately.
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