In manufacturing, the margin for error is measured in minutes. An assembly line can’t pause politely when someone’s missing — it needs to keep moving, or else quotas are missed. Units are lost. Revenue evaporates.
I spent three years at General Motors as the head of candidate experience, and a problem we were constantly looking to solve was chronic understaffing at our plants, which can have upwards of 1,000 employees. At that scale, one person being out might not seem like a crisis. And it’s not — but in a tightly orchestrated environment, a single absence does set off a chain reaction. Coverage shifts. Line leaders jump in. Flex pools activate. Tempo slips.
Of course, there are systems in place to help buffer these gaps (like team leads filling in or temporary employees providing stopgaps). But when absenteeism rises above a certain threshold, especially when it’s unplanned, the pressure compounds. It’s when you move from a manageable gap to a structural risk. Once understaffing crosses into the double digits, production starts to slide. And while that doesn’t happen every day, it happens often enough to warrant serious attention. Because in a vehicular manufacturing plant where each unit might be worth $15,000–$20,000, missing quota even a handful of days in a year can really start to add up. I mean, you do the math.
But when absenteeism rises above a certain threshold, especially when it’s unplanned, the pressure compounds. It’s when you move from a manageable gap to a structural risk.
And while turnover in frontline roles is unavoidable, I also learned that there are some effective strategies — and technologies — to help mitigate it so your business doesn’t suffer. Let’s walk through what manufacturing staffing looks like, the fallout of being understaffed, and the tactics you can leverage to stabilize headcount in an environment where predictability equals profitability.
The reasons understaffing occurs in manufacturing.
Retention is the easy answer. But the deeper issue? Process fragility — and a structural misalignment between operational urgency and hiring capacity.
In most plants, line managers are accountable first and foremost for output. Recruiting and HR teams handle the mechanics of hiring: posting roles, screening resumes, scheduling interviews, onboarding, etc. But when gaps appear on the floor, it’s the line leaders who feel the heat. The disconnect between hiring systems and operational demand means plant leadership often flags shortages before the process even starts. That advance visibility, while critical, doesn’t always trigger an equally rapid response. Once the need is identified, slow requisition approvals, outdated software, and disconnected communication loops can bog things down.
Imagine walking into a plant at 5:45 a.m., thirty minutes before a shift starts. A team leader scans the call-in board — six absences. Three are in high-skill roles, and the float pool is already thin. She flags the need to HR, but the formal request will take days to process. In the meantime, she pulls in a team lead, reassigns a temporary worker from another line, and hopes no one else calls out. That’s not how you do strategic workforce planning. That’s how you move into crisis management before sunrise. This mismatch between who experiences the pain of understaffing and who owns the hiring process creates tension — and delay.
The result is a system that doesn’t move at the speed of plant operations. In environments where line speed is measured in seconds, a weeks-long time-to-fill can feel like a lifetime.
Hiring becomes reactive not because HR is disengaged, but because the entire pipeline is wired for compliance and process, not urgency. And because every plant and labor market operates under different conditions — from union constraints to local labor shortages — there's rarely a single playbook that works everywhere. Even when candidates make it to day one, many aren’t retained. Some plants report that to net six dependable workers by the end of the week, they need to hire 15 on Monday — a byproduct of rapid hiring pipelines clashing with misaligned expectations, low pay for temp roles, and the demanding nature of plant work.
According to Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, while 83% of manufacturing executives rank hiring as a top concern, only 26% believe their processes are fast enough to compete. That disconnect isn’t just operational, it’s systemic. Staffing gaps burden the team. Burden drives attrition. Attrition opens new gaps. The loop continues.
And all the while, daily operations depend on a workforce that’s increasingly hard to hire, retain, and train — while the pressure to hit production targets doesn’t ease up for a minute.
What actually happens when one — or 100 — employees are missing.
On paper, plants are built to withstand the occasional absence. At GM, we had a built-in buffer: team leads trained to step in, a float pool of flexible workers, even temporary employees who can plug urgent gaps. But those buffers are thin by design, and they aren’t meant to absorb sustained volume loss or high-skill gaps.
When someone calls out — or worse, when multiple people are out unexpectedly — the system starts to wobble. And wobble long enough, it drifts off track. The day begins with a coverage scramble; managers juggling which stations can’t run, which ones can limp by, and who might be able to do two jobs at once for an hour or two. That shuffling pushes everything out of rhythm.
Now scale that up.
If a plant runs 40 units an hour, and it’s missing 10% of its headcount across critical steps — welding, inspection, material handling — you don’t just slow down. You lose throughput entirely. And in high-margin operations where each vehicle represents $15,000–$20,000 in revenue, a few dozen missed units in a day is a six-figure problem. The reality is that these aren’t rare edge cases. Plants regularly experience call-outs tied to weather, illness, or fatigue — especially around holidays or peak volume periods. When those patterns overlap with attrition or training gaps, even well-run operations feel the pinch. Some try to claw back lost time by running overtime or skipping breaks. Others fall behind and stay behind.
In high-performing environments, there isn’t much slack. So when coverage falters, it can shift from delay to a cascade of delays. And if that cascade hits multiple areas, the ripple reaches everything from delivery windows to quality assurance to customer confidence. Consider this:
- A line is scheduled to produce 40 units an hour, over the course of an 8-hour shift.
- And the line is understaffed by 10%.
- The shortage in workers could equal about 30 fewer units over the course of the day.
- If each unit represents $20,000 in revenue, that’s a $600,000 loss in a single day.
Now, that’s an extreme example. But it’s illustrative of the pressure that plants face on literally a daily basis. And no matter what numbers you want to use, it’s pretty clear that staffing = profit.
When speed becomes the metric.
By this point, the challenge is clear: Even small gaps in staffing can compound into large-scale disruptions. But understanding the downstream impact isn't just about tallying missed units. It’s about seeing how each role, each person, contributes to the overall system’s ability to stay in sync.
When a line slows, it doesn’t just delay a shipment. It triggers a cascade: logistics needs to adjust outbound schedules, maintenance might defer non-urgent checks, and supervisors stretch their teams thinner. One absence becomes a series of micro-disruptions that extend well beyond the floor.
Understanding the downstream impact isn't just about tallying missed units. It’s about seeing how each role, each person, contributes to the overall system’s ability to stay in sync.
This is the tipping point where speed, not sentiment, becomes the metric that matters most. If the hiring process can’t match the tempo of daily operations, losses start to stack up. Not always dramatically, but consistently — a drip that turns into drag. Even an estimate like $900 in lost throughput per unstaffed hour becomes believable when you zoom out to see what those gaps delay, defer, or derail.
Which brings us to the next question: if coverage gaps are inevitable, how do you close them faster?
How automation in the hiring process helps make everything faster.
This is where hiring velocity matters. Not theoretical pipeline velocity — actual, measurable time-to-contribution. The types of metrics our peers in finance can follow and smile about.
In plants where time-to-fill can mean the difference between hitting delivery targets or losing six figures in revenue, the case for automation is straightforward: eliminate the drag. That drag often shows up in the form of repetitive manual tasks like interview coordination, pre-screening, and candidate reminders. None of these tasks require human judgment, but without automation, they still require human time.
At General Motors, for example, interview scheduling for salaried roles within our plants used to take several days. With conversational AI integrated into the process, it dropped to under 30 minutes — accelerating time-to-schedule by 85% and allowing recruiters to reallocate attention to engagement and readiness. You can read the full case study here. It was a fundamental shift for how we hired. The results moved beyond just faster hiring — and that’s an important call-out. Speed-to-hire is only useful if the staffing outcomes do not suffer. Rush hiring for the sake of it can result in bad fits. But done right, it’s a strategic advantage. At GM, plants staffed up faster. It’s a cliche, but this really was a classic win-win moment.
That kind of impact matters most when you’re running lean. I remember that one of our HR leaders noted the need to hire 15 people just to get six on the line by Friday. Fallout is a known factor. Speed and clarity reduce it, and so does automation that keeps things moving when human attention is divided.
Even simple automation — for things like scheduling, reminders, or form completion — reduces agency reliance and smooths the path from interest to onboarding. And when integrated with internal systems, it doesn’t just make hiring faster. It makes it sturdier and less vulnerable to human error, burnout, or bandwidth bottlenecks.
In an environment where line speed is measured in seconds, automation gives hiring teams the same kind of precision and momentum that operations teams have always depended on. This is where hiring velocity combined with quality matters. Getting people through the process, and into the work itself. Measurable, actual time-to-contribution numbers.
Automation doesn’t replace recruiters. It replaces the friction that slows them down. That means scheduling interviews without a six-email volley. Pre-screening without needing someone to comb through applications. And that time saved goes back into making critical decisions, like identifying the candidates who are more likely to show up (and stick around) long term.
Manufacturing is about momentum. Here’s how to keep it.
There’s a reason the best operators aren’t just hiring faster. They’re hiring smarter.
They’ve realized that a vacancy isn’t just a pause, it’s a pressure multiplier. Each unfilled role presses harder on those still working, creating drag across every workflow the moment momentum breaks. That’s why the smartest organizations apply the same principles they use in operations — process discipline, real-time responsiveness, systemic thinking — to their hiring strategy.
They’re mapping dependencies, measuring lag time, and quantifying the opportunity cost of every delayed conversation, every missed follow-up, every role that sits open too long. Because the cost of waiting doesn’t live in spreadsheets — it lives in missed shipments, overworked teams, and customers quietly considering their next supplier.
This is where the right technology can make a difference. By layering internal hiring and retention data with external labor market signals, organizations can identify which roles are most at risk of vacancy-driven disruption, and preemptively address them. That means fewer surprises, and a steadier rhythm on the floor.
And the biggest one: increased revenue.
Strategic talent acquisition, done right, isn’t a sunk cost. It’s a stabilizing force — a way to avoid being the company that always seems one technician short, one day behind, one order late. It’s the difference between managing gaps and eliminating them before they ripple. What I learned at GM is that sometimes you don’t actually need more job postings; you need fewer dead ends. Fewer silos. Fewer delays that turn manageable gaps into performance cliffs.
Because in production, time isn’t just money. It’s momentum. And when you lose it, you don’t just slow down — you slide backward.
