Per-MW pricing, regional variance, and cost drivers for owners scoping hyperscale & AI builds.
Salary benchmarks across the 14 mission-critical disciplines.
Hire Process Plant Managers who run concentrators, hydromet plants, smelters, and refineries — comminution, flotation, and leach circuits, ramp-up to nameplate, metallurgical accounting you can reconcile, and reagent and energy cost discipline on MSHA- and OSHA-regulated sites. Operating history verified by reference.
A structured process for the plant leadership hire — where the wrong choice surfaces as recovery you can’t reconcile, a ramp curve that stalls below nameplate, or a reagent bill nobody owns.
30-minute call. Align on flowsheet and commodity — comminution, flotation, hydromet, pyromet — plant state, ramp-up or steady-state, and start date.
Within 2 weeks we introduce 3–5 Process Plant Managers with named circuits behind them, not generic industrial operations backgrounds. References from mine general managers, corporate metallurgy, and maintenance leadership included.
Every placement carries a replacement guarantee. If the hire doesn’t stick, we replace them — that’s true across every engagement model we offer.
A manager who has owned a grinding-flotation circuit or an SX-EW train reads a shift report differently than one who has run discrete manufacturing. We shortlist plant managers who have carried throughput, recovery, and availability targets on real circuits — and verify the numbers by reference.
Concentrators, heap leach and SX-EW, autoclaves, smelters, and conversion plants fail in different ways. As part of our mining and critical minerals recruiting practice, we match candidates to your flowsheet and plant state — commissioning handover, ramp-up, turnaround, or steady-state optimization.
New plants are won or lost between commissioning handover and nameplate. We ask references how the ramp actually went — production curve against plan, met accounting standing up, crew training and turnover — so the manager on your shortlist has taken a plant to nameplate, not just kept one there.
Named plants and circuits managed — crushing and grinding, flotation, thickening and filtration, leach, SX-EW, smelting and refining — with throughput and recovery performance.
Direct history taking plants from commissioning handover to nameplate — ramp curves, deficiency closeout with the EPCM, and operational readiness plans they wrote.
Met balance discipline — sampling, mass balance, reconciliation to mine plan and to smelter or refinery returns — and what they did when the numbers didn’t close.
Reagent, grinding media, energy, and maintenance cost per tonne — with budgets owned, variance explained, and unit-cost trends they can defend.
MSHA training current where the plant sits on mine property, OSHA and process safety exposure where it applies, and incident history discussed factually with references.
Rotating-crew leadership, supervisor bench development, and a working relationship with planned maintenance — availability targets, shutdown scope discipline, defect elimination.
Nameplate dates don’t wait on hiring. Tell us the flowsheet — we’ll shortlist plant managers who have run it before.
Time to shortlist is typically 2 weeks. Total time to placement is typically 3–4 weeks. Narrow asks — say, autoclave history on refractory gold or a lithium conversion ramp — can add a week of targeted sourcing.
Direct-hire search is a 20% success fee with no upfront fee on single roles — you pay when the hire starts. For multi-hire programs, embedded recruiting and RPO price as a monthly volume-based fee plus a success fee — typically well below stacked contingency fees at volume. Leadership and executive searches route through executive search.
Most US markets run $150,000–$190,000 base. Managers of large or complex plants — multi-circuit concentrators, smelters, plants in ramp-up — typically run $185,000–$230,000, with site premiums at remote operations and bonus tied to production and cost.
A Process Engineer designs, models, and optimizes the circuit — flowsheets, mass balances, debottlenecking studies. A Process Plant Manager owns the plant: production and recovery targets, met accounting, crews across rotating shifts, cost per tonne, and the maintenance interface. Most plants need both; they are not the same hire.
Yes. Every placement carries a replacement guarantee, regardless of engagement model. If a placement doesn’t work out inside the guarantee window, we rerun the search and replace them at no additional placement fee.
Yes. Plant managers plus mill superintendents, metallurgists, process engineers, and maintenance leadership route through embedded recruiting or RPO — one accountable recruiting team across the operation.
30-minute scoping conversation. We’ll map your flowsheet, plant state, cost pressures, and ramp calendar — then start sourcing Process Plant Managers with verified history in them.
