Yard notes
Hiring on the repair line: what we actually look for
Request pricing
Everything marked with a star is required. The rest helps us quote faster.
Every new person asks the same question in week one: how do you know? The answer takes about four months to become automatic and about twenty minutes to explain.
Repair line and sort line work is skilled, physical and repetitive in a specific way — the motions repeat, the decisions do not. That combination is unusual and it means the people who thrive are not always the ones a CV would suggest.
What does not predict success
- Woodworking experience. Useful, occasionally counter-productive. Cabinetmakers want to repair pallets properly, which is the wrong instinct when the unit is worth nine dollars.
- Raw speed. A fast grader making 8% errors destroys more value than a slow one making 1%.
- Physical strength. Real but over-weighted. The line is designed so that nothing needs to be lifted awkwardly; the job is endurance, not power.
- Prior warehouse work. Neutral. Some of our best hires came from kitchens and from auto shops.
What does
- Comfort with a judgement call that has no confirmation. A grader makes 800 decisions a shift and gets feedback on maybe three. People who need to know they were right find that genuinely difficult.
- Willingness to be wrong out loud. Our spot-check process finds errors. The people who stay are the ones who ask what they missed rather than explaining why it was borderline.
- Pattern noticing. The ability to look at the fourth pallet from a new customer and say “their forklift drivers are rough”. It cannot be taught quickly and it is worth a lot.
- Consistency under boredom. Hour five is where accuracy falls. Some people flatten out; some do not. It has nothing to do with attitude.
How training actually runs
| Stage | Duration | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Shadow | Week 1 | Stands with a grader. Calls every pallet out loud before the grader does. |
| Assisted | Weeks 2 – 4 | Grades with a second pair of eyes. Every disagreement is discussed on the spot. |
| Supervised | Weeks 5 – 10 | Grades independently. 15% spot-check rather than the standard 3%. |
| Independent | Week 11+ | Standard 3% spot-check. Accuracy tracked individually. |
| Line qualified | ~4 months | Accuracy at target for six consecutive weeks. |
Four months sounds long for a job that looks simple. It is four months because the failure mode we are training out is confidence, not ignorance. A new grader who is 92% accurate and certain is more dangerous than one who is 88% accurate and asking.
What we pay and why
Grading is the best-paid non-management role in this yard, ahead of drivers and well ahead of the repair stations. That is not generosity — it is the only role where individual accuracy moves a six-figure number.
A one-point improvement in sort accuracy across our volume is worth roughly $34,000 a year in correctly routed value. Paying to attract and keep people who are good at it is the cheapest capital investment we have ever made, and it is why our grader turnover is under 8% while the industry's warehouse average is several times that.
The thing we tell everyone in week one
You are not sorting pallets. You are deciding, eight hundred times a shift, whether a piece of wood gets another two years of work or gets destroyed. Get it right and you keep lumber out of a grinder and money in the business. That framing is not motivational fluff — it is literally the job description, and people who hear it that way tend to stay.