Workforce Due Diligence · 4–8 Weeks
The 240 people you need already have jobs
The community's packet shows 48,000 in the labor force, a 4% unemployment rate, and a technical college two exits away with a machining program. Every figure is accurate. None of it answers your question, which is whether you can put 240 qualified people on your floor across three shifts, on your ramp schedule, at the wage in your model — and keep them there through Month 18.
In a market with 4% unemployment, you aren't hiring from a labor pool. You're hiring from other employers. Your staffing plan is a competitive recruitment plan whether you designed it that way or not, and the relevant analysis is who else employs these occupations inside your commute shed, what they pay, and what happens to that wage when you enter at your scale.
Nobody wants to model that before the site decision. It's the model that decides whether the site works.
Why Labor Data Misleads
Every number you've been given describes a market. You're staffing a facility.
Those are different problems, and four gaps separate them.
Your job titles don't exist in the data
Published wage and employment data is organized by occupational classification. Your "Maintenance Technician III" spans two or three of them, and the published median for any one of them is wrong for your role — sometimes by six dollars an hour. Until someone builds a documented crosswalk from your actual classifications to the data, every figure downstream is describing a job you're not hiring for.
Total availability answers the wrong question
You don't need 240 people. You need 60 by Month 3, 140 by Month 9, and 240 by Month 18 — while every existing employer in the shed continues operating and hiring. The constraint is hiring velocity against a pool that's already employed, not the size of the pool. A market can have adequate labor and still be unable to deliver your ramp.
The commute shed is drawn as a circle
A 45-minute isoline is a geometry exercise. Actual commuting behavior is wage-elastic — people won't drive forty minutes for twenty-two dollars an hour and will drive an hour for thirty-four. Drawing the shed without reference to your wage produces a pool that doesn't exist at your offer.
Nobody screens for shift
The available pool for a 10pm start is a fraction of the day pool, and the differential required to fill it is rarely in the model. Second and third shift is where staffing plans fail quietly for two years before anyone calls it a location problem.
Four Phases, One Rule
Specify. Map. Price. Verdict.
The rule: every figure carries its source and its derivation. Where a number comes from a published dataset, it's labeled as such; where it comes from an employer or training provider conversation, it's labeled as such; where it's an estimate, the assumptions producing it are written down so your team can contest them. Nothing arrives as a confident number with an invisible method — the method is the deliverable.
Job Architecture & Requirement Definition
Your classifications, translated into something testable.
We work from your actual roles: duties as performed, required credentials and licensure, experience floor, what's genuinely trainable versus what must be hired experienced, shift structure and coverage model, headcount by role at each ramp milestone, and your target wage band per classification. Then we build the crosswalk — a documented mapping from each of your classifications to the occupational codes the data uses, with the judgment calls visible rather than buried. Where a role has no clean data equivalent, we say so and build the estimate from adjacent occupations and employer conversation rather than forcing a match that produces a tidy wrong number.
A role specification set, a documented classification crosswalk, and a phased headcount requirement by month.
Availability & Competitive Employer Mapping
Who employs these people now, and at what scale.
Occupation-level employment and concentration inside a commute shed drawn against your wage band, not a fixed radius. Then the employer census: who inside that shed employs your target occupations, roughly how many, and at what wage posture. Announced expansions, new entrants, and closures that will move the pool during your ramp — a competitor's 300-person announcement six months before your start date changes your answer entirely. The training pipeline gets tested against completions rather than capacity. A program with 90 seats and 34 annual completers, of whom most are already placed with local employers before graduation, is not 90 people. We also read hiring friction directly: posting volume and duration for your occupations in the shed, and time-to-fill signals where they're observable.
An occupation-level availability estimate with stated assumptions, a competitive employer map, a training pipeline read based on completions, and a hiring friction assessment.
Wage Benchmarking & Market Entry Effect
What it costs to hire, and what your entry does to that number.
Published wage data reconciled against employer-reported actuals for your classifications — because the published figure is a lagging average across a broader occupation than yours, and the two frequently diverge in the direction that matters. Total compensation, not base: shift differential, overtime expectation, benefits load, and any premium your credential requirements command. Then the entry effect. If your ramp represents a meaningful share of the occupation inside the shed, you are not a wage taker. Hiring 240 people out of an employed pool moves the local wage for that occupation, and it moves your own retention cost as incumbent employers respond. We model that at your scale rather than assuming today's median holds through your ramp.
A defensible fully-loaded wage estimate per classification, a comparison across candidate sites, and a modeled entry effect at your ramp.
Staffing Verdict & Mitigation
A hireability verdict per role, and what to do about the hard ones.
Each classification gets a verdict: achievable at your wage and ramp, achievable with a specified change, or not achievable in this market. Turnover sustainability modeled at Month 18 rather than Day 1 hiring feasibility — because the site that can fill 240 positions and then lose sixty a year to employers who were there first is a different site than the one that can hold them. Where a role fails, the mitigation options get costed: wage positioning, shift differential, geographic shift of the shed, a training partnership with a named provider and a realistic timeline, automation or role restructuring that changes the requirement, a staged ramp that fits actual market velocity, or — the honest one — a different market.
A hireability verdict per classification, a turnover and retention risk assessment, and a costed mitigation set with the wage or schedule implications of each.
Why It Matters Who's Asking
We don't recruit, and we don't sell you the fix
No staffing, recruiting, or placement revenue
We take no placement fee, no RPO arrangement, no contingency on hires, and no referral fee from staffing firms. When we tell you a role is fillable, we don't benefit from filling it. When we tell you it isn't, there's no product behind the conclusion.
No transaction commission, no incentive contingency
Our fee doesn't move based on which site you choose or whether you proceed. "You cannot staff this in this market at this wage" is an available conclusion and sometimes the most valuable one in the engagement.
We've written the labor market pitch you're about to be shown
Hyphen has an economic development practice. We've built the workforce sections of community packets, chosen which figures to lead with, and know exactly which numbers are selected because they're favorable rather than because they're relevant. That's what makes reading one useful.
The method is visible
Any availability estimate rests on contestable assumptions. Ours are written down and attributed, so your operations team can push on them and your board can see what the number depends on. An estimate you can't interrogate isn't diligence.
Case Study
Workforce carried the highest weight in the decision — 25%
On a $75M advanced manufacturing search, workforce depth and skills was the single most heavily weighted criterion in the client's decision framework — above utilities, logistics, and incentives.
We validated labor shed depth for CNC machinists, electromechanical assemblers, and quality technicians inside a 45-minute commute, then modeled turnover sustainability at Month 18 rather than stopping at Day 1 hiring feasibility. The distinction changed the ranking.
The facility opened with 150+ positions and the client subsequently retained us for expansion planning, using the workforce baseline built during the original search.
Read the full case study →How We Work
Structured to fit inside a live decision
Weeks, not quarters
Four to eight weeks fits ahead of an LOI or a board vote. One honest caveat: where employer and training provider conversations are central to the answer, scheduling them is partly outside our control. We'll tell you in Week 1 if that's pushing the timeline and give you the interim read rather than holding the deliverable.
Fixed fee, never hourly
You know the number before we start, and it doesn't move when scope clarifies.
Principal-led
The person on your first call is the person having the training provider and workforce board conversations. These are relationship conversations, and they don't delegate well.
Confidentiality by default
Diligence runs under a project code with your identity withheld until you choose to disclose it. On workforce questions this matters more than on most — an identified inquiry changes what a local employer or provider is willing to say.
Assumptions stated, always
Every derived figure carries its method. If you disagree with a commute assumption or a participation rate, you can see it and change it, and the model recalculates.
You own everything
The crosswalk, the employer map, the wage workbook, the mitigation models. When you staff the second shift expansion in three years, you're not starting over.
Fit
This engagement fits a specific situation
It's built for you if:
- You're approaching a site commitment and the staffing plan hasn't been independently tested against the local market.
- Your role mix includes skilled or credentialed positions where a shortage is plausible rather than theoretical.
- You're running multiple shifts, and shift feasibility hasn't been analyzed separately from total availability.
- Your hire count is large relative to the occupation in the market, which makes you a participant in the wage rather than an observer of it.
- Your board or investment committee will require a documented basis for the labor assumptions in the pro forma.
An honest note on where it doesn't fit:
If you need executive or specialized recruiting, that's search work and a search firm serves you better.
If you're setting compensation strategy at an existing facility rather than testing a location, that's a compensation consultancy.
If you're an EDO or community wanting labor market analysis built for recruitment positioning rather than corporate diligence, that's our Workforce Assessment engagement — a different product with a different audience, not the same work relabeled.
And if you're hiring twenty people in a metro of two million, the market will absorb you and you don't need this. Say so on the fit call.
Often Paired With
Frequently combined
Corporate Site Search
Where this work sits as a diligence phase inside a full multi-market search.
Utility Readiness Advisory
The other diligence stream that most often changes a site ranking late.
Incentive Package Analysis
Workforce training grants and their job-count triggers are exactly the terms this analysis tells you whether you can hit.
Further Reading
What 4,000 Live Job Postings Tell Me That Your Workforce Study Can't
BLS workforce data is 12–18 months old by the time it reaches a conference room. Here's how live job posting intelligence fills that gap — and what it reveals about wage competition, hiring velocity, and labor market direction.
White PaperThe Site Selector's Playbook
The validation-first methodology used to advise $50M–$3B+ industrial location decisions — a framework that eliminates fatal flaws before they become expensive mistakes.
IncentivesStop Comparing Incentive Packages by Face Value
The conventional approach to evaluating economic development incentives — comparing total dollar values — is the wrong analysis. Here's a better framework built around timing, deliverability, and risk.
Start Here
Before the pro forma locks the wage, test the wage
Twenty minutes, no cost. Tell us the roles, the headcount, the ramp, and the markets. We'll tell you which classifications look risky, whether four weeks or eight is the right scope, and whether you need this at all.
Schedule a Fit CallOr email [email protected]