A straight-line audit of your hiring and retention gaps — built on deep experience inside operations and supply chain, and the unfiltered view of why your best people leave and your next hire never quite fits.
You've posted the jobs. You've worked with agencies. You've promoted from within when you could and settled for less than you needed when you couldn't. The real problem isn't the labor market — it's that your hiring process was built for a different era and your retention gaps have never been diagnosed with any real precision.
Your intake process is screening for the candidate who interviews well, not the one who stays and performs. Those two profiles are rarely the same person in operations.
They don't complain. They don't give real answers in exit interviews. They get recruited out by someone who positioned the opportunity better than you did. And you never know why until it's too late.
Compensation is a threshold, not a differentiator. The companies winning the ops talent war in 2026 are winning on clarity of role, culture of accountability, and speed of decision — not total comp.
Turnover concentrates downward. The frontline supervisor absorbs the disruption of every bad hire and early exit above and below them. That's not a people problem — it's a systems problem.
This engagement is narrow by design. I work exclusively in operations, supply chain, and manufacturing — because that's where 30 years of pattern recognition actually means something.
Every engagement ends with a written action plan that your leadership team can put to work immediately — not a slide deck full of observations that someone files and forgets.
A line-by-line review of how you attract, screen, and select ops talent — with specific gaps identified at each stage. You'll see exactly where the wrong candidates are getting through and where the right ones are falling off.
An honest read of why your people leave — not the exit interview answers, but the real patterns underneath them. Compensation, management quality, onboarding, role clarity, and growth path all get examined.
A plain-language document your leadership team can use the day it lands in your inbox. Prioritized by impact and sequenced by what you can fix immediately versus what takes a quarter to build.
A look at how your company reads to ops and supply chain candidates in your market — and what the highest-performing companies in your sector are doing differently to win the talent they need.
A check-in call 30 days after plan delivery to review early implementation and answer questions that came up in the field. The plan doesn't go stale and neither do you.
Direct email access to me for two weeks post-engagement. Running into resistance on a specific recommendation? Need a gut check before a key hire decision? Send it.
This is not a drawn-out consulting engagement. It's a focused sprint — designed to get in, find the real problems, and hand you a plan that works for your operation specifically.
You complete a structured intake questionnaire covering your current team structure, recent hiring history, turnover data, and the specific roles and gaps that are keeping you up at night. I review your job descriptions, your current hiring process documentation, and any exit interview data you have. If you don't have formal documentation — that's fine and that's telling.
A 90-minute Zoom session with you and up to two members of your leadership team. We work through the patterns I've identified from your intake, and I ask the questions your team has probably never been asked directly — about what your best people share, what your departing people share, and where your hiring process is optimized for the wrong outcome.
I build your written action plan — mapping specific, sequenced recommendations to each gap identified. Recruiting strategy, onboarding gaps, manager-level retention levers, employer positioning, and the two or three highest-impact changes you can make in the next 90 days.
A 60-minute plan review call where I walk your team through every recommendation, answer questions, and help you prioritize based on your current capacity and urgency. You leave with a document that works as a roadmap, not a report that sits in a folder.
Both tiers include the full four-week engagement and written action plan. The Workshop tier adds a half-day on-site or virtual session to train your hiring managers on the new process.
If you'd prefer to hand the search off entirely, I'm also a recruiter with Goodwin Recruiting — one of the top ops and supply chain search firms in the country. I can run the search for you from start to finish.
If after the Leadership Diagnostic Call you don't believe the engagement will deliver actionable insight your team can use — say so. I'll refund your investment in full. I'd rather lose the fee than deliver a report that collects dust.
HR consultants typically focus on compliance, benefits, and policy. This engagement focuses entirely on the recruiting and retention mechanics specific to operations and manufacturing — the hiring patterns, the candidate pipeline, the manager behavior, and the employer positioning that determine whether you keep good people or keep replacing them. It's a narrower focus with a much more specific output.
No. Many of the companies that benefit most from this engagement don't have formal process documentation — that gap is often part of the diagnosis. You need to be able to share your hiring history, your current job descriptions, and an honest account of your turnover patterns. I'll help structure the rest.
Not at all. Staffing agencies fill seats. This engagement diagnoses why the seats keep opening up. The two are complementary. In fact, many of my recommendations help companies get better results from the agency relationships they already have.
It's a 30-minute conversation — no pitch, no pressure. You share what's going on with your hiring and retention situation, I ask a few clarifying questions, and we both decide whether the engagement makes sense. If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you that and point you toward something that is.
The Assessment tier is fully remote — all calls are via Zoom and all documents are delivered digitally. The Workshop tier can be done virtually or on-site depending on your location and preference. On-site engagements may include a travel cost depending on distance.
I'm James Becton. I've spent my career inside manufacturing, operations, and supply chain — which means I've sat in the hiring manager's chair, I've been on the floor when the wrong hire cost a team six months of productivity, and I now work as a recruiter placing talent in these same environments. I know what good looks like from every angle.
I built The Elevated Edge to make that inside access work for people on both sides of the equation — the professionals trying to land the right role, and the companies trying to build and keep the right team. This B2B engagement is the company-side of that same coin.
I work exclusively in operations, manufacturing, and supply chain. Not because I can't help elsewhere — because deep, focused experience in one industry is worth more than generalist advice spread thin across a dozen.
"The companies that win the ops talent war aren't paying more. They're hiring smarter and keeping longer — and those are both learnable systems."
— James Becton, MBA · The Elevated Edge
30-minute call · No pitch · Straight answers