You can relocate machinery. You can move inventory. You can build a new facility from the ground up. But that’s often the one thing that doesn’t migrate as planned: a workforce equipped to run it.
A KPMG survey of 275 Canadian manufacturing companies published July 7, 2026 found that 42% have already moved production to the United States or are actively considering doing so. Of those planning the move, 77% expect to complete the transition within two years. The motivations are well understood: tariff exposure, trade uncertainty, lower operating costs, a more favourable tax environment, and the need to be closer to US customers. What’s less discussed is what happens once the facility is ready to run and the workforce isn’t.
The manufacturers navigating cross-border expansion successfully are the ones that figured out early that people are the hardest part of the move. Getting that wrong doesn’t just slow the launch. It compounds across every production milestone that follows.
A New Facility Doesn’t Come With a Workforce
Entering a new US market means entering an entirely new labour market: with its own wage expectations, hiring competition, trades availability, and dynamics that may bear little resemblance to what a Canadian operations team is accustomed to.
The roles that manufacturers most need when launching a new US facility are almost always the hardest to find: maintenance technicians, industrial electricians, CNC machinists, instrumentation specialists, production supervisors, and experienced machine operators. In most US industrial regions, these workers aren’t sitting idle waiting for a new employer to arrive. They’re already being recruited by established manufacturers, semiconductor fabs, battery producers, and infrastructure projects that have been operating in that market for years.
A delayed hire for a maintenance technician can postpone equipment commissioning entirely. A shortage of qualified operators slows the production ramp. Difficulty recruiting experienced supervisors affects safety, training quality, and throughput during the most critical window of a new facility’s life. Unlike equipment, skilled workers can’t be ordered and delivered on a project timeline. Depending on the role, sourcing, assessing, interviewing, and onboarding a qualified candidate takes weeks to months: time that needs to be built into the expansion plan, not discovered missing after construction is complete.
The Mistake Most Manufacturers Make
The pattern TPD sees repeatedly with cross-border expansions is consistent: workforce planning starts too late, typically once construction is nearly finished and operational pressure is already building.
At that point, every hiring decision is reactive. Recruiters are working against a deadline rather than building a pipeline. Screening gets compressed. First-choice candidates have already accepted other offers because the organization didn’t engage them early enough. The hires that get made under that pressure are rarely the hires that would have been made with four more months of runway. The cost of those compromises shows up in turnover, retraining, production delays, and safety incidents during the ramp-up period when a facility is most vulnerable.
The manufacturers that launch most successfully treat workforce planning as a parallel workstream to facility development, not a downstream deliverable. That means beginning labour market analysis at the same time as site selection, understanding which roles will take the longest to fill and building timelines accordingly, deciding early whether contract or contingent staffing makes sense during ramp-up to provide flexibility, and establishing a recruiting partnership before urgency forces shortcuts.
It also means understanding what candidates in the target US market are actually evaluating. Compensation is the foundation, but experienced industrial workers, particularly those already employed and not actively searching, are assessing career development, schedule structure, safety culture, and the long-term stability of the employer. A Canadian manufacturer that’s unknown in a US industrial market can’t rely on brand recognition to drive applications. It needs a recruiting approach that gets in front of the right candidates proactively, with a message that’s been calibrated for that specific labour market.
The Competition Is Broader Than You Think
Cross-border expansion puts Canadian manufacturers into direct competition for talent with industries beyond their own sector. In US industrial regions, a maintenance technician with strong electromechanical skills may have concurrent opportunities in manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing, mining, renewable energy, and infrastructure. A skilled electrician in the same market may be fielding offers from employers working on entirely different types of projects.
This is particularly relevant in the US markets most attractive to Canadian manufacturers for their lower costs and proximity to customers. Those same characteristics, established industrial infrastructure and proximity to supply chains, also mean established competition for the same technical talent. Understanding which roles are genuinely scarce in a target market, and building a compensation and attraction strategy that reflects that reality, is foundational work that needs to happen well before the first posting goes live.
Why a Specialized Industrial Recruiting Partner Changes the Equation
Industrial hiring in a new market requires knowledge that takes years to build: which technical backgrounds actually transfer to your specific production environment, what qualified candidates look like and how to evaluate them, what the competitive compensation picture is in that region right now, and how to access workers who aren’t actively searching but might be open to the right opportunity.
A generalist recruiting firm without deep industrial expertise can fill roles from the active candidate pool. What it can’t do is build the kind of pipeline that gets you into conversations with experienced, currently employed tradespeople and technicians who would consider a move under the right circumstances. In tight industrial labour markets, that passive candidate population is often where the best hires come from.
TPD’s manufacturing recruitment team has spent 45 years placing talent across industrial sectors in Canada and the United States. We know what a qualified industrial hire looks like, we understand the operational stakes of getting it wrong during a facility ramp-up, and we have established networks in the US markets where Canadian manufacturers are currently expanding. When our clients enter a new market, we’re not building that knowledge from scratch alongside them: we already have it.
The Workforce Is the Variable That Determines Whether the Expansion Works
The conversation around cross-border manufacturing expansion has been dominated by trade policy, tariffs, and capital investment decisions. Those factors determine whether an expansion happens. The workforce determines whether it succeeds.
Of the Canadian manufacturers considering a US move, 77% expect to complete the transition within two years. For most of them, the facility planning is already underway. The workforce planning, in many cases, is not. The manufacturers that close that gap now, by treating people strategy with the same rigour applied to equipment procurement and site selection, are the ones that will be operational on schedule and producing at target by the time their competitors are still sorting out hiring problems they didn’t anticipate.
If your organization is planning a US expansion and workforce strategy isn’t yet a workstream with a timeline, a budget, and a recruiting partner, the right time to change that is now.
Tell us about your target US market: we’ll outline the hiring roadmap.