Opening a distribution centre in Brazil usually has a fixed date and a fixed headcount. What is not fixed, and is routinely underestimated from abroad, is how long it takes to get that many people admitted, examined, trained and actually present on day one.
Show-up rate governs everything
At volume, applications are a vanity number. The metric that decides whether the site opens on time is how many people appear at each stage — interview, document handover, medical examination, first day. Losses compound across stages rather than adding up.
A funnel that looks healthy at the top and thin at admission is the normal failure, and it becomes visible far too late unless each stage is tracked separately from the start.
Mandatory steps that set the pace
Brazilian employment requires a pre-admission occupational health examination, and several operational functions require role-specific certifications with expiry dates — forklift operation, hazardous goods handling, licence categories matched to the vehicle. None of this can be compressed, and all of it has to be scheduled in batches.
Employment runs under CLT, the statutory regime, with mandatory entitlements plus additional pay where night shifts or hazardous conditions apply. Shift design therefore changes employer cost directly, and is worth settling before the headcount plan is approved rather than after.
Training capacity is the real ceiling
Recruitment can almost always run faster than onboarding. Admitting people who then wait two weeks for a training slot produces attrition before the first productive day, so hiring is planned in waves matched to training throughput — not to how fast candidates can be approved.
There is also a self-competition effect: hiring several hundred people from one catchment area exhausts the local market for that profile, and the final roles in a project are markedly harder than the first with the same posting and the same pay.
Site location decides feasibility
Distribution centres sit where logistics cost dictates, often with limited public transport. Employers commonly provide chartered transport, and statutory transport allowance applies to employees generally. A site plan that does not account for how several hundred people reach it before dawn will not staff, regardless of the pay offered.
Follow-up continues for 90 days after admission and reports early departures by cause rather than by count — because at volume the causes are usually commute, shift and expectation, all of which are fixable in the job design.
