When do I need to hire HR? What kind of person do I need in HR at this stage?
These are questions we hear all the time when talking to current and prospective clients. The answer varies based on your stage, growth trajectory, and your culture. We’ve found the following work well for organizations we encounter:
1-25 Employees
You have a couple of options for covering the People/HR needs at this stage.
- Many startups have an Office Manager, Coordinator, or Admin handling the day-to-day HR tasks. These team members often haven’t had much prior HR experience, so it’s important to provide access to a more experienced HR professional. You could do this by hiring a Senior People Operations Consultant on a fractional basis. See this blog on Why Using Fractional HR is Good for Startups.
- Another common option is to outsource to a People Operations Consultant on a fractional basis to get both the strategic and hands-on day-to-day tasks from one individual.
25-50 Employees
You will want to have someone internally dedicated to the day-to-day people/HR activities.
- The level and role of the hire will be dependent on your pace of growth and complexity.
- The following are considerations for the role at this stage:
- If you are utilizing an outsourced Senior People Operations Consultant, you can hire an early or mid-career People/HR professional to run the day-to-day, but have an outsourced HR Director/VP level consultant to provide strategic guidance and support for new or more challenging questions/issues that arise.
- If you are growing rapidly, you could consider hiring your Head of People or HR Director at this stage to begin building out the team ahead of your growth.
50-100 Employees
At this stage, you will have 1-2 people on the HR team.
- We typically use 50 employees to 1 HR person in the beginning until your company has several hundred employees.
- As for what roles to add in HR after the Head of HR, it will depend on their expertise and if the company is going to do a lot of sustained hiring.
If you find yourself asking these same questions about your other people and culture processes, our People Operations Startup Package includes a Future Roadmap to help you plan out your people processes and tools as you grow.
Ready to chat? Reach out to us directly at info@reverbpeople.com
