If you’re thinking about HR for your startup and wondering when you’ll need it, you’re probably ready or even overdue. While most companies don’t need full-time people operations (HR) support until they reach fifty full-time employees, there’s a lot of work that needs to happen sooner. It’s much easier to get good HR fundamentals in place before you hit rapid growth.
Wouldn’t you love to feel confident in your approach to interviewing and hiring, compensation, and culture-building now vs. waiting until you’re growing from fifty to eighty or doubling in size?
Even in early-stage startups, someone has to take on the people function. Often it’s the COO or CFO, executive assistant, bookkeeper, or a combination. This works for a while until you need more hands and expertise. Hiring an expert saves everyone time and is more efficient since they’ve done this countless times before.
How do you know when it’s time to get HR help?
If one or more of these statements sound familiar, it’s probably time to get some help. You:
- Find yourself saying “I don’t know what I don’t know about HR”
- Are in charge of HR but need more time to focus on your day job
- Know people and culture are important but don’t know where to start
- Have a long list of HR action items and no one to take them on
- Are worried about compliance, retaining talent, or scaling culture as you grow
You Can’t Go Wrong by Starting with the Basics
Interviewing and Hiring
Every hire on a growing team has a huge impact on morale, productivity, and company culture. Early hires also set the stage for a diverse and inclusive team. It’s important to train recruiters and interviewers on best practices including behavioral interviewing and unconscious bias.
Want to build the best team possible? A well defined interview and hiring process leads to a positive candidate experience and helps avoid mis-hires. Good interview and hiring basics include compelling job descriptions, standardized interview questions, and debriefs where the team has a healthy debate about each candidate before bringing them on board.
Competitive Pay
Your approach to compensation is as unique as your company. Maybe you’re using a combination of base salary, performance bonuses, and stock options or RSUs. Competitive compensation helps you bring on and keep the talented people you need to grow your business. Benchmarking (learning how and how much your competitors pay) will help you figure out how to pay people based on their skillset, where they live, and their level of responsibility.
You’ll also want to think about how to budget for annual increases, promotions, and benefits costs. Often startups worry about how to attract people when they can’t pay the same as big tech or Fortune 500 companies. But you can compete by offering creative pay and benefits packages, flexibility, and meaningful work.
Create a Feedback Culture
Giving and receiving is probably one of the most helpful and underutilized forms of communication and development in organizations. Can you think of feedback you’ve gotten that made you better? I can! Yet, many people avoid giving feedback because they’re afraid of hurting feelings, or are conflict avoidant.
A feedback culture means developing everyone’s skills so they are not only good at giving feedback, but it’s normalized. These are skills that can be built with a little investment. Open communication including feedback helps teams and leaders make good decisions, explore alternatives, and prevent avoidable mistakes.
Where to start?
If you’re not doing these things already (or think you could be doing better) you know now how important it is to build out a good interview and hiring process, pay people strategically, and make sure that giving and receiving feedback is part of how you operate. If that feels overwhelming, I promise you it’s not. For instance, you could prioritize the things mentioned above and list your top three priorities or share this article with your leadership team then brainstorm about what’s most important and where to start.
Additional resources:
- Use our Company HR Review to assess your HR processes and get a customized recommendation about what to do next
- Read this blog and learn to give feedback in a way that motivates others
- Ready for more? Read Part 2 of The Top 6 HR Must-Haves for Every Startup
If you want to learn more about Reverb’s low-cost starter package that includes information on these topics and more plus consulting help you can find all the details here. Ready to chat? Reach out to us directly at info@reverbpeople.com.
