What does an HR person do and when should you think about hiring one?
So you've been online, trying to find the answer to this very tricky question: is it time for me to hire an HR person? And what do they actually do? In this blog post, we've set out everything you need to know about what an HR person does, what tasks they can have and whether you need to hire one depending on the stage your business is at – when you can get by, when you should outsource, and when you need a full-time hire.
Hiring an HR manager is an important step in any company's journey. But it’s actually a bit misleading to characterise this as a “step” at all. Most businesses can – and should – ease their way into having formal HR structures as the organisation grows.
A lot of the time, the best option for a small business or startup isn't actually to hire someone to do the role full-time. Some companies will outsource their HR department to an HR consultancy. Many smaller startups find that – with the right support – HR responsibilities can be taken on by a current member of the business, such as the COO, Operations Manager or Office Manager.
Slightly larger businesses may choose to employ an HR professional part-time, and once you're past a certain size, having a full-time HR professional on the team becomes a necessity.
All of the above are legitimate methods – all that matters is that your business is handling this proactively, rather than simply ignoring HR until a problem crops up.
What does HR do?
An HR person or an HR department is responsible for all aspects of Human Resources at your business. Whether it's to do with administrative tasks such as booking holidays, or sitting with you during a disciplinary meeting, it's their responsibility to ensure your company follows UK employment law.
To do so, an HR person or department will hold a qualification with a CPID level. It's extremely important to check the person you want to hire has these qualifications if you want them to look after all of HR and hand it off completely to them.
If they don't, they won't be able to help you with complicated procedures or employment law challenges. In this case, they might be called an operations associate or a culture associate. They will be able to take care of administrative tasks, but won't be able to provide HR assistance when it comes to legal matters (you might have to hire an HR consultant or an employment lawyer for this), so make sure you check their qualifications and write a good job description.
10 tasks an HR person or department can handle
Below, we've listed all the HR tasks an HR person or department can handle. In fact, this is what (as Charlie's Senior People and Talent Partner) I'm responsible for day-to-day.
1 – Recruitment
Recruiting candidates is a crucial part of any HR department, especially as the business is growing.
At Charlie, I put together a recruitment policy to outline all the requirements managers and recruiting teams need to have when recruiting candidates.
We also use our own Charlie Recruit tool as part of the hiring process to automate most of the hiring pipeline, send automated emails and make sure we get the right talent pool with our applicant tracking system.
2 – Holidays and time off
The most admin-heavy aspect of an HR department is handling holiday bookings and time off requests.
Between annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave and more, it can be difficult to keep track of all of it.
I recommend ditching the spreadsheets and investing in HR software such as Charlie – if you're not planning on hiring an HR person, it's the least you can have to allow your employees to self-serve and simply handle requests in one click.
3 – Employee handbook and HR policies
Building an employee handbook is an important task for HR departments and HR people – it will outline all the HR policies and procedures a business needs to have.
Although employee handbooks are not legal requirements in the UK, it's better to have them in place so your employees always have a point of reference when it comes to your HR policies.
It will protect you against legal actions by ensuring the rules for your business are set in stone.
4 – Performance management
Performance management may seem like a task you may not want to tackle when you're just a small business, but I can guarantee it makes all the difference when you show your employees you care about how they're performing and how you're willing to help.
At Charlie, we have reviews twice a year to make sure we track performance and catch up with our employees on where they want to go next, and how to help them reach their goals. This is all handled through our software as well where team members and managers can add their feedback and then meet about their performance throughout the year.
If you're looking for more resources when it comes to performance management, also check out our blog posts:
5 – Development and career progression
Complementary to performance management, development and career progression are muscles you need to train your business on.
At Charlie, we want our team members to have all the tools in hand to progress and take the next step in their careers.
That's where, as an HR person, I've put together a budget allowance for L&D. Employees can use it to attend courses or conferences to help them learn new skills.
Our career progression framework is also a staple we use to make sure we reward employees and have clear expectations when it comes to pay rises and promotions.
6 – Disciplinary meetings and grievances
HR departments and HR people don't always get to do the fun stuff. We're also responsible for handling disciplinary actions and hearing grievances.
In these instances, it's crucial to create strong HR policies for your company to rely on. The person responsible for HR at your company (CIPD qualified) needs to write these policies ahead of any issue arising so you can confidently and effectively deal with these issues:
7 – Employee engagement and initiatives
Back to the fun part of hiring an HR person: get them to boost employee engagement with fun and initiatives.
Employee engagement is an aspect you need not neglect if you hire an HR person. They'll be able to run employee engagement surveys to keep the finger on the pulse, but also plan summer parties, team bonding events and include everyone by building an inclusive workplace. Check out our Diversity and Inclusion calendar for more information.
8 – Benefits, allowances and budgets
Benefits, allowances and budgets to make sure your team feels supported and to ensure you have a competitive advantage as an employer.
HR people will be able to find the right balance between what employees would like and what your business can afford.
At Charlie, for example, we've settled on a wellbeing budget with £30 per month, but we also have 9 day fortnight as a benefit for our team – among many others!
9 – Keeping tabs on HR metrics
HR KPIS are not metrics people focus on, but they definitely should! They're crucial to understanding HR's business impact.
Between understanding how many sick days people are taking or making sure everyone takes advantage of benefits, an HR person will analyse these metrics to drive decisions forward with concrete data.
10 – Reporting to the leadership team
So if you get HR off your hands, it means someone will have to tell you what's going on in the business.
As one of the business stakeholder, your HR person will be reporting on HR metrics by giving you a clear outline and summary of what actions need to be taken following a thorough analysis.
This can be done monthly, every 6 months or annually, and it really depends on the objectives you set for HR.
So, do you need to hire an HR person?
If you're a very small business and early-stage startup (1-10 team members)
Small businesses which have less than 10 employees usually don't need a dedicated HR specialist. At this stage, it’s generally the case that (with a little bit of foresight and preparation) you can manage most HR tasks and challenges in-house.
What you absolutely do need, though, is a strong set of HR foundations. Once you have these in place, your HR will tend to run itself.
For very small buisnesses, it can be summed up this way:
- The 3 HR policies required by UK law which are health and safety, grievances and disciplinary
- An HR software to automate your time off, onboarding and performance management processes
If you're a growing small business or startup (11-40 team members)
By the time a small business begins moving towards the 20-person mark, it becomes necessary for there to be one person who is officially responsible for the Human Resources side of the company.
That person doesn't need to be a dedicated HR professional, however, and they don't need to be working on HR full-time either. For companies of this size, it's usually a better option for someone at the business to take the HR functions on as part of their wider role. They might be an Office Manager, the COO or work in the Operations team. The only necessity for this role is that their role allows them can prioritise HR tasks and be the point of contact for HR issues as they arise.
There are many different reasons why a dedicated HR person becomes so important at this stage.
Firstly, it is around this company size that it becomes important to have good processes in place if the business is going to continue to run smoothly. HR tasks such as employee onboarding or preparing new employees for their role, for example, tend to need a dedicated person running them to make sure they don't fall by the wayside. Having someone to take the lead on the company's hiring processes is another good example.
It's also at this stage that many startups and small companies look to put in place more formal performance reviews. Again – this is a project that needs someone to own it. Performance reviews are a crucial aspect of employee retention as well as driving performance across the team, and can't be left up to an ad hoc system.
Remember that this part-time HR person doesn't necessarily have to have an official HR qualification. They're there as a point of contact for HR issues, and someone to oversee the development of your company culture, rather than to provide expert knowledge of employment law. However, they are going to need access to trustworthy, reliable advice if a tricky issue comes up so maybe that's where using an HR professional would help.
An established small business (40+ employees)
By the time your company has grown anywhere near the 40-person mark, you're going to have to start looking at hiring an HR professional.
With 50 team members, there’s a potentially unmanageable number of HR tasks and admin to be kept on top of – employee contracts, recruitment, share schemes, onboarding, payroll, performance reviews, probation reviews, hiring processes – this is now a full-time role and it needs a dedicated HR professional to get it right.
Perhaps one way to go around this is to automate some of the tasks that would fall under an HR professional – recruitment, for example, can be handled through Charlie Recruit. Chat to our team to find out how an applicant tracking system might be the answer to your hiring strategy without hiring an HR professional.
Other HR needs that you should consider
Treat what we’ve said so far as guidelines. Every business is different, so you shouldn’t consider these rules to be set in stone. In particular, there are a couple of special cases where you should be hiring a full-time HR professional much earlier:
If your startup is going to grow fast
If you know your business is about to grow a lot in a short space of time – say, increasing the team size by 100% or 50% within 6-12 months – it's a very good idea to hire an in-house HR professional early, before you really need.
When you’re hiring and onboarding a large number of new employees, HR immediately becomes a full-time job. A full-time HR professional will save the rest of your team a vast amount of time, as they take on various hiring and onboarding responsibilities, and they’ll keep you on top of the incoming mountain of contracts and other documents which accompany new hires. Additionally, when a company grows significantly, its culture can change dramatically – and someone needs to make sure it’s not heading in a negative direction.
If you’ve got remote workers or distributed offices
If your team isn’t all in one place, you need to be thinking about HR much, much more. If people are siloed off in various locations, the strain that a lack of proper HR structures and professionals puts on your team is amplified. Managing people in distributed locations is an extremely intensive task, and you’re going to need someone dedicated to the role much earlier.
If you’re in this situation, as a rough estimate, you should look at the numbers above – and halve them. That means you should have a person running part-time HR well before you hit 20 employees, and should probably have a full-time HR professional as you hit 25.
