Is a dedicated HR professional always needed in an organisation? Can this role be filled by a founder, owner, founder or perhaps a team leader?
How can such a solution work in practice and will the business not collapse or even grow?
Let’s make it clear. An in-house HR professional is never going to be hired in the early stages of a company's development when the runway is short. Moreover, they don't necessarily join the organisation permanently at a later stage. We have many examples on the market of successful companies that do not have dedicated HR people.
In such a model, this role is filled by the founder and, as the team grows, also by the team leaders. A company is not only about the product/service, financing models and sales channels, it is above all about the team and human affairs. So what awaits the founder?
The first practical experience related to people in a startup highly likely will be recruitment. I will share some thoughts in this area because mistakes can be made a lot. Having built two startups in which I was a co-founder, I can see what I could have done differently. And this is consistent with what I hear from other founders on the market. We all ask ourselves similar questions.
Conduct recruitment interviews in person
You can outsource your candidate search and initial interviews, but the interviews in which you assess the successful candidates have to be conducted in person, in the form of a structured interview. Don't aim for a casual chat with the candidate (although the atmosphere can be nice), but a substantive conversation based on which you decide whether this is the person you want to invite on board.
Even if later team leaders will be conducting most of the recruiment conversations, keep your stage and don't reduce it to a 'formality'.
Hire people who consciously want to join the startup and can make the case for it. Pay attention to attitude, whether you share the same values, outlook on the work and even the vision for the product/service. These are the foundations you are building and they need to be solid from the start.
Hire people with experience and don't be afraid of people with more experience and competence in areas where you lack experience. At the same time, answer strategic questions: in which area does the person bring value, when is it worth paying such a person a lot and when is it not worth overpaying?
What about when you're bootstrapping and don't have the budget for experienced people?
At this stage, ensure an appropriate level of competence on the part of the management team/co-founders and use external consultants. If you hire people with no experience, do not delegate key areas and tasks to them, e.g. product functionality. For the same reason, the first recruiter in the company also needs to be someone with experience (unless you need someone to coordinate meetings, but then you need an assistant, not a recruiter).
Don't expand your team with only company growth in mind. This introduces haste and leads to mis-hires.
Look for qualities in candidates that you care about, such as an open mind or precise communication. It is this area that determines whether a team is cohesive and whether the next member will fit in.
Typical mistakes? Trying to capture an entire department in one role. The very idea and vision of the kind of person you want to employ will be pathological and doomed to failure from the outset.
And dragging out the dismissal of a person who makes mistakes, underperforms and does not improve their performance, despite talking about it.
And here we touch on another HR area for which the founder is responsible.
There are many more areas. Because what is HR anyway? How do you define it?
The most accurate definition I know of defines HRM as a set of activities and processes that allow a company to grow, meet its business goals and, at the same time, people to work well.
People are the biggest challenge in building a startup: hiring when you hardly have any money, retaining people, motivating them, and building company culture when you have no idea how to build culture.
As a founder you will be driven by passion, but with a team of 30+ people, communication silos can already start to be created. For a startup, ups and downs are typical. How are people supposed to deal with these? Founders often mention that the following works: transparency, trust and consistency. These values help build a good culture.
Organisational culture is, in simple terms, the way we get things done, and the way we work with each other and in the business environment.
Culture is built from the moment the first employee enters the company and cascades downwards from the founder. How the founder works influences how subsequent people work. Ideally, organisational culture should not remain encapsulated in abstract buzzwords but shown through concrete examples. Remember that it is easier to put these elements together from the start, and much harder to change them in a working organisation (it costs a lot of time and money).
In addition to recruitment and building an organisational culture, the founder will face further challenges: creating an effective organisational structure in a growing team, internal communication, knowledge sharing, and development paths for people to grow with the organisation. These challenges will be many.
When is a good time to hire your first HR professional?
When we feel that we are overburdened with tasks in HR areas, these areas can no longer be solved or automated with tools.
This could be, for example, employer branding activities or the first and last stages of recruitment, which will be delegated to a recruiter (either permanently employed or hired temporarily).
How can we ensure that the delegated employee area continues to operate effectively?
Founders who do well at this stage have very high expectations of the person they hire, a lot of trust in them, but also a lot of interest in the area and how the person performs.
This is not micromanagement. It is a supportive attitude, along the lines of:
"Don't limit action, but give direction and remind of priorities".
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