Hiring your first HR leader: What skills to look for

Getting HR a seat at the table. We should have long done away with this phrase. Like the silver linings of dark clouds, the pandemic brought in some much-needed changes in many spheres of life, especially in the business world. The pandemic highlighted the basic but oft-ignored fact that employees form the backbone of an organization and that businesses must take a people-first approach. 

The Great Resignation underscores this fact. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.3 million people quit their jobs in July 2021. While the data doesn’t point to the exact reasons for this phenomenon, it definitely indicates organizations need to prioritize people first and that they must emphasize on reconstructing their talent acquisition & retention strategies in addition to a razor-sharp focus on employee engagement and satisfaction.

So, when should you hire your first HR leader? 

 

Technically, it would be the second HR leader in your organization because the founder/CEO is the first! Professor Dave Ulrich, widely acknowledged as the ‘Father of modern HR’ says his rule of thumb is when an organization has anywhere between 75-100 employees, it is time to look for your HR leader — though this varies based on different factors.

“Because that’s when the talent begins to coalesce into a company,” he says. He says while coaching the founders of a company, he would tell them that they are the Head of HR or the main drivers of talent, leadership and organization and that their company should reflect their brand/identity.

For the uninitiated, Dave Ulrich is the Co-founder and Principal of RBL Group, an HR Consulting firm. He is the best-selling author of ‘Reinventing the Org’ and 29 other books. He is a university professor, author, speaker, management consultant and coach..

Ask yourself this fundamental question: Are you spending too much time on various people-related functions such as talent, leadership and organization, as you scale from one phase to the next? If your answer is yes or if these are overwhelming you to a point where you find it difficult to sustain, that’s the time you need to get yourself an HR leader.

 

When should you hire your first HR leader?

Based on this, the point at which you decide to hire your “second” HR leader would differ – it could be when you have two dozen employees or more than 100. 

Kyle Racki, Co-founder & CEO of Proposify, a proposal software to help sales teams close deals, hired an HR manager when they were only 24-members strong. He says hiring an HR manager at an early stage paid off for them. 

Pierre Betouin and Jean-Baptiste Aviat, co-founders of Sqreen, an application security platform and a Series-A startup backed by YCombinator and Greylock Partners, were quite particular about culture right from the early stages of their venture. They hired their Head of People – Alison Eastaway as their 13th employee!

 

What should the focus areas of the first HR leader be?

 

Trust Dave Ulrich to give you straightforward answers to such complex questions. He neatly divides the responsibilities of an organization’s first HR leader into two:

Focus of an organization’s first HR leader

More often than not, founders tend to hire HR leaders or managers to handle just administrative tasks: be it processing payroll, collecting and storing employee data, handling time-off requests, hiring, onboarding, and offboarding. 

However, since you have software and tools to manage most of such tasks, it makes better sense for the HR leader to automate these and focus on being an excellent coach and facilitator by helping the founders with three aspects: talent, leadership, and organization.

 

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The HR leader should focus on attracting the right talent for their organization. This would include setting up a scalable  hiring process to building a work environment that will help people do their best. While the HR leader focuses on the latter, a smart HR tech stack will help you intelligently automate a large part of the source-to-hire and onboarding process. This would apply to most startups and small- and medium-sized companies looking to scale to their next growth stage.

The newly-hired HR manager should also help build great leadership teams in the organization. They must ensure that there is adequate emphasis on succession planning – developing the second or subsequent lines of leadership. The question to ask now is – Should you promote leaders from within or hire from outside?  

The third responsibility for the HR leader is to help evolve the organizational culture. 

At Proposify, Kyle says their newly-appointed HR manager helped them by setting up a few people-related processes dealing with certain compliance issues, shouldering a major part of their recruitment responsibilities and protecting and improving culture.

The last point (culture) is something that Sqreen’s co-founders were quite particular about from the early stages of their venture. Even though there were just a dozen employees at Sqreen (besides her), Alison says this move worked really well for Sqreen as such an early focus on culture helped them with five main factors: 

  • Hiring and retaining great talent
  • Getting through bad times
  • Scaling up
  • Employer branding
  • Converting passive to active candidates

 

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What kind of skills should the first HR leader have?

 

Let’s lean onto Dave for a simple but profound answer yet again. He says founders must look for an HR leader that helps their organization win in the marketplace. Anything the leader does on developing talent, leadership, and organization should be seen through the lens of the previous point.

When you’re on the lookout for your first amazing HR leader (thankfully, they aren’t as elusive as unicorns), assess them to see if they can fulfill four primary roles:

Coach: Have regular 1:1 coaching sessions with the founders/business leaders in the organization and help them achieve the right business outcomes through the right strategies/plans.

Facilitator: Stitch together processes and policies to help run different functions in the organization and execute strategy and drive business by bringing together the right people.

Designer: Developing sound HR systems for talent, training and development, compensation, rewards and benefits, and communication.

Executor: Deliver all the above in alignment with the company’s goals/vision/mission/objectives.

This is a handy matrix that would help your organization’s first HR leader to focus on what matters most:

Roles and responsibilities of an organization’s first HR leader

All your first HR leader needs to do is match the four roles (HR activities) for the three primary HR outcomes: Talent, Leadership, and Organization, and fill in the corresponding cells with specific tasks/activities to help achieve the organization’s goals.

Would love to hear from you if you’ve hired your first HR leader already or are contemplating doing so! Share your experiences in the comments below – I’m up for a discussion anytime!

 

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