When you first began your company, you likely handled payroll, hiring, training, and other tasks usually delegated to a human resource professional by yourself. However, as your business continues to grow, and you find yourself juggling more roles and an ever-growing workload, you may find yourself struggling to stay on top of everything. This may lead you to wonder "when should I hire an HR professional?" While bringing on a new employee in a role that will not generate income may not seem appealing, it can end up saving you money. Hiring an HR professional can help streamline HR functions at your company and ensure that you stay compliant with all laws and regulations. Yet, when is the right time to bring on professional help? Here are a few signs that you can look out for indicating that it may be time to bring on a people expert.
Your Company is Growing Quickly
If you are lucky, you may find that your company is growing faster than you had anticipated and there is a need to continuously bring on new team members. While this can be a good problem to have, it can quickly become overwhelming recruiting, trying to screen applications, conduct interviews, and perform background checks on all of your applicants. This is where it can be beneficial to bring on an experienced HR professional who can manage much of the work involved in hiring new team members. Many recruiting agencies in San Francisco assist in placing experienced HR Professionals.
You Have 50+ Employees
Speaking of growing businesses, once your company has 40 or more team members, it will definitely be time to bring in a human resource professional. Once your business grows to more than a handful of employees, regulations will kick in and there will be laws that you will have to follow regarding how you treat and pay your employees. Bringing on an experienced HR professional at any point in the early stages of your business's growth can be a lifesaver as it can help you to navigate these complex laws. However, it is particularly critical that you have an HR person on staff by the time you reach 50+ employees, as this is when laws such as FMLA kick in, and it can be hard for you to keep track of everything on your own. Having an HR professional on staff will be critical at this point in order to ensure that you are in compliance.
You Need Help Communicating
Just because you are a successful entrepreneur and a good business manager, this does not necessarily mean that you will be a good people manager. As your business grows, you may find that you are not ready to handle problems that can arise with your staff. Fortunately, a good HR person can help to deal with personnel issues and make sure that policies are in place to maintain a happy, productive workforce. They can also help counsel employees and smooth over ruffled feathers when necessary, allowing you to focus your attention on continuing to grow your business.
Paperwork is Piling Up
As your business grows, you may also find that expense requests, time off requests, performance reviews, and application forms can quickly overwhelm your desk and monopolize your time. If you have found that you now spend most of your time working on payroll, onboarding, and HR-related paperwork, then it may be time to consider hiring an in-house human resources professional. Hiring someone who you can delegate these HR tasks to can be critical in freeing up your time so that you can return to your primary role as a business manager.
In the beginning, you may not feel that it is necessary to have a full-time HR employee at your company, and that is why a staffing agency is a go-to-solution for many businesses. As your company grows, it will be critical that you bring in someone who can help you to manage critical HR functions and help your company stay in compliance with laws and regulations. In fact, some of the best companies hire HR personnel early on due to the liability that can come with hiring employees under the wrong classification (exempt vs non-exempt). More employees may be overtime-eligible than you realize, and claiming ignorance is not a sufficient excuse if an employee brings a lawsuit against you due to misclassification. In fact, did you know that many Sales Development Representatives and Lead Generation Representatives are actually overtime-eligible? If commissions are not more than 50% of their earnings, you could be classifying people improperly.
Contact us at The Hire Standard for more advice on how to know when it is the right time to hire an HR professional as well as for help in finding the right HR team member for your company. Depending on the stage of your organization, you may need an HR Generalist, an HR Program Manager or even a People Operations Manager.