Hiring your first HR professional: when is the right time?

The decision to hire an HR professional usually comes at a time of strain. The business owner is spending too much time on contracts, absences and interviews; employee requests are piling up; a critical recruitment process has failed. Someone suggests bringing in an HR specialist, and the idea seems to be the perfect solution. Then the search begins, and it becomes clear that the available profiles vary widely.

Four different needs, one common label

The first is personnel administration: hiring, terminations, attendance, liaising with payroll providers, and compliance. This is the most visible need and also the most straightforward to organise.

The second is HR Operations: recruitment processes, onboarding, policy management, and HR tools and data. This requires someone who can build repeatable workflows and ensure they run smoothly.

The third is the HR Business Partner role, which supports management in people-related decisions: how to structure a team, manage a difficult situation, or guide the business through change. This role requires experience and the ability to be heard by decision-makers.

The fourth is organisational development: roles, responsibilities, employee growth, and leadership. This is often the most critical need, yet the least articulated, as it usually manifests as symptoms rather than direct requests.

The consequences of choosing the wrong profile

A company whose main problem is structural but hires an administrative profile will achieve orderly paperwork but continue to suffer from overlapping roles. Conversely, bringing in a senior business partner where reliable administrative management is still lacking means asking them to spend a significant portion of their time on tasks for which they are overqualified.

There is also a more subtle risk. The first HR hire is often burdened with expectations that rightly belong to the business owner: resolving conflicts between partners, managing long-serving employees, or introducing rules that the ownership has never been willing to formalise. Without a clear mandate and visible support from leadership, even a capable professional will struggle to make an impact.

In-house, external or fractional

There is no specific employee threshold beyond which hiring becomes mandatory. What matters are complexity, pace of growth, number of sites and contracts, and the volume of people-related decisions currently being postponed. In many businesses, external or part-time support can help put processes and priorities in order before defining the in-house role, which can then be specified much more accurately.

This intermediate phase is also useful for building the foundations for the future HR professional to work on: a clear pay structure, well-defined roles, and agreed-upon selection criteria. Without these foundations, the new hire will spend their first few months reconstructing information instead of adding value.

The right question to start with

Before writing a job description, it is worth listing the people-related decisions that have been postponed, rushed, or made by the wrong person over the last six months. This list reveals the type of HR support the company needs far more effectively than any job title. It also helps clarify how much of the work relates to personnel and how much concerns the organisation as a whole.

If the demand for an HR professional stems from confused roles and fragile processes, it is worth framing it within the broader question of how to organise a growing company before deciding on the specific profile to hire.