We understand why organizations want a number. Numbers make decisions feel easier. But headcount alone rarely tells the whole story.
You will often hear benchmarks suggesting one HR professional for every 50 to 100 employees. That can be a helpful reference point, but we would never use it as the sole reason to make, or delay, a People hire.
We have seen relatively small organizations with enough complexity to justify dedicated People support much earlier. We have also seen larger organizations operate effectively with lean People teams because their systems, managers, and processes were strong.
The more important question is: what people-related work is the organization creating, and who is carrying it today?
Pay attention to where the work is showing up
There are usually signals long before someone formally says, “We need HR.”
- A founder or COO is spending several hours every week handling employee questions, reviewing offer letters, solving benefits issues, or coaching managers.
- The company has started hiring employees in multiple states.
- Managers are asking similar questions but receiving different answers.
- Onboarding depends heavily on which manager is leading it.
- Important policies or processes exist largely through institutional knowledge.
- Performance concerns are becoming more complicated.
- A leave request, classification question, employee relations issue, or compliance requirement catches the organization by surprise.
- The company is preparing for a meaningful period of growth and leadership realizes the current way of managing people will not scale with it.
Those signals matter more to us than whether the company has 38 employees or 72. Headcount tells you how many people are in the organization. Complexity tells you how much People infrastructure the organization needs.
Start by understanding what you actually need
One of the biggest mistakes growing organizations make is hiring for the title before defining the work.
- Do you need someone to manage payroll, benefits, onboarding, HR systems, and employee documentation?
- Do your managers need more support navigating performance and employee relations?
- Are you growing fast enough that workforce planning, organizational design, leadership development, or change management need dedicated attention?
- Do you need someone who can build the function from scratch?
Those are very different jobs. Your first People hire may be a People Operations Manager, HR Manager, People Generalist, Head of People, or something else entirely. The title matters much less than making sure the person's experience matches the problems you actually need them to solve.
Your first People hire will probably need to do both
At an early-stage or growing organization, the first People leader rarely has the luxury of being only strategic or only operational. They need to be able to move between the two. One minute they may be helping the CEO think through organizational structure. The next they may be fixing an onboarding workflow, reviewing an employee issue, preparing for benefits renewal, or figuring out why the HRIS does not match payroll.
That ability to connect strategy to execution is incredibly important. You do not need someone creating sophisticated talent frameworks simply because those frameworks exist at larger companies. But you also do not want someone who can only process transactions when leadership needs a trusted partner to help anticipate what the organization will need next. The right first hire understands the stage of the business and knows how to build accordingly.
Give them something to build from
You do not need a perfect HR function before you hire an HR person. That would defeat the point. But the more clarity you can provide, the better positioned that person will be to succeed. Before they join, leadership should have some understanding of:
- Where employee and compensation information currently lives.
- How hiring decisions are made.
- Who owns payroll, benefits, and finance-related approvals.
- What policies already exist.
- What authority the People role will have.
- Which decisions leadership wants to retain.
- What problems leadership expects this person to solve in their first six to twelve months.
Your new hire can absolutely improve those things. What they should not have to do is spend their first six months discovering that five different leaders had five different expectations for the role.
There is also an in-between option
Sometimes an organization clearly needs People support but is not ready to make the full-time hire. That is where fractional support can make sense. A fractional People partner can help stabilize the function, build foundational systems and processes, support managers and leadership, and help the organization determine what the eventual internal role should look like.
Then, when the company is ready to hire, the new People leader is not walking into complete ambiguity. There is infrastructure. There is documentation. There is clarity around priorities. And ideally, there is a thoughtful handoff instead of several months spent reconstructing how everything works.
If you are trying to make the decision right now
Look back at the last month. How much time did your CEO, COO, Finance leader, or other executives spend on people-related work? Then separate that work into two categories: what truly required executive judgment, and what simply landed with an executive because nobody else owned it. That distinction will tell you a lot.
If leadership is regularly carrying work that does not actually require leadership, you probably have a People operations gap. If your organization is navigating workforce planning, organizational change, increasingly complex employee matters, leadership development, or major growth decisions, the gap may be more strategic. And sometimes, it is both.
The goal is not to hire HR because you reached a certain number of employees. The goal is to build the People function your organization needs for the stage it is entering, not just the stage it is leaving.