If you’ve started a business and things are going well, you may well experience a period where you need to recruit more people in order to fulfill your orders, provide your services, and keep on growing your customer base. It is normal that, over time, things you were able to do yourself or with the help of your fellow founders at the start become full-fledged roles of their own that need a dedicated person taking care of them. One of the areas where this naturally happens is human resources. A very small company usually just has its management doing things like recruitment and overseeing the admin that comes with employing people. But, as a company gets larger, having someone in charge of HR becomes a necessity. As things continue to grow, this can even become a whole department, so it is also important that the new HR manager put in place will be scalable if your plans are for continued expansion.
But, what should you be looking for when it comes to hiring somebody to do this job? It will, of course, be necessary for them to have a broad and detailed knowledge of HR as a business function by having done an online HR masters degree like the one at https://studyonline.rmit.edu.au/online-programs/master-of-hr-management. A masters level degree in HR should equip them with all of the knowledge to enable them to start applying best practices in your business. However, a general level of knowledge and experience in HR alone will not be enough for your specific situation,as you will need someone who is experienced and well suited to working in a growing business, especially if they are going to be the person to create your business’s HR approaches.
Here are some things to look for:
A Strong Background with HR Processes
There are some very good corporate HR managers out there who are excellent at making existing HR processes work well and whose focus is primarily on the interpersonal aspects of HR. While this kind of HR person is great at their job, you need a different kind of HR expert for your business, because they need to be able to take whatever methods you have been using to handle HR yourself and change them into a proper set of processes, and they will also need to implement their new processes across your current staff base.
Someone whose experience is in working with start-ups or businesses going through major change such as restructuring will have the focus on processes and efficiency that you will need to basically create HR from scratch in your company.
An Interest in Innovation
A benefit that you have as someone who is in the early stages of forming a proper HR framework for an expanding business is that at this point, it is easy to change things and adopt the latest approaches. It is much easier to bring on board the latest thinking about things like working environments and staffing policies and to use the best, currently available IT solutions to support your HR if you are designing how your HR will work and applying it on a blank canvas than if you have to change existing ways of doing things.
For this reason, you want an HR manager who has their finger on the pulse when it comes to the latest thinking in HR. It will greatly benefit you if they are passionate about creating great working environments and putting in place policies that will help you keep on the talented people you want to hire. When you consider some of the things that are becoming increasingly popular, like staff benefits packages that include tempting and helpful perks, flexible working, and remote working, it is clear that your business can give itself an edge over other employers in your sector if your HR manager is good at applying newer ideas rather than just sticking to traditional, conventional staff management.
A Dynamic Person
Your HR manager will be tasked with a lot of things, especially in the beginning as they enter your business in its current form, where a lot needs to be done to level up the HR for its growing scale. They will also probably be the first and only person on their team, and they so will need to be a self-motivated person who can get moving on all of the things your business needs without having an awful lot of help.
They will also need to be able to get to know your current staff quickly and involve them in their decision making where helpful as well as be able to drive them towards using the new procedures and policies they will need to start implementing. The HR manager will also have to liaise with third parties for things like managing recruitment, and they may have to build new relationships with recruitment agencies if this is not something your business has needed to do yet. An energetic, dynamic and personable person is therefore a must for the role.
Administrative Skills
Senior HR employees in some companies have assistants who take on a lot of the more routine aspects of the administration, but your new HR manager is going to need to be able to do all of this themselves – at least the very least in the short to term until the demands of the HR department grow enough to warrant more hires. This means that they need to be someone with attention to detail, which is not always something that people who are used to working at the more strategic, process driven level will possess!
As you can see, there are a lot of things that you need to look for in the person you are going to trust to be your growing company’s HR manager, so it is worth considering putting these points in your job advert to attract suitable candidates or when you are interviewing for the role to eliminate those who aren’t best for the job and your flourishing business.
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