“We’re still too small for HR.”

We hear this quite a lot – usually from companies where quite a lot is happening already.

The product is ready, the first customers are on board, and maybe the first funding round is in the bag. New people are joining, responsibilities are shifting, and overall, things are going pretty well.

There’s just that one employment contract that still needs to go out. A new colleague starts next week and someone should probably think about her onboarding. The feedback meeting has already been postponed twice, and somewhere in the inbox there’s a message about parental leave that no one is quite sure how to handle.

But HR? Surely you’re still far too small for that. Right?
Maybe for your own HR department. But almost certainly not for HR matters.

Because HR for startups doesn’t begin at a certain headcount or when you hire your first dedicated HR person. People-related topics simply start coming up at some point – often long before anyone is officially responsible for them. And with them come a few phrases we hear from startups all the time

“We Just Handle It on the Side” – Is That How HR for Startups Works?

Of course. That’s probably how most companies do it in the beginning.

One of the founders takes care of the employment contract, someone in Operations has also taken on payroll preparation, and interviews are conducted by whoever happens to have time.

That can work surprisingly well. The more interesting question is what “on the side” actually means.

If the employment contract is being written on Sunday evening because no one got around to it during the week, the phrase may have started to lose its meaning. And if the employee meeting is postponed for the third time because something more urgent always comes up, that’s less a question of team size and more a question of available time.

HR matters have a slightly inconvenient habit: they rarely take care of themselves.

You can postpone them, squeeze them in between two meetings, and some things really can wait a few days. But at some point, improvising starts to take more time than putting a proper solution in place would have.

And that’s exactly when HR for startups becomes relevant: not because you’ve suddenly reached a certain headcount, but because doing HR “on the side” starts taking up a surprising amount of time.

“But We’re a Startup. Things Work Differently Here.”

We actually quite like hearing this one. Because yes, things do work differently at your company. And hopefully they’ll stay that way.

Nobody wants to turn a fast-moving, pragmatic startup into a miniature corporation where every decision needs a process diagram and ordering a new coffee machine requires three approvals.

Professional HR for startups doesn’t have to mean making everything more complicated. In fact, it should do the opposite.

If there’s a clear onboarding process, you don’t have to reinvent it every time someone new joins. If you have a useful template, every employment contract doesn’t start with a search for the file you used for the last person. And if it’s clear who handles HR matters, the question doesn’t have to make its way through three Slack channels first.

Good HR isn’t about having as many processes as possible. It’s about having the right ones: enough structure to make things work, and little enough to keep you moving quickly.

“Our People Just Come to Us If Something’s Wrong.”

Great. An open culture, short lines of communication and direct conversations are exactly the kind of things many young companies consciously want to preserve.

But an open door doesn’t automatically replace clear responsibilities.

Sometimes, someone may not want to discuss a sensitive issue directly with the founders or management. Sometimes, a team lead is dealing with a situation themselves and would be quite glad to have someone to ask. And sometimes, the conversation isn’t the problem at all – it’s what happens afterwards.

Who takes care of it? What needs to be documented? What happens next? And who actually said they would handle it?

Good HR shouldn’t replace your personal culture. It should make sure that culture still works when the whole team no longer fits around one table.

That’s another important role HR for startups can play: not creating more distance or bureaucracy, but preserving short lines of communication and personal collaboration as the team grows.

“Can’t We Just Google It?”

Of course. We do that too, by the way.

The internet is full of information about employment contracts, parental leave, recruiting, employee conversations, references and probably every other HR topic you’re likely to encounter at some point.

The challenge usually isn’t finding information at all. It’s figuring out which information actually applies to your specific situation – and sometimes recognising that what looks like a simple question has another question hiding behind it.

But more importantly, there’s another question to ask: should the founders or management team of a growing company really be spending their time on this?

You probably didn’t start your company so that someone could spend Tuesday evening at 9:47 p.m. figuring out which documents are still missing from an offboarding.

There are people who genuinely enjoy dealing with these things. Us, for example

Does HR for Startups Just Create More Bureaucracy?

It can. But it doesn’t have to.

Bad HR can produce an impressive number of forms. Good HR should primarily produce one thing: less unnecessary work.

A process isn’t automatically good just because it’s documented somewhere. And a template isn’t useful if nobody uses it.

That’s why HR for startups in particular should adapt to the company – not the other way around. Maybe one topic needs a clear process, another just needs a useful template, and for the next one, all you really need is someone who knows what to do.

Not everything needs a process. But things that happen again and again don’t need to feel like the first time every time.

“We’ll Deal With That Later.”

Also understandable. In a growing company, there’s almost always something that seems more important right now: the next big customer, the product launch, the funding round or an open role that urgently needs to be filled.

HR can feel like something that can wait another two weeks. And then another two.

That usually doesn’t lead straight to a major disaster. Much more often, something far less dramatic happens: it becomes annoying.

Onboarding is improvised slightly differently every time, managers somehow handle people issues themselves, information is spread across five different places, and things get forgotten or have to be dealt with again later.

At some point, someone ends up spending quite a lot of time solving problems that a little structure could have prevented altogether.

That’s why HR for startups doesn’t only make sense once something has gone wrong. Often, the point at which the same HR topics keep taking up time is reason enough to ask: Could we actually organise this more simply?

When Does a Startup Need HR?

There’s no fixed headcount at which that happens. HR for startups becomes particularly relevant when people-related topics regularly take up time from founders or managers, responsibilities become unclear, or important tasks repeatedly get left undone.

That’s why we don’t think the question “When are we big enough for HR?” is particularly helpful.

A more useful question is:
At what point would good HR make our day-to-day work easier?

That might be at twelve employees. Or at 30. Maybe you’re not there yet.

There’s no magic number. But there are some pretty good signs: HR matters keep getting left unfinished, nobody really knows who is responsible, or managers regularly spend time dealing with things they themselves would quite like some support with.

Or when “We’ll just do it on the side” has started to mean “We’ll do it in the evening” surprisingly often.
And even then, it doesn’t mean you need to build an entire HR department straight away. It simply means making sure your HR matters are handled reliably.

Growing a company is turbulent enough as it is. It’s quite nice when every employment contract, every onboarding and every HR question doesn’t become a small new project of its own.

So the next time we hear:
“We’re still too small for HR,”
we’d probably answer:
Maybe for your own HR department. But almost certainly not for good HR.

And if you’re currently wondering how much HR for startups actually makes sense at your stage: we can talk about it.
Pragmatically – and without turning a twelve-person startup into a corporation overnight.