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Do start-ups need HR? - read the full article about 2021 HR trends, Human Resources and Recruitment, Staffing, Payroll from Tom Haak on Qualified.One
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does a startup need hr as startups begin to scale generally a hr function is created but this leads to the question is hr needed for a startup to be successful and if so what type of hr does a startup need welcome to talking hr trends with natal and tom where we explore the latest hot topics and business challenges impacting the people side of organizations stick around to the end for our practical top tip and if you like this please subscribe to be notified of the next in the series [Music] so today tom we are exploring the idea of hr for a startup and whats interesting is quite recently there was this very heated debate on linkedin because a ceo of a very successful uk startup greg jackson at octopus energy he made the claim that hr is unnecessary and of course you know linkedin was a buzz so whats your thoughts here um why might a startup ceo be so fearful of hr i i cannot go into his mind but many entrepreneurs many founders generally they think they can do everything probably initially you dont need hr and if youre a good people-oriented person you might think well you know what i dont need it but yeah of course i dont agree but well it was interesting because once you went into the article it was more that hr could sometimes represent bureaucracy and processes and unnecessary things to do and his belief was that people can get that done themselves and really own the business so i think that kind of links into how we see the role of hr in a startup dont we can you talk me through tom because i know youre quite uh you have some very strong views on this and some great ideas so what is the role of hr in a startup whats your vision on this well i think uh going back to the ceo of the startup most startups want to grow because youre not in the business to stay small so and then scalability is an important element can we grow fast for most organizations for most startups that has to do with people can we find the people to go and to accelerate our growth yes and thats where hr can help with the scalability but also with making sure startups can accelerate ill give you a couple of of elements but one of the most important elements and we have said it before is hiring the right people yeah and that initially many startups start with you know the founder people he knows a couple of other people they add on other people well there if you want to scale up you might be very strict on recruitment and selection only hire the best that is a skill and you need professionals to help you to hire the best people looking at of course their skill set but also looking at their personality and looking at their you could say learning agility and other elements can they grow with the company ideally you hire people who can grow with you and help you to grow how is their growth mindset so selecting the right people is super important and there it often goes wrong the startup grows becomes a scale up and and they need people fast because the growth is limited by the people and then so you know yeah yeah do you know people we can hire do you know people we can hire they lower the threshold and then that affects the culture because they hire people that that dont fit in too well they hire people who are okay but not top top then some people start to leave they say well this was a very nice company but now i see people walking around i dont recognize myself in that team so yeah you dont want that and then you need less hr because then you see organizations needing hrd so we need people to develop and we need uh yes and the mediocre people start to say i dont know exactly what i need to do so you dont want that i was i was also reading a really interesting article recently that was looking at how actually a startup should hire people for different stages of growth yeah so perhaps even at the start when you hire people you say okay were in this for the next say two to three years and at the end of that we will revisit because perhaps once were at a different stage of development as a company we might need a different type of team so it was actually looking at how you need to kind of you know build your team but also change your team based on who you need in the business at different times of that kind of startup journey which i thought was really interesting but that is a different kinds of lens again of how you need to build do your recruitment yeah but it it has the same element i think you need to sink big from the start we are now small but we will be bigger otherwise we wont be successful so what does it take yes it might help to make sure you have the best hr support you can get maybe you dont have to hire that you can get that outside there are fantastic companies that can help because what you might what you often see is that they start small and then they also have small hr they start with a recorder a union recruiter the union quota becomes a little bit older and then suddenly the recorder is the hr manager but that is not sinking big thats sinking because that person is well he or she does not know exactly what to do she is too small for the company so yeah thinking big is important from the start also yeah people-wise and so whats your thoughts uh because as the startup scales theres always this tension between okay we need some structure for efficiency and as you said to think big uh and thats where some of this more kind of old style hr maybe creeps in but then youve got you want to maintain that culture of self-organization and autonomy that sort of makes a startup so great to work in how should hr navigate this tension whats your tips here but one is it helps to be very explicit about the culture you want to have but also the organizational setup it doesnt come automatically so yeah you can make a choice and say we are going for self-managed teams but then you have to choose a model spotify or all accuracy but but that doesnt come automatically so you have to if youre explicit and hr can play a role in what comes with these models and how do we implement these models and what are our values and values also has to do with autonomy for example of people we dont want to be bureaucratic we want self-management but what you often see is organizations not being very explicit and then it starts to yeah yes be unclear definitely yeah and uh we recently ran a meet up with a people lead at a startup in australia and they made the point that having some good rituals that which weve talked about before around review retrospective and really kind of speaking to those values in those rituals was really important so again it brings the discipline in and it brings some structure around the idea of self-organizing excellent great to speak to you today tom thanks so much for your insights and thats what were going to make our practical tip we were speaking to a hr lead at a start-up in australia recently at a meet-up of pxo culture and what was interesting is that they didnt come from a traditional hr background and indeed they came from marketing and it meant they didnt bring all the assumed best practice of hr to begin with so this is the message forget about assume best practice and go and focus what are the main things to solve for your business and how do we work with the business to achieve those if you do that youll build a great startup culture thanks for your time today this is talking hr trends with natal and tom please subscribe to be notified of the next in the series have a great day
Tom Haak: Do start-ups need HR? - Human Resources