I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one.
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
I agree that HR serves a role in the company and that they cannot simply be fired, but there are a few points I heavily disagree with:
> "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?"
No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain knowledge of what they do. Raises and promotions need to be handled by someone with the correct background - CTO for small companies, VPs for larger ones.
HR should not be handling raises.
> "Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?"
YES. Emphatically yes. He/she's the Chief Executive Officer, the structure of the company is entirely their business. HR has no substantial insight into the specific needs of the business structure, if they did, shit, fire the CEO and make HR the boss.
The CEO is a manager first and foremost, and organizational design is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the position. Letting HR do this is abdicating a primary responsibility of the role.
> "Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?"
Yes, for small companies. No, for larger companies, but neither should it be HR. Again, HR has no idea how the team dynamics in your company works. Who do you think is a better judge of culture fit - the CTO/VP who's interacting with the team daily, or the HR person who rarely speaks to any of the engineers? Once again this is very much a CTO/VP role.
> " Chase down background checks?"
This is pretty much the only thing in your list that I'd say firmly belongs to HR. HR administrates benefits, HR mediates disputes, HR performs the clerical duties in hiring - including background checks. HR is not a decision maker any more than you'd let your accountant make strategy decisions for your company.
Let's agree to disagree. My view on the small company CEO is that most of their time should be spent on products, customers, fundraising and hiring. Within hiring it's mostly analysis of candidates and selling people on joining the firm. Anything they do that's not one of these things is a distraction.
If they're spending their time on Glassdoor figuring out what DBAs get paid when they could be at a customer the customer suffers. Much more efficient for HR to do it. Much better to let a specialist propose an organization design to get the firm from 10 people to 100. Let the HR person do the research, let the CEO decide. If the CEO is reading all the books on org design instead of being in front of VCs, there won't be funding.
It depends on how big your company is, but for anything under say 5,000 people:
> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?
HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.
> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?
Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.
> HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.
Exactly what I was trying to get across. It's HR's job to come up with general salary trends by seniority, geography and anything else that management wants.
It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be the ones gathering the data.
This is really not HR's job. HR people are hired for experience with benefits management and bookkeeping; when they try to trend salaries, they inevitably wind up just sourcing extremely dubious data from extremely dubious sites. Most companies would be better off not pretending that HR has any other function than trying to minimize the cost of health insurance to the company.
Perhaps I'm biased because I've been in a few places where HR did the mainline jobs in the firm prior to becoming HR. Those scenarios turned out extremely well, though perhaps we didn't get the best deals in health insurance.
I've also seen (unhealthy) environments where HR's primary job was to protect the company from lawsuits. That's not great either.
In general I've counseled people not to put their career in HR's hands, but that's still a long way from calling it a near-useless function. It frequently turns out that way, but it has the potential to be much more.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input.
HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere.
Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though.
Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
Short question: Do you have employees? We do have a handful and the amount of work associated with them [1] is astounding. On average it used to cost me 20% of my time until we hired someone for administrative and HR work. Now, we're a small company and have no need for a full HR position, but that role is taken by a person and I can quite well tell that the more employees we hire, the more we'll move to a dedicated HR position. It's not a "big" role, but it's still an important one. I value that work being taken off me.
That's a good reason to have an administrative assistant, right? In fact there;s no reason why departmental administrative assistants can't take on HR roles, is there?
Sure, if that fits you. That still doesn't make "HR" disappear - they're just labeled differently and can't specialise. So as long as you can't fill a full HR position that's certainly a measure, but if you can, why not fill it with somebody who can and wants to fill that role as good as possible?
If the team manager is doing background checks - initiating, conducting, following up, etc.- how much time does that allow for him/her to manage the team, do whatever technical work is required at level, interact with the rest of the company as required, take a breath and think strategically, etc.? And how many team mangers WANT conducting background checks as part of their jobs? Even farming that out to a contractor - finding a good one, following up, ensuring quality, making sure deadlines are met, etc. - takes time.
Please re-read what I said. Background checks should be either HR or an administrative assistant tot he team manager. But things like initial fit interviews should be with the team, not just the manager.
The point is that bringing someone onto the team and seeing if that is a good fit, is something that belongs at the team level. Some of the support could be done by a small HR department, or the old fashioned way, by an administrative assistant.
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.