SevenStar HR CEO Jackie Gernaey recently joined Alan Schoenberger on his podcast, Chasing Nickels, to discuss the importance of job descriptions, employee handbooks, and hiring the right employees. This blog post will cover some of the discussion on outsourcing HR.

Alan: For business owners not trying to do everything themselves and bring in the experts, is there an ideal size when it's time to either start thinking about outsourcing part-time HR, versus bringing somebody in full-time?

Jackie: According to the Society for Human Resources Management, at around 120 employees you probably need a full-time HR employee. If you have around 25 to 35 employees you’d need someone one day a week - a fractional person. It can depend on the business owner; we have clients that will bring us in for three hours a month - while they are very small, they just hate doing HR. Others have high turnover and bring us in to onboard new employees, so everyone's different.

Alan: Is it realistic to be able to find an HR generalist, or do you have to find specialists almost the same way you would as with a doctor or a lawyer, where maybe one HR person only deals with compliance, another with managing and hiring employees, and so forth?

Jackie: There is a split between generalists -people who can manage laws and regulations, employee relations, training, and the like - and hiring. You need specialists to hire for you, and I don’t mean recruiters. Recruiters charge 30 to 35% of an annual salary, and that's really kind of outrageous for a small business to afford.

Alan: So there are companies out there that would do it as a flat fee, or maybe an hourly basis or something like that?

Jackie: Yes, absolutely.

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Listen to the full podcast episode here