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How to Hire an HR Director

Growing companies add employees at a rapid clip. They also tend to handle human resources in an ad hoc function for too long. Here's a look at the best practices for when and how to hire an HR director.

Companies with 50 or fewer employees rarely have a formal human resources department; instead, duties from recruiting to benefits administration are scattered among of colleagues--an accounting manager might manage a payroll vendor while mid-level employees write job listings, and a manager makes key hires.

Over time, that piecemeal approach becomes inefficient. If your company is growing, when is it time to add a human resources director? Simple, experts say: When the staff resources consumed by the tasks that can be managed by a human-resources director exceed the costs of hiring one. For some companies, creating a HR department is a way to consolidate outsourced jobs such as hiring consultation and payroll maintenance under one purview.

"To make it worthwhile to have someone dedicated full time to HR, you have to have a critical mass in the office," says Ellen Rudnick, the executive director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

With various critical HR functions – employee training, setting standards, payroll, hiring and firing – lumped into one position, it's essential to find the right person for the job your company needs.

Some strategic questions to consider: If you are growing, it may make sense to hire an HR manager who has run a department for a company that is twice as large as your own - even if the cost, in term's of that candidates desired salary, will likely be higher. Remember this: You want an HR manager who will be qualified to help you as you grow.

Second, to what extent will you look at your HR director to establish your company's culture? If you really want a person to build upon the culture you have established, you may go into the hiring process with the expectation that you should hire two people: one to work on culture and one to assist in handling more mundane tasks such as the paperwork involved with sponsoring employee visas or benefits administration.

To better identify what the position you'll be hiring entails, you should start by taking the time necessary to carefully craft a job description.

Dig Deeper: A Hiring Checklist

 

Hiring an HR Director: The Job Description

The first item under the job title should be a summary overview of what the position will be. A list of job duties and responsibilities should follow. Depending on what your company needs in an HR director, that list could include design and administration of employee policies and employee-compensation programs, managing incentive pay and s alary oversight, administrating employee benefit programs, overseeing the staffing process – including hiring and firing – and administering worker-training programs. Bullet points work best for organizing these responsibilities.

It's key not to forget a catch-phrase line to include additional "duties as assigned," just in case the job morphs over time or something is omitted. “Basically, it's so a hire doesn't come back and say ‘that wasn't in my job description," said Roberta Chinsky Matuson, president of the Northampton, Massachusetts-based Human Resource Solutions.

When the job description is clearly laid out and agreed upon by management, it's time to write and post the job listing, for which the foundations are already laid.

Dig Deeper: View a Sample Job Description Template

 

Hiring an HR Director: How to Determine Compensation

To find a salary that's fair to offer, a small business owner or hiring manager should contact an agency or two that do HR salary studies. Average sales-manager salary information, particularly if it is industry-specific, may cost you a fee. You can take that data and combine it with knowledge gleaned from PayScale.com or Salary.com and current job listings online to obtain an accurate picture of what candidates are expecting.

That said, it's perfectly couth to ask applicants about their salary expectations in terms of base plus commission plus benefits. It's also worth asking what sort of salary scale the candidate expects for the rest of his or her staff.

To keep the salary right, for small companies adding their first HR staffer, Jamie Resker, president and founder of Employee Performance Solutions, suggests seeking the perfect hire who's only perhaps three to five years into their career – a junior HR representative who worked hard for someone else and, though eager, hasn't been out on their own yet.

"Someone who has a network of resources and a lot of motivation to be out on their own is perfect," Resker says. "Someone who is perhaps involved in some professional organizations, so that they can tap into, others tools, say, their telecommuting policies, and help them bring in resources."

Read more:

How to Hire a Star Employee

Christine Lagorio

Christine Lagorio is a writer and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, and The Believer, among other publications. She is executive editor of Inc.com.