Most small company owners like to think of HR advisors as an unnecessary expense that should not be there. In fact, most startup companies start with the employers having a direct relationship with their employees, with no HR person in sight. However, as a company grows, there is an acute need for a dedicated human resource person, not only for getting people on board through recruitment but, more important, for avoiding expensive mistakes in handling employees.
What are HR advisors?
Hiring an HR person who is trained in the job is expensive, though, but thankfully there are HR advisors that can help you. They are human resource support services for companies that have 1 to 50 employees. These services are cheap and you can typically get unlimited email and chat support for less than $20 per day, depending on the service you use.
Having the word “advisor” in HR advisor means that these services dispense advice on how to handle your employees. We’re not talking about ordinary advice here, we’re talking about sound advice based on applicable state and federal laws. If you are like most people, you probably do not know how long maternity leave is, or what kind of severance package you need to give if you are laying off employees. HR advisors can guide you through the whole process.
But that is not the only thing they do. The typical HR consulting company can provide you with the following:
* An employee handbook that’s updated to reflect the latest labor laws,
* Employee documents relevant to the different stages of employment (from hiring to separation)
* State and federal posters that are required to be posted in your offices,
* HIPAA protection,
* Detailed advice on specific employee problems
As you can see, HR advisors provide a wide range of services relevant to managing people professionally.
If you’re like most people, you probably assigned the human resources department to an employee who is not trained and is totally inexperienced in the area. You can help this HR person by paying for advisory services from professional people. As we said earlier, it will not cost you much.
If you want to know how much it will actually cost, we suggest that you search Google for different HR advisors that offer these services. Click on at least three search results and then ask for a quote from each of them. Aside from the price, make sure that the inclusions are also listed in the quote.
Not all services are created alike, though, and while there are those that provide the whole menu of services that we listed above for one price, there are those that offer them ala carte. We are not going to tell you how to choose, that’s something you do after doing a cost-benefit analysis.
But for us, however, it does no matter which type of service you hire, what matters is that you have something in the way of informed advice that will get you out of harm’s way by avoiding expensive HR-related mistakes.