Hiring without an HR team
How do I hire when I don't have an HR department?
Founders without HR can hire well by using a simple structured process: define what the role needs, write consistent screening and interview questions in advance, score every candidate the same way, and follow the basic UK legal steps. A clear process matters more than having an HR department.
Most small businesses don't need HR for their first hires. They need a repeatable way of making decisions.
When should a small business hire its first HR person?
Many UK businesses bring in dedicated HR support at around 20 to 50 employees, often starting with an outsourced HR service before hiring someone in-house. Before that point, most founders handle hiring themselves, which makes having a structured hiring process especially important.
The trigger is usually complexity — frequent hiring, multiple managers, or people issues — rather than a fixed headcount.
How much time does hiring take for a founder?
Hiring one person typically takes a founder many hours across writing the advert, screening applications, interviewing, and onboarding, spread over several weeks. Screening is usually the most time-consuming part, especially when a job attracts dozens or hundreds of applications.
The biggest time saving comes from filtering out unsuitable applications before they reach your inbox.
Should I use a recruitment agency for my first hire?
An agency can make sense for a first hire if the role is specialist, urgent, or you genuinely have no time. For most first hires, a structured in-house process is cheaper and builds a hiring capability the business keeps for every future hire, rather than paying a fee each time.
The first hire is also the best chance to learn what your business actually needs in a person.
What's the difference between an internal hiring process and using an agency?
An internal hiring process means the business runs its own recruitment, owns its hiring criteria, and builds knowledge with every hire. An agency runs recruitment on the business's behalf for a fee per hire. Internal processes cost less over time; agencies save time on individual hires.
A business with its own process gets better at hiring. A business using agencies gets better at briefing agencies.
How do founders make consistent hiring decisions?
Founders make consistent hiring decisions by writing down their criteria before seeing candidates, asking every candidate the same questions, and scoring answers the same way each time. Consistency turns hiring from a series of one-off judgements into a repeatable process that improves with each hire.
Keeping a record of why each decision was made also makes it much easier to learn from hires that do and don't work out.