The HR Department of One: A Survival Guide
SquadBear··6 min read
Somewhere around employee 25, most companies discover they have had an HR department for a year. It is usually one person, appointed by accident: the office manager who set up payroll when there were nine of you, or the EA everyone already trusted with sensitive things. Nobody announced the promotion; the hard questions just started arriving at your desk.
If that is you, this guide is yours: not the version for HR directors with a team and a budget, but for one person doing all of it at a 25 to 60 person company, usually next to another full job.
The job description nobody wrote down
You are three roles wearing one badge. Part compliance officer: contracts, statutory leave, data protection, the records an audit will one day ask about. Part ops: payroll inputs, benefits admin, onboarding logistics, offboarding under time pressure. Part therapist: the conversations that land on you because there is no other desk for them.
Nobody can do all three well at once, and you are not expected to. The skill that decides whether this job is survivable is triage: knowing what must be perfect, what merely has to happen on time, and what you should refuse to own at all. The rest of this guide is the sorting.
The four fires you never wing
Most of HR forgives improvisation. Four things do not: they cost real money, legal exposure, or someone's livelihood. The rule for all four: never wing it, even when everyone wants an answer today.
Payroll errors. Paying someone late or wrong burns trust faster than anything else you control, and corrections drag tax filings with them, penalties attached. Slow and checked beats fast and plausible.
Contracts and terminations. Probation deadlines, notice periods, the difference between a hard conversation and a dismissal. This is where small companies pick up employment claims. No termination without written advice from someone qualified. None.
Harassment and grievance complaints. The damage happens in the first 48 hours: informal chats that should have been documented, confidentiality promised then broken, the accused told before the process starts. Write the procedure before you need it, and follow it literally when you do.
Visa and permit deadlines. Miss a renewal window and a colleague can lose the right to work while it gets fixed. Those dates go in the calendar the day you learn them, reminders months out, in two places.
Everything else you can figure out as you go.
The annual calendar
The recurring work is predictable a year out, so calendar it once instead of remembering it twelve times. Deadlines vary by country; treat this as the shape of an EU-ish year and pin your own statutory dates onto it.
| Month | What recurs |
|---|---|
| January | New leave year: carryover lands, fresh balances appear, questions about both arrive. Payroll year-end paperwork begins. |
| February | Year-end filings and employee tax documents go out; your provider leads, you supply clean data on time. |
| March | Pay-review season at many companies: have salary data ready before you are asked. Nudge spring vacation booking. |
| April | Benefits and insurance renewals cluster here. Audit who is actually enrolled against who should be. |
| May | Public holidays cluster across much of Europe. Publish the year's holiday calendar and open summer coverage planning. |
| June | Settle summer leave and coverage now, before it becomes a July argument. Intern and graduate onboarding batch. |
| July | Quiet month one: review the handbook and policies while nobody is asking about them. |
| August | Quiet month two: clean employee records, chase missing documents, dry-run offboarding. |
| September | Probation reviews from summer hires stack up; people who made decisions over the summer resign. |
| October | Budget season: headcount gets decided now, so bring the case (more below). |
| November | Leave-balance warnings: whoever will lose days to the carryover cap needs to hear it now, not on 20 December. Confirm December payroll cutoffs, which move earlier. |
| December | Holiday closure comms, early final payroll, carryover decisions, next year's holiday calendar published. |
Underneath it runs the monthly metronome: payroll cutoff, starters and leavers to your provider, benefits changes. Calendar those too.
Systematize ruthlessly
An HR team absorbs repetition with headcount. You cannot, so every repeated process either becomes a system or becomes your evenings.
Two moves do most of the work. First, checklists for anything that runs more than twice a year: onboarding, offboarding, probation reviews. A checklist with named owners and due dates is the only way "order the laptop" happens without you personally remembering it, and it leaves proof that it happened. If you build only two systems this quarter, make them the onboarding checklist and the policy acknowledgment trail; we have written both up in detail.
Second, self-serve for lookups. "How many days do I have left?" and "who is off next week?" are your most frequent interruptions, and both have exact answers a system can show people directly. Each question you make self-serve hands you back five minutes, dozens of times a year.
Refuse or outsource
Hero mode does not scale and rarely gets noticed. Parts of this job should leave your desk entirely.
Outsource payroll to a bureau and keep only the inputs. Outsource employment law to counsel you can actually call: a retainer costs less than one mishandled termination, and knowing when to call is the skill, not knowing every answer yourself.
Refuse to be the performance manager for other people's teams: managers own the difficult conversations, you own the process and the paper trail. And refuse to be the complaints bin without a mandate: if grievances are yours, get that in writing, with authority to act attached. Responsibility without authority is how HR departments of one burn out.
Building the case for headcount
Founders do not respond to tiredness. They respond to numbers and risk. Spend a quarter collecting both: hours per week on HR admin, interruptions included; the onboardings, offboardings and reviews you ran; the near-misses, the deadline caught with two days to spare. Near-misses persuade the most, because they price the alternative.
You cannot put a precise figure on what losing someone costs, and you do not need to. Make the components visible: recruiting fees, months of ramp-up, the vacancy itself, the knowledge that walks out. One experienced engineer leaving costs a multiple of a part-time HR coordinator. Made about your own team, that comparison is the argument.
Ask for a specific slice, not a department: a better payroll bureau, then a part-time coordinator, then the full role. Small asks get funded.
The colleague you don't have
A department of one has nobody to ask "did I miss anything this week?" The review a team provides for free (a second reader, someone who notices the overdue thing) is missing.
Honestly, it is the best case we know for pointing an AI assistant at HR data. Not to decide anything. To check. An assistant connected to your HR system answers Monday morning in one pass:
"Run my Monday triage: who's out next week and who's covering, which checklist items are overdue and whose are they, and which policy acknowledgments are still unsigned?"
Full disclosure: we make SquadBear, and it is built for this. Checklists start themselves when someone is hired, people check their own balances, and a connected assistant (Claude or ChatGPT) reads it all under your permissions, nobody else's. You can start free and point the triage prompt at your own data. The method matters more than the tool, though: the assistant is not standing in for a colleague's judgment, because the colleague was never there.
The four fires stay human, and lawyered. Everything else is fair game for the system.