Why HR People
Outsourced HR is not automatically the right answer. Software, a PEO or hiring someone are all better choices in the right circumstances, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours. So here is the honest version.
Gusto, BambooHR, Rippling and the rest.
Genuinely good at storing records, running workflows and giving employees a portal. If your problem is that information is scattered, software fixes that properly and cheaply.
It does not decide anything. When a manager asks whether they can fire someone on Friday, the platform has no opinion. You are still the one who has to know the answer.
Right when your problem is organisation, not judgement.
TriNet, Insperity, Justworks and similar.
Real advantages. Your employees join their master plans, which can mean better benefits pricing than a small business could negotiate alone, and they take on real administrative burden.
Co employment. Your employees are legally on their books alongside yours, you move onto their payroll and benefits, and leaving later means migrating everything back. The pricing is usually a percentage of payroll, so it scales with your wage bill rather than your need.
Right when benefits buying power is the main problem and you are comfortable with co employment.
A full time person, in house.
The gold standard if you can justify it. Someone in the building, in your culture, available all day, who becomes genuinely expert in your business.
Salary plus benefits plus payroll taxes, before you count recruiting time and the risk of the hire not working out. Below roughly a hundred employees most businesses cannot justify a full time HR salary, which is why the role usually gets absorbed by an office manager instead.
Right once you are consistently big enough to keep one person busy.
What HR People does.
A named HR expert on call, working alongside the payroll, benefits and software you already have. No co employment, no migration, no full time salary. You get judgement rather than a platform.
We are not in your building every day, we do not process payroll ourselves, and we are not attorneys. For a business over about a hundred and fifty employees, hiring in house usually starts to make more sense and we will say so.
Right when you need HR judgement more than HR software, and cannot justify a salary.
Side by side
The last row is the one that goes against us, and it is the one most likely to matter to you.
| HR People | HR software | A PEO | In house hire | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A named person who knows your business | Yes | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| Keep your existing payroll provider | Yes | Sometimes | No | Yes |
| Keep your benefits broker and carriers | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| No co employment | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Handles difficult employee situations | Yes | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| No long term contract | Yes | Sometimes | No | No |
| Cost does not scale with your payroll | Yes | Sometimes | No | Sometimes |
| Available in your building every day | No | No | No | Yes |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
How we work
Plans that scale down as well as up. No hidden costs and flexible terms, because a small business budget is a real constraint rather than a negotiating position.
Month to month. Stay because it works, not because you signed something. If you are only staying because leaving is painful, the service has already failed.
The same expert every time you call. She knows your team, your providers and what you told her last month. There is no queue and no case number.
Your people stay your people. No co employment, ever. Your EIN, your payroll provider, your benefits relationships, all unchanged.
In fairness
Every one of these is something another provider would happily claim. Knowing where the edges are is more useful to you than a longer list of services.
Nothing on that list is a gap we are working to close. They are deliberate, and each one is a reason your existing providers stay exactly where they are.
They understand that small businesses need HR solutions that are professional but also realistic and affordable.
We needed HR expertise without hiring a full-time HR department. This has been the perfect solution for our growing company.
The support feels personal rather than outsourced. They understand our company, our employees, and the way we operate.
Questions
Co employment. A PEO becomes a joint employer of your staff, who move onto the PEO's payroll, benefits and workers compensation. We do not. Your employees stay on your EIN, your payroll provider keeps running payroll and your benefits stay with your broker. A PEO takes things over. We work alongside what you already have.
If your problem is that records are scattered and nothing has a process, then quite possibly yes, and it will cost you less. Software is good at organisation. What it cannot do is tell you whether your documentation is strong enough to act on, or have the conversation with the manager who has been avoiding it for a year.
Roughly once you are consistently over a hundred and fifty employees, or when the HR work is genuinely full time. At that point a salary is justifiable and someone in the building has real advantages. We will tell you when we think you have reached it, because keeping a client who has outgrown us is not a good outcome for either side.
Cheaper than a full time salary with benefits, almost always. Against a PEO it depends, because PEO pricing usually runs as a percentage of payroll, so it scales with your wage bill. Against software alone it is more expensive, because you are buying judgement rather than a database. Book a call and you will have real numbers.
Yes, and most clients do. Keep the platform you like. We work in it with you rather than asking you to replace it, and most plans include access to our client platform at no extra cost if you would rather have one.
It is a real project rather than a switch, and worth planning properly. Your employees move back onto your EIN, you take on payroll and benefits directly, and there are timing considerations around the plan year. We have done it and can tell you honestly whether it is worth doing in your case.
Twenty minutes, no pitch. Describe your situation and Brandi will tell you which of the four she would actually recommend, including when that answer is not us.