At some point in the growth of almost every small business, the owner realizes they have outgrown their informal approach to HR. The question becomes: do we hire someone full-time, or bring in outside support?
A full-time HR manager or director gives you dedicated in-house capacity. The cost is real: an HR manager in the US earns an average of $65,000 to $95,000 in base salary. Add benefits, payroll taxes, and overhead, and the fully-loaded cost is typically $85,000 to $130,000 per year. For most businesses under 50 employees, that is difficult to justify.
Fractional HR gives you a senior HR professional's expertise on a part-time or project basis. The cost typically ranges from $1,500 to $6,000 per month — and for that investment, you usually get access to experience far above what you could hire full-time at the same budget.
Before you decide between fractional and full-time, ask a different question: what does your HR need to accomplish in the next 12 months? If the answer is "build a handbook, fix our onboarding, get compliant, and put a performance process in place," that is a project-based scope — and fractional HR is built for exactly that.
The goal is not to have an HR person. The goal is to have HR that works. Sometimes those are the same thing. Often, they are not.
ValuedHR helps small and growing businesses build the HR systems they need — without the overhead of a full-time hire.
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