The first HR hire can wait. The first HR system can’t.
Theo Kela
Operations Lead
·
6 min read
The systems worth putting in place before your first people hire.
Systems before headcount
Most founders wait until the chaos is unbearable to hire their first people person. By then the debt has compounded: records live in five tools, leave is tracked in a spreadsheet, and nobody knows which contract version is current.
A lightweight system in place from day 30 does the boring work of remembering, so your first HR hire inherits order instead of archaeology.
Start with the source of truth
Pick one place for people records and make everything else point at it. The tooling matters less than the discipline of a single, trusted source.
Written by
Theo Kela
Operations Lead at Northwind. Turns messy people processes into systems that run themselves, then writes down what worked.
