HR Consulting for SMEs

We have built our business around providing HR and recruiting services that work to SMEs. We’ll handle all of the business as usual “transactional” stuff, and we’ll get your people strategy fit for purpose.

What does this mean? At the moment, you’re big enough to need processes, so that typically ends up with finance, but you’re growing, so finding that quite a lot of time is spent on things like issuing contracts, fiddling with new starters or leavers on payroll, and recruitment agency fees are edging towards to £150k mark. In HR terms, you’re treading water.

Our HR solutions will stabilise your people flow and prepare you for growth. We’ll help you to make the most of the skills you have and be clear on what new skills you need. The benefits of using a third party are legion – we have various specialists in our business and you’ll use them all at some point. You’ll have a single point of contact who’ll assess what you need and then bring in the right skills. This could be a skills assessment, rolling out a new appraisal system, restructuring your Board, or working on your organisational design. It could be managing disciplinaries and grievances, or sorting out a better comp and bens system, clearing the backlog of hires that you need to make, or even clearing out some people you know should go. Difficult decisions that seem to be intertwined seems to unravel and resolve themselves.

Unless you hire someone seriously senior, it’s unlikely that all of these skills are present in one person. Using a third party, or an outsourced provider, means that you’ll use the skills you need when you want to. Our solutions flex to a frankly ridiculous degree, all so that you get the service you need and you don’t have any nasty surprises.

Here’s a really great recent example, live from the vaults. An employee grievance was raised against their manager. Our primary HR point of contact, although well embedded, knew that her sweet spot wasn’t in managing grievances, so she brought in her colleague, who loves dealing with difficult conversations and picking out a path to resolution. Situation resolved, documented and everyone was happy, and it didn’t cost a penny more.

The process of outsourced HR consulting is very clear-cut. We’ll come and talk to you about what you need, which isn’t always what you want. It might be that a low-cost tech solution will suit you where you were thinking of an all-singing HRM or ATS, or it might be primarily people-led. You might need a short-term change project or a long-term shoulder to cry on. Just remember that to be truly impactful, don’t use us as a way of letting your managers abdicate management responsibility. They’ll still need to develop their teams, and we’ll help them to do that, but we’re most definitely not the police.

We’re an agile consultancy. To us, this means that we flex when you need us to, we solve the problems that are in front of us and we look to the future, to a point when you won’t need us at all.