Hiring an HRBP vs deploying HR software — the build-vs-buy choice

Around 50 employees, every founder has the same conversation with their cofounder: "we need HR." What "HR" means in this moment usually isn't strategic people-management. It means "the existing systems are breaking, can we please not do the vacation spreadsheet anymore."

The two paths from there are:

1. Hire an HR Business Partner (HRBP).
2. Buy HR software.

In practice you eventually do both. But the order matters, and "both at the same time" rarely works for a 50-person company. Here's the decision frame.

What an HRBP actually does

A founder's instinct is that HR is the absences spreadsheet, the onboarding checklist, the org chart. That's HR ops. It's the most visible 10% of an HRBP's job. The other 90% — what experienced HRBPs spend most of their time on:

• Manager coaching: hour-long 1:1s with first-time managers helping them think through a difficult report, a re-org, a difficult conversation.
• Compensation philosophy: building bands, leveling, equity allocation principles. Bringing in the right benchmark data.
• Talent strategy: where the company should hire next, who should be promoted, what skills are missing.
• Difficult conversations: leading PIPs, terminations, harassment investigations.
• Culture building: facilitating offsites, designing rituals, naming and addressing dysfunction.
• Manager hiring: helping the founder hire their FIRST head-of-engineering, head-of-sales, etc.

This is high-leverage work that only an experienced human can do. An HRBP at 50 people is almost entirely doing the 90%, not the 10%.

What HR software actually does

The HR-software offering at the 50-person scale is exactly the 10%: vacation approvals, org chart, employee directory, basic reviews, KB for HR docs, maybe office floor plan. The operational layer.

Software cannot coach a first-time manager through a 1:1. Software cannot facilitate a PIP. Software cannot help the founder hire their head of sales.

What software CAN do is take the operational layer off whoever is doing it now (usually the founder, COO, or an EA-doubling-as-people-ops), so that the person who eventually owns People at the company isn't drowning in absences-tracking when they start.

Why the order matters

If you hire an HRBP FIRST and have no software, the new HRBP spends their first 6 weeks setting up the operational layer themselves (or arguing with the team about which tool to pick). 6 weeks of senior-IC-level salary spent on something software does in 4 hours. You also burn the HRBP's onboarding patience on a task they didn't sign up for.

If you buy software FIRST and don't hire an HRBP, you have a portal that handles the obvious workflows. The 90% work doesn't happen. The founder picks up the slack on culture / coaching / hiring decisions, which is fine up to ~75 people and starts failing visibly above that.

The right sequence for most companies:

1. ~30 people: buy operational software (portal). 4-hour setup. Founder still does the strategic stuff.
2. ~75 people: hire the first People hire — could be HRBP, could be more junior People-ops + part-time advisor. They walk into a working operational layer.
3. ~150 people: split into two People roles — one operational (People-ops manager), one strategic (HRBP). Software still doing the daily routing.
4. ~300 people: full People org. Software is now a small piece of a larger toolchain (ATS, HRIS, payroll, performance-management — usually different vendors).

The exception: companies that buy software too late

We see this pattern often: a company hires their first HRBP at 50 people because "we need HR." The HRBP spends the next year drowning in operational work, the strategic 90% doesn't get done, the founder is disappointed, the HRBP is overworked, they part ways at month 18, the company concludes "HR doesn't work at our stage."

The actual problem: the company hired the HRBP a year too early AND didn't give them software. Either fix alone would have helped. Both together would have produced a different outcome.

The exception: founders who treat HR software as HR strategy

The mirror-image failure: a founder buys software, declares "we have HR now", and tries to grow to 200 people without hiring a person. The org runs on autopilot, gets the operations right, and visibly fails the strategic side — first-time managers don't get coached, compensation gets ad-hoc, the first hard termination happens and there's nobody who knows how to do it well.

Software is necessary infrastructure. It's not strategy. At some headcount you need a person who treats People as their whole job.

A simple decision frame

Three questions:

Q1: How many hours per week does someone currently spend on operational HR (vacations, employee directory, onboarding logistics)?

• <2 hours/week: too early for software. Manage with spreadsheets a bit longer.
• 2-8 hours/week: buy software. ROI is immediate.
• 8+ hours/week: you should have bought software a while ago.

Q2: How many open managerial / strategic-HR questions are unresolved right now?

• Examples: "should we have promotion levels?", "what's our policy on remote work?", "how do we hire our head of engineering?", "are we paying market for our seniors?"
• 0-2: too early for an HRBP. Founder can handle.
• 3-6: hire one. The questions will only multiply.
• 7+: you should have hired an HRBP six months ago.

Q3: What's your headcount?

• <50: usually neither yet. Software around 30-40 if the operational layer is breaking, HRBP later.
• 50-100: software for sure, HRBP at the upper end of the range.
• 100+: both.

If your answers cross-validate (you have lots of unresolved strategic questions AND lots of operational hours AND headcount of 90), the answer is "both now, software first because it's faster to deploy."

The wrong reasons people hire an HRBP

A few patterns we see that produce mis-hires:

• "Our culture is suffering and we need someone to fix it." Culture is fixed by the leadership team's behavior, not by an HRBP. The HRBP can help name and prioritize the work, but they can't change the leadership's behavior if leadership isn't bought in.
• "We need someone to handle compliance / legal stuff." That's a lawyer + a payroll provider, not an HRBP.
• "Performance reviews are coming up and nobody knows how to run them." A consultant can design your first review cycle in a week. Hiring an HRBP for a one-time process design is overkill (and they'll be bored).

The right reason to hire an HRBP: there's an ongoing stream of judgment-call decisions involving people at your company that nobody on the leadership team has bandwidth or expertise to handle well. THAT is the recurring need.

How software fits in long-term

Even at 300 people with a full People org, you still use the same employee portal you bought at 30. The features that matter expand (custom fields, deeper review cycles, more reporting), but the daily-touchpoint UI for "who works here, who's out, how do I request vacation" doesn't change. Buying software early doesn't mean you outgrow it; you just use more of it.

The HRBP who joins later usually appreciates the existing software stack. The portals they hated are the ones that required them to manually configure approval chains for every employee, or that didn't integrate with the IdP, or that had no API for them to pull data into the strategic-analytics work they actually wanted to do. The portals they liked were the ones that handled the boring stuff invisibly so they could focus on coaching managers.

Related reading

• What is an employee portal — and when does a company really need one
• Building a 360-degree review process people don't dread
• Vacation and absence tracking: from spreadsheet to self-service