How to Hire an HR Generalist: A Guide for Startups

In the chaotic world of startups, perhaps no one has a better front-row seat to the madness than the lucky few who work in HR.

From building a hiring process from scratch to managing compliance and the scandals lurking around the corner, HR bears the brunt of the chaos in an early-stage company, while also holding the key to its success.

For earlier-stage startups (around 25-50 employees), your first and most critical HR hire will often be an HR Generalist. The ideal HR Generalist is someone who can juggle numerous responsibilities while keeping their cool as they adapt to what comes their way. In this guide, I’ll show you how to attract, identify, and hire the right HR Generalist for your startup.

 

The Job Functions of an HR Generalist in a Startup

HR Generalists have a simple yet critical mission: build the team, help shape the culture, manage growth, and put out the inevitable fires along the way.

HR Generalists typically perform the following functions:

• Recruiting and onboarding
• Employee relations
• Payroll and benefits
• Compliance and HR policies
• Performance management
• HR systems and technology

As you can imagine, this is one of the problems with the HR Generalist role: it is seen as a grab bag of many, if not all, HR responsibilities. As a result, the role can vary from company to company depending on the needs. One startup may require its HR Generalist to act as an HR team of one, while another may need someone to handle recruiting and payroll.

To make matters more confusing, many startups look to an HR Generalist as their first hire, and thrust all HR-related responsibilities, including strategy, culture, and other higher level initiatives, upon their shoulders. While an HR Generalist can be a great hire, there are limits to what they can do.

When hiring an HR Generalist, I recommend bearing the following in mind:

• Be as specific as possible about the capabilities you are looking for and the responsibilities you expect for the role.
• This is a foundational hire who will shape the direction of HR within your company and is often one step toward building a fully-fledged HR function.
• This hire may want to grow into a new role as your company and HR organization scale.

HR performs table-stakes functions in a company, so when hiring an HR Generalist for your startup, you cannot afford to bring on someone who is not prepared and ready to make an impact in your company.

 

When to Hire In-House vs Outsource HR

Before we go any further with hiring for your budding HR team, it’s helpful to review whether now is the right time to hire someone in-house rather than outsourcing.

When I ask most companies (especially startups) about their hiring plans, their dream hires usually consist of:

• Engineering/product
• Sales
• Marketing

And I get it. You need a product that can compete in the market, a sales team that can hit the pavement and sell, and a marketing team that ensures your message is heard loud and clear.

But those same companies miss the fact that HR plays a key role in how the above jobs are filled.

That said, you don’t have to jump to hiring to fill your immediate HR needs in the early stages. For early-stage companies, I recommend outsourcing HR. Personally, I’ve worked as a fractional HR consultant for many companies over the past decade-plus and can speak to the impact a senior HR leader can have within a limited scope.

If your company has:

• Nailed product-market fit
• Found HR tasks consume too much time
• Increased headcount past 50 employees

Then it’s time to invest in an in-house HR team. It’s at this stage that an HR Generalist can be a good hire if your existing leadership already has strong people fundamentals. That way, a Generalist can execute on the existing strategy you’ve built. If you truly are starting from scratch, I recommend hiring an HR leader and adding in more specialized roles as you scale.

Learn about deciding between in-house vs outsourced HR here; if in-house sounds like the way to go, then keep reading!

 

How to Write an HR Generalist Job Posting

Your job posting will dictate the type of candidate that you attract and bring into your hiring funnel. Bland, generic job postings may appeal to a broader audience, but they won’t necessarily attract the right hire your team needs.

A good job posting begins with a job description that outlines the role’s responsibilities and duties. Start by describing the role, the challenges the hire will face, and the skills they will need. Then write your job posting and market the role to attract ideal candidates.

When writing a job posting, I like to start with the following three things:

• Assess the needs of my team
• Define the ideal candidate profile I want to hire
• Note the responsibilities and roles of the job

And from there, the basic job posting template I use includes the following:

• A company description: Go beyond the basics and use clear, descriptive language to give your prospective candidates a taste of what your company culture is like.
• Summarize the role: Include a brief description of the role, key responsibilities, and required experience. Define success for the role and the team structure, too.
• Skills: Specify the technical capabilities and experience required for the role.
• Benefits and location: Include where the job is (if it’s not remote), in-office expectations, and benefits that come with the job.
• Compensation: I’m an advocate for being upfront about compensation. Pay will depend on location and experience. According to PayScale, the average salary for an HR Generalist in the United States is $62,000. However, the range is wide ($48,000-$79,000). Compensation packages also include bonuses or equity.

Once your job posting is written, it’s time to attract the best candidates for the role. Check out my guide on strategic places to publish job postings so you can maximize quality applications.

The Process for Hiring an HR Generalist: What to Expect

Interviewing is a key step in any hiring process, but many companies aren’t using their interviews strategically.

This especially goes for HR Generalist interviews. These interviews provide an opportunity to assess whether a candidate is the ideal fit for your company or just sounds good on paper.

When interviewing, involve multiple team members to get diverse, informed perspectives on each candidate. I find it’s helpful to bear the following in mind:

• Develop a process and stick with it. Don’t add/remove steps as you go, or you’ll end up frustrating candidates.
• Define a clear purpose for each step. Don’t do something “just because.” Every step you take should have a clear purpose that allows you to effectively evaluate each candidate. If you can’t clearly say why you’re doing something, cut it.
• And don’t cut corners! Hiring is one of the most important tasks for any fast-growing company, so don’t skip important steps for the sake of speed.

At a high level, the typical HR Generalist interview process looks like this:

• Initial screen: As with any other hire, ensure the candidate meets the role’s minimum requirements and is likely to be a good fit for the organization. Focus on their expectations for the job, basic skill questions, personality fit, and their interview timelines.
• A hiring manager screen: Ensure there is a strong likelihood that the candidate fits the role. Focus on getting to know the candidate on a personal level, and either gauge their ability as best you can or seek outside help to evaluate them at a technical level (a fractional HR leader can help here).
• A take-home project: A take-home project lets you see their process in action and the results they can generate. This also gives you an opportunity to review a candidate’s capabilities with a real-life scenario. The task could be to create a new-hire checklist, examine a hypothetical workplace conflict, or outline a new employer handbook – whatever gives you the best picture of their process and capabilities.
• A “meet the team” interview: This could be a full-day or a half-day, depending on the size of your company. This is typically composed of a few parts:
  • Meetings with non-HR teams to gauge how they establish rapport and how well they understand each department’s goals and needs.
  • A meeting with senior leadership (this could be a senior leader, or members of the C-Suite depending on the size of the company).
  • 1:1 interviews with potential colleagues to assess the candidate’s skills, thought processes, and leadership approach.
• Following this, you will review the candidate’s performance with your team to make a final hiring decision. You may want to include the following as you evaluate and compare candidates:
  • A post-interview panel to discuss the candidate, followed by a decision by the hiring manager.
  • Reference checks to ensure the candidate has good character and standing, and to make sure you haven’t missed anything across the hiring process.
• Make an offer!

It’s worth noting a quick point about the take-home project.

Make expectations clear upfront: what the task is, how to submit it, and when it’s due. You’re not looking for perfection; you’re looking for thoughtfulness, curiosity, and how they think on their feet. If feedback is part of the process, make sure you deliver it and give them a chance to respond constructively; that’s where you’ll really see their potential.

The project should be closely aligned with the work you are looking for this new hire to do, and for that reason, you should pay the candidate for their time. Set an hourly rate based on what an HR Generalist of this level would be paid, and communicate clear expectations around the amount of time you expect them to take on the project. This allows you to cap the pay per candidate and get a sense of what each candidate can do with the same amount of time.

Now that we’ve explained the interview process at a macro level, we need to specify how to engage candidates through specific questions, skill-based assessments, and team needs.

 

How to Interview an HR Generalist

Remember: An HR Generalist is often the first and defining hire for your HR department. Do not gloss over these questions or the answers you get; otherwise, you run the risk of hiring someone ill-qualified for the role and setting them up for failure.

I like to split the HR Generalist interview into two parts:

• Seeking out the required skills (again, these should be based on your company’s needs)
• Specific questions to assess those skills and competencies

Let’s walk through each one.

 

Skills to Look For When Hiring an HR Generalist

When hiring an HR Generalist, I like to look for the following key skills:

• Self-starter: Look for someone who doesn’t wait to be told what to do. The ideal candidate should be proactive and address opportunities and challenges without being asked to do so.
• Strong HR fundamentals: The idea candidate needs to understand the basics of HR compliance, hiring, benefits administration, and other baseline HR work because you will rely on them to handle these things.
• Communication: Look for someone skilled at presenting, onboarding, and facilitating conversations that educate, influence, and align both leaders and internal teams. Good conflict management skills are a must as well.
• Adaptability: Needs and priorities change daily in startups. Thanks to this constant change, HR generalists need to be adaptable and be able to handle what comes their way.

• Technology fluency: Look for a generalist who is comfortable with technology and is able to leverage it to make HR work more efficient. Ideally, they will consider how needs will change and not select technology solely based on what is needed in the moment.

   

Interview Questions to Ask an HR Generalist

The exact questions you ask during the interview process depend on the specific needs of the role. As a general rule, you can break questions down into the following categories:

• HR foundations and compliance
• Recruiting and talent management
• Culture and employee relations
• Startup culture fit
• Systems, processes, and scalability

Whenever asking questions, no matter the scope, I focus on outcomes rather than inputs in earlier-stage companies and startups. Each employee can have an outsized impact on your success; therefore, prioritizing outcomes over “just getting the work done” is essential.

Learn more in my guide to the right way to interview.

 

HR Foundations and Compliance

First things first, you need to know whether they have the chops to be the first (or one of the first) HR hires in your company. Ask specific questions that get to the heart of their experience and practical knowledge, not just theoretical concepts:

• Can you describe a time when you onboarded a new hire, starting from the offer letter through their first day? What specific steps did you take, and what was the impact on the employee experience?
• How do you stay current on employment laws and compliance requirements?
• Tell me about a time you caught a potential compliance issue before it became a problem. What actions did you take to resolve it, and what was the outcome?
• Describe a time when you handled a harassment claim from an employee. What process did you follow, and what was the result for the team and organization?

 

Recruiting and Talent Management

You’re going to have to scale quickly in the months/years ahead, so ask the following to ensure your newest HR hire can hit the ground running and build a recruitment operation primed for scale:

• Tell me about a time when you had to balance speed, quality, and culture fit while hiring for a role. How did you approach the situation, and what were the results?
• Describe a situation where you developed job descriptions and built candidate pipelines for an open position. What steps did you take, and what was the impact?
• Tell me about a time you improved your company’s hiring process. What improvements did you make? How did you measure them?
• Tell me about a time you evaluated the success of your recruiting efforts. What metrics or feedback did you use, and what did you learn from the outcome?

Culture and Employee Relations

In the early stages of your company, culture is a competitive advantage for attracting the right hires into your talent pipeline. Building a strong culture should be a priority, so I suggest asking the following:

• Tell me about a time you had to navigate a conflict between employees. What was the situation, how did you approach it, and what was the outcome?
• Tell me about a situation in which you had to handle sensitive feedback or complaints from an employee. How did you manage the situation, and what steps did you take to resolve it?
• Describe a time when you needed to address an underperforming employee who was well-liked by the team. What approach did you take, and what was the result?
• Give me an example of when you had to manage a top-performer whose behavior was causing conflict within the team or with other teams. What actions did you take and what happened afterward?
• Can you share a specific instance where you had to terminate an employee? What led up to the decision? How did you handle the process, and what was the impact on the team?
• How do you build and measure employee engagement? What tactics or strategies have you used in the past, and how do you assess their effectiveness?

 

Startup Culture Fit

Startup environments are fast-moving, so it’s important that an HR Generalist thrives under uncertainty and brings a proactive, can-do attitude. Ask questions like these to assess whether your candidate is meant for a startup role:

• How do you handle situations when priorities shift rapidly or resources are limited? How did you handle the situation, and what was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time when you took initiative without much guidance. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
• How do you ensure communication and alignment across multiple teams? Please explain with an example.

 

Systems, Processes, and Scalability

An HR Generalist must work cross-functionally to prime the company for scale while implementing processes and systems as they go. To assess how well your candidate can prime your company for scale, ask questions like:

• Tell me about a time when you implemented or improved an HR tool at your company. What was the situation, how did you approach the implementation, and what did you learn from that experience?
• Describe a situation where you had to prioritize building HR processes for a company at a particular stage of growth. What was your thought process, what priorities did you set, and what was the result?
• Can you share an example of when you established HR metrics to measure success during a critical period or project? What metrics did you choose to track? Why were they important? What did the data show?

 

What Makes Someone a Good Fit for a Startup HR Role?

Almost every SaaS company claims to be “agile and fast-paced,” but this is especially true for early- to mid-stage startups.

Your first HR Generalist is a pivotal hire for your company. They will play an active role in how you recruit, promote, shape your culture, and scale. This is a role that demands hands-on experience and the ability to adapt as needs change (and boy, will they change).

That said, even the most seasoned HR Generalists may not thrive in an early-stage startup environment. Beyond the core skills listed above, look for someone who:

• Doesn’t mind rolling up their sleeves: Look for candidates who love to get their hands dirty and take on different tasks. This will be necessary, as your HR Generalist will likely need to wear many hats.
• Keeps the big picture in mind: Balances day-to-day priorities and employee needs with an eye on where the company is headed. Again, this is especially true for HR Generalists, who will need to wear many hats in their roles.
• Stays curious and resourceful: Look for candidates who will ask good questions of your internal teams. They dig for solutions and bring fresh ideas that uncover new opportunities to shape your company.
• Builds trust naturally: HR is a difficult job that requires balancing many internal pressures throughout your organization. Look for an HR Generalist who excels in building trust in both areas and paves the way forward rather than follows someone else’s lead.

 

Where to Go From Here: The Other Types of HR Roles to Consider

As your company grows, you will need to consider how you will scale your HR team along with it.

At some point (usually as you grow to the 50-100 employee range), you will need to fill a few gaps with specialists who can go deeper and lead your department.

These roles will include:

• Director of HR: The Director of HR (or Chief People Officer, Head of People, or Head of HR – it depends on seniority and budget) sets the overall people strategy (covering hiring, retention, performance, and culture) and ensures compliance with employment laws. They work closely with the leadership team to align HR initiatives with business goals.
• HR/People Operations Manager: This role manages the day-to-day HR operations (onboarding, payroll, benefits, and compliance) and often takes the lead in implementing HR software, performance management tools, and policies that keep your company efficient as it grows.
• HR Business Partner (HRBP): Think of this as a bridge between HR and leadership. HRBPs work directly with department heads to understand business needs and design people strategies that drive performance, engagement, and retention. They combine business acumen with HR expertise to help managers lead effectively.
• Recruiter: Recruiters manage job postings, candidate sourcing, interviews, and offers. As your hiring volume increases, having an in-house recruiter (or talent acquisition specialist) saves time and improves the candidate experience. In the early stages of growth, this can often be outsourced (with direction and input from your company).
• HR Specialist: ​​A mid-level HR role focused on specific functional areas like employee relations, training and development, or compliance. HR specialists bring depth in one domain while supporting broader HR initiatives.
• Payroll and Benefits Specialist: Handles compensation, payroll processing, benefits administration, and compliance with tax and labor laws. This role ensures accuracy, timeliness, and employee satisfaction with pay and benefits.

You do not need to fill these roles all at once. Who you hire and when will depend on your company size and growth projections. That said, for a lean/conservative timeline, I’d recommend the following:

• <25 employees: Outsource

• 25-50 employees: Look for a strong HR Generalist or HR Manager with startup experience
• 50+:Hire a Head of People (or equivalent) who can take over people strategy, build a team, and drive organizational design, leadership development, and other critical HR work.

The moral of the story is, don’t rush scaling to fill roles. I’ve worked with clients in the past who over-staffed their HR departments and bore the scars to prove it. Start with a Generalist and let your department evolve as needs change.

 

Hiring is Just One Part of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide For the Rest

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of a robust and effective HR strategy.

The most successful startups know that their path to scaling from seven to nine figures will be made possible by the practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
• How to hire
• How HR evolves as your company grows
• And more!

Fill out the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hyper-growth.