A firm that sells HR advice to other businesses still has its own people to manage. Consultants, coordinators and trainers are busy on client work, so their own contracts, growth and workload often get left to chance.
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Share your requirementsA human resource firm advises client businesses on policies, hiring, documentation, grievances, training and employee records. The team is typically a founder, a few senior consultants with long experience, a layer of associates who draft documents and run surveys, coordinators who chase client data, and sometimes trainers or recruiters. Work is project based, with deadlines set by the client's own busy calendar. Consultants see sensitive information about pay, complaints and exits, so confidentiality is part of the job. Time is billed or retained, which pushes people to put clients first and themselves last. Skills sit in individual heads, from how to run an inquiry to how a client likes its handbook. Juniors learn by sitting in, and good associates are often hired by clients as their first in-house HR person. See also HR for professional services.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in human resource firms. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Appraisals, role definitions and policies for its own staff are always postponed because client deadlines come first.
How to run a fact-finding, draft a policy or handle a difficult manager is known to one senior, and juniors only watch.
Owners phone with urgent staff problems in the evening and expect an answer, and consultants have no clear on-call limit.
Complaints, pay lists and exit notes pass through many hands, and a casual forward or shared folder can cause real damage.
Appraisal cycles, annual policy refreshes and onboarding drives from many clients land in the same weeks.
People who spend hours on internal templates or mentoring look less productive on paper, so the useful work is skipped.
A client who has seen an associate's work offers an in-house role with a title the firm cannot match.
Clients ask for legal opinions or payroll computation, and a consultant who says yes without checking creates risk for everyone.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Career and Succession Management; HR Operations and Governance; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a human resource firms business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Define associate, consultant, senior and partner with what each must be able to do and sign off, so growth is visible.
Define associate, consultant, senior and partner with what each must be able to do and sign off, so growth is visible. See compensation by level.
Templates, checklists and worked examples for each kind of engagement, kept current and used by juniors.
Templates, checklists and worked examples for each kind of engagement, kept current and used by juniors. Hold it with your documentation.
Hours when a consultant is reachable, a rota for urgent calls and what counts as urgent, agreed in each engagement letter.
Hours when a consultant is reachable, a rota for urgent calls and what counts as urgent, agreed in each engagement letter.
Who may see which client's data, how it is stored and shared, and what happens on leaving.
Who may see which client's data, how it is stored and shared, and what happens on leaving. Cover it in onboarding.
A fixed share of each week for mentoring, templates and learning, treated as part of the job.
A fixed share of each week for mentoring, templates and learning, treated as part of the job. Use learning plans.
A short scope note for consultants listing what to refer to a qualified legal, tax or payroll professional.
A short scope note for consultants listing what to refer to a qualified legal, tax or payroll professional.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Levels and pay that make staying inside the firm a believable path.
A method library and clear written scope that survive a consultant leaving.
New consultants learn confidentiality rules and methods in their first weeks.
Mentoring and internal sessions given real hours instead of leftover time.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
6 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead article
Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Client work always has a date and our own work does not. Give internal tasks a named owner, a deadline and protected hours, just as for a client.
State response hours in the engagement letter, run a simple rota for true emergencies and agree what counts as one. Clients accept limits that are set at the start.
Treat mentoring as part of the senior's target, keep worked examples and let associates draft first under review. It costs hours early and saves more later.
Decide your position beforehand, ideally in the contract, and talk to the associate openly. A visible ladder and fair review make a quiet exit less likely.
Not unless your firm is qualified to. Say where your advice ends and ask the client to confirm legal matters with a qualified professional.
How your consultants spend a week, where know-how sits, how clients reach them and why associates leave. A ladder, a method library or on-call rules is a likely start. Scope, timing and fees are put in writing after that talk.
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