You can't hire your way out of every people problem

I have a lot of respect for the point when a growing company realizes it needs more support on the people side.

Recruiting is getting busy. Managers are stretched. New hires are arriving faster than anyone can properly welcome them. Someone is suddenly responsible for culture, onboarding, hiring and every question that starts with “Quick one…”

Of course you need good people doing this work. Eventually, most companies need more of them.

But I think we sometimes jump too quickly from “this feels messy” to “we need another person to manage the mess.”

Maybe. But first I’d want to know what the mess is actually made of.

Headcount isn’t a process

Imagine every new hire needs the same pieces of information, but they’re collected by three different teams in three different formats.

Or every manager runs onboarding differently because nobody has agreed on the basics.

Or nobody owns the handoff between an accepted offer and a prepared first day.

A new People Ops hire could spend a good part of their week chasing those things. They might even be excellent at it.

But you’ve now hired someone to keep an inconsistent process moving.

That’s a problem worth separating from the question of whether the team has enough capacity.

I find it helpful to break the work into three buckets.

Work that needs more capacity. Real conversations, recruiting partnerships, employee support and complicated situations where human time matters.

Work that needs clearer ownership. The tasks that everyone assumes someone else is doing.

Work that shouldn’t exist in its current form. Duplicated forms, unnecessary approvals and updates nobody reads.

A fourth bucket has become much more interesting: work that could be supported by better tools or AI, once those first three questions are answered.

The trap of the indispensable person

In a small organization, one capable person can keep an astonishing amount of work in their head.

They remember which hiring manager needs a reminder, who to contact when equipment isn’t ready, how exceptions are handled, and where the document from last year is hiding.

That person is valuable. They’re also a single point of failure.

The goal shouldn’t be to replace them with a bot. It should be to make the work easier for other people to understand and operate.

A process that’s written down, has an owner and gives people the right information at the right moment is easier to scale than a collection of heroic reminders.

A better first question

Before adding a role, I like asking:

“If we hired someone tomorrow, what would we actually want them spending their time on?”

If the answer is mainly moving information between systems, chasing the same approvals and reminding people about tasks nobody owns, there’s probably design work to do first.

If the answer is meaningful employee support, leadership advice, workforce planning and conversations that need a skilled person, that’s a different case.

Growth does require investment in people.

I just want that investment to create more human capacity, rather than a more expensive way to keep bad processes alive.