Playbooks
Practitioner playbooks on running HR — the HR of one, automation vs judgment, founder pushback scripts, the five operational systems that matter, when to argue for headcount. Written from twenty years inside people operations and training at companies large enough to feel the math.
The renewal email lands on exactly one desk: yours. The September-to-December timeline worked backward, the three decisions hiding in the actuarial tables, the broker meeting you run on your agenda, and the one-pager that helps thirty people choose well in two weeks.
The exit interview is an autopsy; the stay interview is the checkup. The five questions that surface why people stay and what would move them, the everyone-not-just-flight-risks rule, and the two-week visible action that makes asking safe.
The posted range did its job — your team read it. What to say in the first five minutes, the three honest diagnoses of compression, the math on fixing it versus losing her, and the audit that finds the next gap before it finds your doorway.
The range in the posting is now the law in a growing list of states — and “competitive salary DOE” is both a compliance problem and a quiet repellent. The small-company method for building a band you can actually defend, without a consultant or a survey subscription.
The last two weeks of employment are the most information-rich and least managed in the whole lifecycle. The three jobs of a deliberate exit: mechanics on a checklist, knowledge capture that starts Monday, and a last conversation — early, neutral, undefended — where the truth finally gets cheap to tell.
The annual review is big-company theater that small teams cargo-cult at their own expense: recency bias, surprise verdicts, and a form nobody believes. Replace it with a running evidence file and a one-hour quarterly conversation built on four questions — with a hard no-surprises rule.
The gut feeling at the end of a good interview is usually charisma and similarity-to-me wearing the costume of competence — and at an SMB, gut hiring is high-variance and legally shaky. Define the competencies, ask every candidate the same job-relevant questions, and score each on a rubric with evidence, before you compare.
HR compliance isn't a task you finish — it's a calendar you maintain. The expiring documents, reverification deadlines, and renewals that quietly become fines, and the simple system that catches every one before it lapses (without trusting your memory).
At an SMB you hired because you're slammed — so the new person gets left to sink or swim. The 30-day system that gets them productive fast, catches the quiet quitter before week two, and runs on a calendar instead of a coordinator.
The filter doesn't see "would be great at this job" — it sees "looks like past hires," and auto-rejects everyone else before you ever see them. Why a false reject is invisible, how to make AI a librarian instead of a gatekeeper, and the disparate-impact liability you didn't know you took on.
The requirements wall is your biggest silent repellent. How to write a job posting that attracts: the first line that earns the second, real verbs, posted ranges, the repellent-words field guide, and the ten-minute inclusive pass.
A dozen states now require salary ranges in job postings — different thresholds, different rules, and a remote-work trap that catches employers who think they're exempt. The plain-English operator's guide, the five patterns that let you reason about any state, and the one safe default that covers most of it.
You are mathematically underwater. Not slow, not bad at your job. Here's the operating model that gets HR-of-one from drowning to running it — triage rubric, five systems, founder pushback scripts, and the five signs you need a second person.