Chief Human Resources Officer

At ten employees there is no human resources function. The founder knows everyone's name, what they're good at, and what they earn, and deciding who to hire next happens in their head. That arrangement survives a fair bit of growth. When the paperwork piles up, one HR manager gets hired to handle employment contracts, payroll, and time off.

It cracks somewhere past fifty people. One day it surfaces that two people doing comparable work in the same job family are paid $7,500 apart. One of them brought in an outside offer and got a raise; the other didn't. Two years of case-by-case decisions like that leave a salary table nobody can explain. Payroll is usually well over half of what a company this size spends, and no one can say what rule set that half.

The chief human resources officer (CHRO) exists to move those decisions from case-by-case to rule-based. Instead of setting one person's salary, they set a pay range for each level. Instead of urgently filling one seat, they count how many people each team will need next year. Other executives walk into the leadership meeting carrying product or revenue; this one carries headcount and payroll.

More of the day goes into setting rules than into handling individual cases. Laid out as the work that recurs across a year, there are five things.

1. Workforce planning. Deciding how many people each team needs next year and producing the total payroll figure. When a request to add five engineers comes up, the question is what specifically gets delayed without those five — which either cuts the request to three or approves it as written.
2. Pay structure. Compensation is made of base salary paid monthly, bonus tied to performance, and equity in the company. The job here is to set a pay range per level and require every offer to land inside it. With ranges in place, the gap between a strong negotiator and a weak one stops reaching $7,500.
3. Reorganization. Reworking the org structure — whether to group by job family or by product, and how many people one manager can carry. A manager with twelve reports spends twelve hours a month on one-on-ones alone at thirty minutes every two weeks.
4. Running the performance cycle. Taking performance management around one full loop. The part the CHRO touches directly is calibration: managers grade at different levels of generosity, and calibration corrects for two people doing comparable work landing on different ratings because of who their manager is.
5. Reporting to leadership and the board. Turnover, hiring progress, and payroll spend, all as numbers. Those numbers become the basis for approving next quarter's hiring.

The five connect in a line. Without pay ranges, every hiring negotiation produces a different result; when ratings wobble, the bonuses derived from them wobble too. Which is why almost nothing here gets fixed on its own — a complaint that shows up as a pay problem often started two steps earlier, in how levels were defined or how the last review cycle was run.

Below are the four seats in the people organization. Alongside are the founder, finance, and the head of each business unit.

A recruiter works on hiring alone — sourcing candidates and running interviews. An HR manager handles the monthly machinery: contracts, payroll, leave. People operations covers the same ground from the design side, shaping things like the first-week process or the review cycle. An HR business partner (HRBP) embeds with one organization and works its hiring and attrition problems alongside that unit's leader. The CHRO decides which of the four to add first. Once annual hiring passes twenty people a recruiter splits off first; when one unit keeps losing people, an HRBP gets attached to it.

The most frequent outside counterpart is finance. A chief financial officer watches everything coming in and going out, and since payroll is the largest line in that, workforce planning is effectively a budget negotiation. People asks for ten hires, finance offers six, and the gap gets closed with a specific account of what slips without each seat.

Business unit leaders pull the other way by design. A unit leader wants the person their team needs now; this seat asks whether that seat is next in line across the whole company. Grant one unit's request and every other unit arrives with the same one, so the answer has to come out as a rule rather than a decision.

"The CHRO owns next year's workforce plan."

Hiring requests from every team get collected and reconciled against one total by the people organization.

"That's outside the band, so it needs an exception approval."

The proposed offer falls outside the defined pay range and has to go through the documented process.

"This quarter's turnover is concentrated in one team. That's a team problem, not a company problem."

Split the number by organization rather than reading it company-wide and the cause becomes visible.

At Pagedeck, Grace runs people alongside being founder. Once headcount hit 45, individual salary adjustment requests started arriving, each unit sent its own hiring request, and it came out late that two people at the same level had joined on different terms.

What Grace did first wasn't hiring someone — it was writing down levels and pay ranges. Setting three levels per job family and a range for each surfaced three people sitting below their range, and those three got adjusted before anything else. Only then came next year's hiring plan. That ordering is typically what this seat does first.

The most common mistake is reading it as a new name for the head of recruiting. Hiring is the most visible part of people work, which makes the assumption easy. But hiring is one of nine areas this seat covers. Put someone in the chair who only knows recruiting and the hiring gets faster while the share of new hires leaving within a year stays exactly where it was. That share moves through pay ranges, rating standards, and org structure, so without the ends on either side of hiring the same seat gets refilled every year.

The other frequent mistake is treating the people organization as being on the employee's side. It feels that way because it's the place that takes your questions and explains the policies. In practice the seat sets rules between the company and the people in it, which means layoffs and judgments about low performers are also designed here. Believing otherwise is how someone shares a conflict with their manager in confidence and then watches it travel through a process to the very person involved. What this seat protects is the standard, not the individual.