You have grown over 20 people and haven’t got an HR department yet.
Growing business scale faster than you think. It becomes 5 times difficult to set up basis processes in larger organizations than when you do it while being small in size. Once you are 20 people, HR issues start eating into senior management bandwidth. Cost of this can be manifold if senior management has client facing responsibilities as well.

Your clients want more of you and you are dealing with internal people issues.
In growing and competitive businesses, you want to be with your client as much as you can but frequent people issues related to hiring process, new joining, reviews, conflicts, meetings keep you entangled most of the time. Soon you start delegating client interface, something you should do last.

Your new hires are asking for induction, their roles, KRAs, and you are wondering what’s happened to them.
They are being natural, that’s how professional organizations work. In absence of these, their stay is a matter of time, its highly likely that they’ll move on to professional workplaces if basic organizational frameworks are not put in place.

There is no process of hiring; some people just turn out to be good hires.
Bad hiring costs organizations dearly not just in direct costs but also indirectly in terms of cost of training, client loss, brand image loss, loss of team capability. Bad boss can be annihilating. Good organizations hire through a defined process that captures trends, sources and methodology of getting in good resources.

You’ve changed two HR Managers or more during last year.
Average tenure of HR professionals in an organization is around 8 months. HR processes take time to seep in before they start impacting. If HR professionals do not stay put, no magic can happen.

You’ve never really headed a team of HR professionals successfully on your own.
a. Leading a team of HR professionals needs both knowledge and bandwidth. Unfortunately this is not a function you can run in a part time role, you can of course ruin it. Need for dedicated senior management attention in knowledge gathering, exposure and original ideation is significant in areas of HR.

You have aggressive plans that need people, trained & motivated.
Considering its difficult to sustain competitive advantage in other resources, human resources remain the final frontier as far as building perpetually smart workplaces is concerned. Journey from paper to bank can be done on the back of talented & motivated team members.

You are increasingly sensing compliance risks & wish that you’re wrong.
Compliance commitments are more than what meets the eye. Right from setting up office, to hiring, confirming, reviewing, pulling up, paying, exits compliance needs can be enormous. We find this only when things go wrong.

You and your managers swing between hard decisions and appeasement without basis.
It is impossible to take decisions consistently and fairly in absence of a robust HR policy framework. What you think as deciding on feet is seen as knee jerk decision, favoritism, and high handedness by team members. Absence of guidelines deters managers from taking decisions and they delegate tasks upwards.

Your HR department costs a lot.
HR professionals can come expensive. If you have multiple professionals in your HR department and you get a feeling if you’re getting value for money, you’re probably not getting it.