Chief Human Resources Officer
Owns hiring, employment compliance, compensation and the thing people mean when they talk about culture: who gets promoted and who gets let go.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The hat a founder wears worst and longest. Fractional support is worth buying the moment you have employees rather than contractors, because employment law is jurisdictional and getting it wrong is expensive and retroactive. Hire full time around 25–40 people, or earlier if you employ across borders.
Education
HR, business or industrial relations degrees are common. For a company employing in several countries, specific employment-law exposure matters far more than the degree.
Experience
7+ years including terminations done properly, a compensation structure built from scratch, and ideally hiring in the countries you are in. An HR generalist from a 5,000-person company is often a poor fit: their instinct is policy, and a 20-person company needs judgment.
Vertical / domain experience
Industry domain rarely matters; jurisdiction always does. Employment standards, notice periods, statutory benefits, works councils and misclassification rules are local. Someone excellent in California will not know Ontario's termination entitlements or Colombia's severance regime.
What it pays, roughly
$85,010 median, Canada — for Human resources and business service professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $74,006 to $91,728 over 333,310 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| CPHR — Chartered Professional in Human Resources | CPHR Canada (provincial associations) | The Canadian designation outside Ontario. |
| CHRP / CHRL | Human Resources Professionals Association (Ontario) | Ontario's regulated designations. |
| SHRM-CP / SHRM-SCP | Society for Human Resource Management | The common US credential; SCP is the senior one. |
| PHR / SPHR | HR Certification Institute | The other US credential; more law-and-compliance weighted. |
| GPHR — Global Professional in Human Resources | HR Certification Institute | Specifically relevant to employing people in several countries. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The founder, with a template employment agreement reviewed by an actual employment lawyer in each jurisdiction. That review is the cheapest insurance available to a startup.
Fractional, a day or two a month: contracts, an option plan everyone understands, a hiring process with more than one interviewer, and onboarding that does not depend on the founder being free.
A real people function. Compensation bands, performance cycles, manager training and the employment-compliance calendar across every country you pay someone in.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Information Officer
- Payroll Administrator (Operations)
- HR Experience Specialist (Operations)
- Manager, Onboarding (Operations)
People + payroll is a natural merge in a small company, and the jurisdictional knowledge overlaps heavily. Separate them once payroll is large enough that a single person both approving and processing it is a fraud risk.
Keep separate from
Keep the final approval of terminations and senior compensation with the CEO; the CHRO prepares them and should not be the only signature.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Asks which countries your people are in before anything else
- Has a view on contractor-versus-employee risk specific to your setup
- Writes plainly; no culture deck without a hiring process behind it
Red flags
- Policy-first instincts in a 15-person company
- Has never run a termination
- Treats engagement surveys as the deliverable
The jobs under this seat
What this hat is actually responsible for once there are people doing it. Every one is a page of its own — and at seed most of them are the same two people, which is what the merge notes above are about.
The human on the other end of an employment process — getting a person hired, onboarded, paid and answered, correctly…
Answers the customer, fixes what can be fixed in the moment, and routes the rest to whoever can.
Makes cross-functional work actually finish: the launch, the migration, the certification, the thing that needs six…
Pays people correctly and on time, in the right currency, with the right deductions and the right filings behind it.
Gets a person legally able to work where the company needs them, and keeps the permissions current.
Owns the first 30 to 90 days of a customer's life: getting them live, trained and using the thing they bought.
The whole department: Operations · every job in one list
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.