HR for Startups and Small Businesses Training Course

Course overview

In a company of twenty people, HR is whoever has the least excuse to refuse it. Contracts are copied from a template someone found online, pay is set by negotiation and never revisited, onboarding is a laptop and a lunch, and the first serious employment problem arrives without any of the paperwork that would have made it manageable. None of this is negligence. It is what happens when a small business has no one whose job is to think about it.

This course builds a proportionate HR foundation for startups and small businesses: light enough that it does not slow the company down, solid enough that it does not collapse under the first dispute or the first thirty hires. It covers lean HR systems, hiring and retention with no employer brand and no budget, the compliance that genuinely cannot be skipped, onboarding and development, culture in a company where culture is still a handful of people, and what has to change as the business scales.

Why small companies get HR wrong in the same order

The sequence is almost always the same. No written contracts, or contracts that do not reflect what was actually agreed. No records, so a performance problem eighteen months old has no documentation behind it. Pay set case by case, producing differences that cannot be defended when they surface, and they always surface. A founder who hires people like himself and calls the result a strong culture. And then the first dismissal, the first grievance, or the first regulator letter, arriving at a company with no process to meet it.

The fix is not enterprise HR shrunk down. Copying a corporate HR framework into a twenty-person company produces bureaucracy without capability. What a small business needs is the small number of things that carry real risk, done properly, and the rest deliberately left informal until it needs to change.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Set up only the HR essentials a small business genuinely needs.
• Write contracts and records that hold up when a dispute arrives.
• Simplify HR tooling to what one busy person can maintain.
• Hire well without a recruiter, a budget, or a known name.
• Retain key people with scope, ownership, and proximity to the work.
• Classify each new working relationship before it is signed.
• Onboard new people quickly without a dedicated HR function.
• Choose what founder behavior rewards, not just what is stated.
• Formalize pay structure before differences become indefensible.
• Scale HR ahead of each growth step rather than after it.

Course outline

Unit 1: Introduction to HR in startups and SMEs

• What HR actually has to do in a company of twenty people.
• HR owned by the founder or by a fractional adviser.
• A founder who met the first grievance with no process.
• Avoidable HR failures a small company could not absorb.

Unit 2: Building lean HR systems

• Minimum viable employee records and how long to keep them.
• Knowing when a spreadsheet is still the right answer.
• Payroll, leave, and time records kept by one person.
• Documenting a problem before it is eighteen months old.

Unit 3: Talent acquisition and retention

• Writing a role definition for work nobody has done yet.
• Sourcing through networks, and what actually converts.
• Candidate assessment a small team can actually score.
• Retention in a company that cannot compete on pay.

Unit 4: Compliance and HR policies

• The contract template that does not match what was agreed.
• Worker classification after the first contractor is hired.
• Working time, leave, and pay rules that do not scale down.
• The four policies worth having before the first dispute.

Unit 5: Onboarding and employee development

• An onboarding week that a busy founder can actually run.
• Setting expectations where no job architecture exists.
• Development through exposure and ownership, not budget.
• Feedback that does not need a rating system behind it.

Unit 6: Building an entrepreneurial workplace culture

• Founder behavior as the culture, whatever the values say.
• Recruiting in the founder's own image, and the cost.
• Transparency about the runway, and what not to share.
• Handling the first serious conflict with no HR to refer to.

Unit 7: Sustaining HR in growth and scaling

• The steps at fifteen, fifty, and one hundred fifty people.
• Preparing records for due diligence in a funding round.
• The first HR hire, and what that role should not be.
• Deciding what stops being informal at the next headcount.

How the course is delivered

The course is delivered as practical discussion built around real documents: contracts, offer letters, policy sets and dismissal records from small companies, which participants read, critique and rewrite. The emphasis is on proportionality, because the most common mistake in this area is importing a corporate solution into a company that cannot carry it. Legal points are covered as subject matter for HR understanding; the course does not provide legal advice and does not replace qualified counsel in your jurisdiction.

Where a compliance question needs the full treatment, it is addressed in Employment Law and HR Compliance.

Who should attend

• Founders and managing directors of startups and small businesses who own the people decisions.
• Office managers, operations managers and finance leads who have inherited HR responsibilities.
• First HR hires in a young company, building the function from nothing.
• Consultants and advisers supporting small business clients on employment matters.

About EuroQuest International Training

EuroQuest International Training was founded in 2015 by a team with more than 25 years of experience in professional development. We run over 1,000 courses and have trained more than 15,000 participants. Our head office is in Bratislava, Slovakia, and we deliver courses through hubs in Dubai, London, Barcelona, Istanbul, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. Courses are built and reviewed by practitioners who have worked in the fields they teach.

Frequently asked questions

Does the course cover the employment rules of my country?

It covers the obligations that recur across systems and shows where they typically bite, with examples from several jurisdictions. It is educational and is not legal advice; the specific position where you operate must be confirmed with qualified local counsel.

Does the course include a live lab?

No. There is no software environment. Participants work from real contracts, policies and case records, which they analyze and rewrite in the room.

I have no HR background at all. Is that a problem?

No. The course assumes none. It is built for the person who ended up responsible for HR because the company had nobody else to do it.

Related courses

• HR Policies and Procedure Implementation
• Employer Branding and Talent Marketing
• Employee Engagement and Retention Strategies
• HR Budgeting and Cost Management

Register for this course

Choose a city and date from the schedule above and register online, or contact the EuroQuest team for group bookings and in-house delivery. Founders often attend with the person who will take HR on; the handover conversation is easier when both have sat through the same material.