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Recruiting doesn’t have to feel expensive, complicated, or… like an agency. At BloomHR, we’ve built a simple and transparent model that’s designed for how companies actually hire. We price per job, not by salary or long-term retainers. Each search is scoped based on the role, the market, and how challenging the hire truly is. 🌿 How we support you — role by role: You choose the role, and we run the full search from start to finish. Need help again later? Just add the next role when it makes sense. No bundles, no commitments — hiring support that moves at your pace. And the best part? For every role, we handle the entire process: job posts, resume review, phone screens, interview coordination, and offer support — all with the care and clarity you expect from BloomHR. ✨ Hiring support that feels easy, intentional, and built for real people. That’s the Bloom way.

FIELD NOTES FROM THE WEIRD MIDDLE #03 Your first hires were probably your friends. Of course they were. When it's just you, a laptop, and an idea, you call the people you trust. Your college roommate runs operations. Your old coworker handles sales. Your neighbor's kid does "marketing stuff." And for a while, it's magic. Everyone's all in. Nobody needs a job description because everyone just does whatever needs doing. Then the company grows. Now your friend reports to a manager you hired last month. Or the job outgrew them, and everyone can see it but nobody says it. Or they're still getting the "friend" version of feedback, which is usually no feedback at all. I see this constantly, and the founder almost always says the same thing: "I don't want to lose the friendship." Here's the hard truth: avoiding the conversation is how you lose it. Friendship and accountability aren't opposites. Your earliest people deserve the same clear expectations, honest feedback, and real growth plan as everyone else. Maybe more. Sometimes that means they grow into the bigger role. Sometimes it means a different seat. Either way, they deserve to hear it from you, not figure it out from an org chart. Loyalty got them in the door. Clarity is what keeps them there.

FIELD NOTES FROM THE WEIRD MIDDLE #02 I've lost count of how many times I've seen this one. A company's best salesperson gets promoted to sales manager. Godspeed. 😂 On paper, it's obvious. She crushes her number, clients love her, and she knows the business cold. Every head in the room turns to her. Six months later, I get the call. She's miserable. Her team's frustrated. Nobody's getting feedback. And she's still closing half the deals herself because "it's faster if I just do it." Here's what happened: the company rewarded excellence in one job with a completely different job. Doing the work and leading the people who do the work are two separate skill sets. Managers have to give feedback, set expectations, have the hard conversation, delegate without disappearing, and hold people accountable without becoming a jerk. None of that is personality. It's all learnable. But most growing companies hand someone four humans and a "you've got this!" and call it a promotion. The founder almost always asks me, "Should we move her back?" Almost never. Don't demote her. Develop her. Your first layer of managers will either become the infrastructure that lets you scale, or the reason everything still lands on your desk.

When people hear “outsourced HR,” they usually picture one of two things: software, or a staffing agency. We’re neither. Software gives you a place to store documents. It won’t tell you whether to fire someone. A staffing agency fills a seat and moves on. Neither one sits in the room while you figure out what your company should look like in a year. A fractional HR team is people. Actual HR professionals who plug into your business, learn how it works, and act like an extension of your team. We write the policies, build the processes, and handle the messy human stuff that comes up at every company eventually. Same expertise a full-time HR leader brings. Without the full-time hire. See what that looks like → https://lnkd.in/emf5WSgm #FractionalHR #HR #PeopleOps #SmallBusiness

Last night, Hayley (Sultana) Scholl, Liz Barry, Gina Ringelberg, MSW, and I played mahjong. 🀄 Three games. Three hours. Not because the games are long. Because we talked through most of them, and we’re all still learning, so every turn involves at least one “wait, can I do that?” I won one game. (Full disclosure: we’re new enough that there’s a real chance Gina actually won and none of us caught it. So we cheersed and moved on. 🥂) Hayley also brought something new to the table, literally. Blank tiles, for a version of the game called “messy mahjong.” They work like wild cards. The game moves a little faster, it’s a little less punishing, and it’s a lot more fun while you’re still figuring it out. And because I can’t turn off my HR brain, somewhere around game two I realized this is exactly what HR looks like for most growing companies. You kind of know what you’re doing. You’re getting better every month. But you’re still learning the rules as you go, and one “wait, can we do that?” can stop the whole game. You don’t need someone to take over the table. You need a tutor and a few blank tiles in your hand. The right tools and an expert in your corner, so you can keep moving, keep it fun, and not make everything more complicated (or more serious) than it needs to be. That’s the kind of partner we try to be at BloomHR. And honestly? Carving out nights like this just for me is something I’m still learning too. Turns out you don’t have to master something to enjoy it. That goes for mahjong, for HR, and for making time for yourself. What’s your version of a blank tile? 👇

Most people who call us can’t name what they need. They know something isn’t working. Someone quit and they’re not sure why. A manager keeps escalating things they should be handling. The handbook is three years old and nobody’s read it. But “we need HR help” is as specific as it gets. That’s fine. That’s normal. Figuring out where to start is part of the job, not a prerequisite for calling. You don’t have to arrive with a diagnosis. You just have to tell us what’s been bugging you. Start there → https://lnkd.in/eri562KJ #HR #FractionalHR #SmallBusiness #Founders