sfHR Consulting is a human resources practice serving California employers. It does the ordinary work of an HR department, for organizations that do not have one, and the specialist work that an existing HR department cannot reasonably be expected to carry alone.
The work is scoped in writing before it begins, and what it produces belongs to the client: memoranda, determinations with their reasoning, policies, files, in a form the organization keeps and can use after the engagement ends. There is no account management layer between a client and the work.
At a glance
- Human resources consulting, HR outsourcing, and payroll outsourcing
- California employers, principally 25 to 500 employees
- Not a law firm; not a professional employer organization; does not conduct workplace investigations; sells no insurance or software
- Certified in human resources by SHRM
- Serving employers throughout California
How engagements run
Scope in writing, then the work.
Consulting disappoints in predictable ways. Scope that was agreed in a conversation and never written down. A proposal that promised more than the engagement delivered. A client who reaches the end of a project unable to say what was actually done, because nothing was left behind except advice somebody has to remember.
So every engagement here begins the same way: scope, deliverables, response times, fees, and the boundary with legal advice, agreed in writing before work starts. If something is not in that letter, it is not agreed. Where the scope genuinely changes, it is re-quoted rather than absorbed and billed later as a surprise.
The other half of that discipline is refusal. Where a matter falls outside what this practice can do properly, it is referred to somebody qualified rather than attempted, and you are told at once rather than left waiting.
Alongside your other advisers
Most clients already have an employment lawyer, a benefits broker, a payroll platform, and an accountant. None of them is displaced here, and no referral fee is paid or received in either direction.
The usual effect on your legal costs is downward. Counsel bills for judgment; an HR function that hands over an orderly record removes the hours otherwise spent assembling one.
Confidentiality
Personnel information is handled as a service provider handles it: used only to perform the engagement, never sold, never used to train anything, and returned or deleted at the end on your instruction. Conflicts are checked before work is accepted.
How this practice thinks
Four positions.
HR is an institutional function, not a personality
Organizations habitually treat employment problems as problems of individual character: a difficult manager, a disgruntled employee. Most of the time the individual is responding rationally to a structure that gave them no alternative. Fix the structure and the personalities become manageable. Fix the personalities and the same problem arrives with new names.
The record is the deliverable
Advice that leaves no document behind has to be remembered, and memory is exactly what fails under pressure. Every piece of work here produces something you keep: a memorandum, a determination with its reasoning, a policy, a file. That is what an employer is left with when the person who did the work is gone.
Fairness and defensibility are the same discipline
The practices that make an employer hard to sue are, almost without exception, the practices that make it a decent place to work: consistent treatment, stated expectations, a real opportunity to respond, decisions explained. Employers who pursue only the legal half get a compliance program nobody believes in. The two are worth doing together.
Say what you cannot do
The most expensive advice an employer receives is confident advice from someone outside their competence. This practice states its boundary in writing, refers what belongs elsewhere, and would rather lose a piece of work than take one it cannot do properly.