I built a free HR checklist for founders after realizing most HR content is written for enterprises, not us
Quick backstory: I kept running into the same problem while trying to get basic HR processes in place for a small team — role clarity, hiring, onboarding, performance conversations. Everything I found online was either written for HR professionals managing hundreds of employees, or so generic it wasn't actually actionable.
So I built a practical, self-diagnostic checklist specifically for the 5-30 employee stage — the point where "we're basically a family" stops working but you're nowhere near hiring an actual HR person. It covers 5 areas: role clarity, hiring, onboarding, performance & policies, and the employee lifecycle (promotions, offboarding, etc).
It's meant to be a fast gut-check — see what you've already got covered and what's quietly missing — not a lecture.
Made it free because I mostly want feedback from people actually dealing with this right now:
https://people-consultant-8uwwoj.subscribepage.io
Would genuinely love to hear:
Does this match the gaps you've actually run into?
Is there a 6th area I'm missing?
Anything that reads as obvious/unnecessary?
Answering your actual questions first. The sixth area is compensation. At 5 to 30 people it is the thing that reliably blows up, because the first handful of hires were negotiated ad hoc in different market conditions, and somewhere around employee 15 people start comparing notes. Bands do not need to be public, they just need to exist before somebody asks why.
Then a distribution point you did not ask for. The checklist is invisible right now. It sits on a subscribepage domain behind an email gate, so none of the authority lands on anything you own, and it can never rank for the queries your people are actually typing, things like hr checklist for startups or onboarding checklist small team. That is a lot of search demand you are opting out of.
The fix is cheap. Publish the checklist as a plain public page on your own domain, and put the email capture on the version people want to keep, the printable or interactive one. You keep the leads and gain a page that compounds instead of one that disappears down the feed.
It also fixes the thing currently working against you. You said you mostly want feedback, but an email wall filters out exactly the casual reader most likely to give you a quick honest reaction.
A possible sixth area is decision ownership and escalation: who can make which decisions, where agreements are documented, and what happens when a manager and team member disagree. That gap often stays invisible while a team is small because everyone can ask the founder directly, then becomes painful as context gets distributed. A lightweight decision log plus a recurring feedback cadence might fit the checklist without turning it into enterprise process. Would that be useful alongside role clarity and performance conversations?
The 5–30 employee focus makes this more useful than a generic HR checklist. That transition point is specific enough to surface problems founders often don't realize they have until the team has already outgrown informal processes.