HR consulting

Write the people proposal the way you would write a policy.

HR consultants are called when a growing company has copied its contracts from the internet and a manager is about to have a conversation they are not equipped for. The client is buying a clean process for that risk. They are not buying a culture deck.

The conversation that prompted the call

There is almost always a specific pressure: a first dismissal, a handbook that still names a country they no longer employ people in, or a founder who has been the HR department and cannot be. Name the pressure without turning the proposal into a case file. You do not need the employee's name. You need the decision the company has to be able to make correctly next time.

State the jurisdictions and the headcount. Advice that is silent on where the staff actually work is not advice a careful founder should sign. If you are not qualified to speak to a particular country's employment rules, say the local counsel stays in the loop and your work is the process around that advice.

Policies are the appendix

The body of the proposal is the working change: who approves a hire, how a warning is recorded, what a manager must do before a performance conversation. The templates sit behind that. Clients who have been burned by a folder of policies nobody followed will look for the behavior, not the document count.

Keep investigations, representation in court, and ongoing retained HR out of the fee unless they are the actual brief. A fixed engagement to install a process is easier to buy than an open-ended 'people partner'.