How a 40-person fintech transformed their people operations in 90 days
The company had grown from 12 to 40 employees in just 18 months. What started as a tight-knit founding team had become a mid-size organization — but the people operations hadn’t kept pace. There was no formal HR function, no documented processes, and no systems to support the complexity of a growing workforce.
Onboarding lived in the founder’s head. New hires received a laptop and a Slack invite, but there was no structured orientation, no compliance checklist, and no 30-60-90 plan. The average time to first productivity was 30 days — nearly three times the industry benchmark for a company this size.
Benefits enrollment was managed via a shared spreadsheet that only the CEO could update. Compliance tracking was nonexistent: I-9 verifications were sometimes completed weeks after start dates, and there was no visibility into training completion or policy acknowledgments.
The CEO was spending 15+ hours per week on HR tasks instead of product and growth. Managers had no enablement tools, no performance frameworks, and no way to escalate employee issues through a formal channel. The company was one audit away from a serious compliance incident.
SoftHire Systems deployed a three-phase engagement designed to build complete HR infrastructure from the ground up. The approach was async-first, with milestone reviews delivered via Loom and all deliverables managed through a shared Notion workspace.
Phase 1 (Weeks 1–4): Audit & Blueprint. A comprehensive assessment of the current state — interviewing the CEO, managers, and a cross-section of employees. The output was a detailed architecture blueprint mapping every process that needed to be built, prioritized by compliance risk and operational impact.
Phase 2 (Weeks 5–8): Build. System construction — 14 SOPs, onboarding workflows, compliance tracking frameworks, benefits administration processes, and a manager enablement toolkit. Each deliverable was built to be self-sustaining, requiring no HR specialist to maintain.
Phase 3 (Weeks 9–12): Rollout & Handoff. Training sessions for managers, documentation walkthroughs, and a 30-day adoption monitoring period. The engagement concluded with a comprehensive handoff package and executive debrief.
| Metric | Before | After | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onboarding time | 3 weeks | 5 days | −60% |
| HR admin hours (CEO) | 15 hrs/wk | 2 hrs/wk | −87% |
| Compliance items tracked | 0 | 23 | +23 items |
| Employee satisfaction (onboarding) | 62% | 94% | +32 pts |
| Time to first productivity | 30 days | 12 days | −60% |
| SOPs documented | 0 | 14 | +14 docs |