Not Surprisingly, More Businesses Outsourcing HR

A recent article about small businesses outsourcing HR functions should come of no surprise to those in the HR field. With the legal complications involved in hiring, maintaining and ultimately terminanting employees taking its toll on small business operators, it is making much more sense to throw it to a PEO and let them take care of it.

These days, it is nearly insane for a small business to try to manage all of their own financials. They likely go the outsource route to outside accountants who take their scraped together financial documents, tell them what to do to maximize their deductions, and file their taxes for them. Now, HR is starting to go that way. Recruiting has been an indicator of that but now PEO’s are starting to go that way. The issue for HR departments everywhere?

Creep. Specifically, creep along the lines of routine job duties 30 years ago being too complicated for anyone other than specialists. Companies aren’t relying LESS on Accounting firms when they get bigger for the most part. As long as employing employees becomes more and more complicated (and with the slate of laws being considered from state to state until 2010, that is going to happen), more specialization is expected.

Now, of course, what is the big deal? After all, accountants are one of the highest recruited for positions in this country. The ever complicating tax code has given them leverage.

The issue is that working with a bunch of HR specialists in a Human Resources Office sounds like a special area of hell. Not only that, continuing education is going to become nearly required with advanced degrees becoming more and more standard. Can I see a test for HR managers wanting to enter the field? Oh yeah!

The issue, of course, is that it never had to go down this road. With a bit more partnership between business and government, we could avoid a significant portion of new legislation passed every year that makes it incredibly difficult for HR people to enter the field already.

Prediction for HR: more education, more training, more testing and more labor shortages. Of course, for all you smart guys out there, you’ve already figured that out since it is predicted for almost all semi-skilled/skilled profession in the US.