Hiring an HR administrator
A hundred and ninety applications for what is usually somebody’s first HR hire — a role that quietly requires competence across six areas, filled from a pile of people who have mostly done one.
The job is broad and the CVs are narrow. A first HR hire in a growing business is expected to run recruitment admin, onboarding, contracts, absence, policy, and the early stages of anything difficult — while also being the person who knows what must not be said. Most applicants come from larger HR functions where those sit in separate teams, so a CV showing four years of "HR" may mean four years of employee relations and nothing else. The other difficulty is that the most important quality is one nobody can evidence directly: this person will know about salaries, grievances and departures before anyone else, and discretion has no line on a CV. The classic false positive is a CIPD qualification standing in for judgment.
First HR hire, or reinforcement
Selene establishes whether anyone else does HR here, because a sole HR person and a team member need almost opposite profiles.
Scope, headcount, and what is already going wrong
Whether this is the first HR person is the fork. If it is, breadth beats depth and confidence to operate alone matters more than any specialism — and there is usually a backlog of something that has been neglected.
One sentence changes the guide
The scoring approach matters as much as the criterion here. You cannot ask someone whether they are discreet — everyone says yes. But you can notice how they write about difficult cases, and applicants who name names or supply identifying detail in a covering letter have already told you something. It is one of the few places where how an application is written is itself the evidence.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who keeps a confidence. That sounds small and it is the entire job.”
→ Handling confidential matters became a must-have, scored on how candidates describe cases rather than on claims.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria for a sole HR hire, weighted toward breadth. Inside a ten-person HR team this guide would be close to useless — depth in one area would be the point, and generalist range would read as shallow.
No gates, and CIPD is deliberately not one
Nothing here disqualifies on a yes-or-no basis, and the qualification is scored rather than gated on purpose. CIPD is a genuine signal of knowledge and no signal at all of judgment, which is the half this manager described as the entire job — so it sits at weight 2 where it can be outweighed rather than at a gate where it silently ends applications.
Scored on how they describe the difficult cases
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for breadth across areas and for how sensitive situations are recounted — since on this role the manner of the description is itself evidence about the candidate.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Establishing whether this is the first HR hire, which decides breadth versus depth
- Reading all 190 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that prioritises people who have decided alone
- An interview brief covering the areas each candidate has never had to touch
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- References, which on a role built on trust are worth doing properly
- The interview, and the judgment about discretion that only a conversation gives
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
Say whether they would be the only one
First HR hire or part of a team — the same CVs rank almost oppositely.