HR generalist
Also called: HR business partner, people generalist
What an HR generalist covers
The job spans the full employee lifecycle:
- Recruiting: hiring plans, sourcing, screening, candidate experience.
- Onboarding: paperwork, day-one logistics, the 90-day plan.
- Employee relations: questions, concerns, performance issues.
- Policy and compliance: contracts, handbook, local-law compliance, GDPR.
- Payroll handoff: data entry into the payroll system or coordination with an external provider.
- Performance and review cycles: setting them up, running them, summarizing them.
It’s a deliberately wide role. The trade-off is depth — an HR generalist won’t be a specialist in any one of these compared to someone dedicated to it.
When SMBs hire one
The typical first HR hire shows up around 25-50 employees. Before that, the founder or COO holds the function. After that, the workload exceeds what a side-of-desk role can sustain.
HR generalist vs. recruiter
In a small company, the same person often does both. In a larger company, they split:
- HR generalist owns the employee lifecycle after hire.
- Recruiter owns hiring.
The HR generalist’s hiring work tends to be lighter on outbound sourcing and heavier on candidate experience and onboarding. The recruiter focuses on the funnel itself.
Where Join fits
Join is the part of an HR generalist’s day where hiring lives. Onboarding hands off to the HRIS; payroll lives elsewhere. The clean integration matters more than the all-in-one promise. See the features page.
