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 TalentGleam fits
TalentGleam 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 .
