One of the most common questions we hear from founders is some version of: "We're at 35 people. Do we need to hire a full-time HR person?"
The honest answer is: probably not yet. But the more useful answer is: it depends on what you actually need, and what you can afford to get wrong.
This article lays out the decision framework we use when advising companies on this choice — and what the data tends to say.
What "Full-Time HR" Actually Costs
Let's start with the math. A qualified HR Manager in Bangkok with the right experience for a 30–80 person tech company costs somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 THB per month in base salary. Add in social security, provident fund, insurance, bonuses, and all the operational overhead, and you're looking at 1.2M–1.8M THB per year in total employment cost.
That's before you account for the fact that hiring the right person takes time — often three to four months — and that a bad HR hire is disproportionately expensive because it touches every part of your business.
For a company doing 10–50M THB in revenue, that's a material line item. And the honest question is: does the company need 40 hours per week of HR leadership? Or does it need 8–10 hours of senior HR thinking, applied very precisely?
When Fractional HR Fits
Fractional HR works best when:
You need senior thinking, not just execution. A lot of what high-growth companies need at 20–80 people is judgment — on org design, on compensation, on how to handle a difficult people situation. That judgment doesn't require someone in the office every day. It requires someone who's seen enough to know what actually matters.
Your HR needs are project-intensive, not volume-intensive. If you're building out a performance management system, rewriting your employment contracts, or rolling out a HRIS, that work has a shape — a beginning, a middle, and an end. A fractional engagement is designed for this shape. A full-time hire doing project work is often underutilized between projects.
You're scaling, but not at enterprise speed. Once you're at 150+ people with continuous high-volume hiring across multiple departments, the case for full-time HR becomes clearer. Below that, the math usually favors fractional.
You want expertise without the lock-in. A fractional HR partner can bring deep experience in specific areas — compensation benchmarking, Thai labor compliance, HRIS implementation — that would be unrealistic to find in a single full-time hire.
When to Hire Full-Time
There are specific signals that suggest a full-time HR hire is the right move:
Daily operational HR volume is high. If you have 100+ employees and are running payroll, onboarding, benefits admin, and employee relations issues every week, a fractional model can struggle to keep up with the pace.
You need a culturally embedded presence. Some companies — particularly those with a strong culture-building agenda or a physically present workforce — benefit from having HR in the room every day. This is particularly true for companies with significant blue-collar or field-based teams.
You're preparing for a major organizational event. A merger, an acquisition, a significant workforce expansion, or a union situation typically requires someone who is fully dedicated and fully available.
The Hybrid Model
The model we see work best for many companies at 30–100 people is a combination: a fractional HRBP who provides strategic leadership and expertise, paired with a junior HR coordinator or operations person who handles day-to-day execution.
This gives you senior judgment where it counts, without the cost of having a senior person doing administrative work. And it gives you a development path for someone more junior — which is good for your team and good for your culture.
The bottom line: there is no universal answer. But the question to ask is not "do we need HR?" It's "what decisions do we need HR to make for us, and what's the least expensive way to make them well?"
If you're genuinely unsure, the right first step is a conversation — not a job posting.
Fractional HRBP and HR strategist with 10+ years experience in Thailand. Founder of VIATAL.
