Building HR Infrastructure for Businesses That Don't Have an HR Department Yet

When a ten-person startup hires an eleventh employee, it becomes apparent that there is no one in the organization who actually handles Human Resources, no one monitoring onboarding compliance, and no one who knows what to do should the employee bring up any grievances after six months. A mid-sized company that has grown at a fast pace and now requires compliance with EPF, ESI, and gratuity realizes that the entire responsibility of keeping track of compliance has been handled by the owner, along with the rest of the operations of the organization, and he does not have any way of knowing whether the company is compliant or hasn’t yet gotten discovered. When an organization decides to hire its first fully remote employee who is based in another country, it is clear that “just hire them as a contractor” may not be the legally correct method; instead, it may misclassify the relationship, and that misclassification can expose the company to liability neither party intended.

What ties all these stories together is not the scale of the business, but the lack of a person who would make sure all these gaps are addressed before it becomes a problem. An expanding business that lacks the capacity for Human Resources tends to work on HR issues reactively, where the policy is written the week after an argument, the compliance issue is addressed the week after the audit report, and the contractor agreement is made the week after a classification issue is raised. It is not because the business is not careful; rather, it is because Human Resource compliance is not the primary responsibility of anyone at the table.

Our team is meant to be the HR and legal resource which is something that many scaling companies do not have the size to create internally yet. Corrida provides end to end support through the entire employment lifecycle and beyond, through recruitment, onboarding, payroll structuring, and exits, while also providing grievance redressal services and handling of disciplinary matters in case there happen to be any issues at the workplace, all of which was created by us initially while working for an early stage company which needed all of its HR services created from scratch as it scaled past its fifty person mark. Gig and flexible employment arrangements bring their own structuring questions, and we draft the contracts that define these relationships correctly from the outset, having recently helped a logistics company structure its delivery partner agreements so the classification would actually hold up rather than simply looking tidy on paper.

Compliance lies at the bottom of all other activities here, and we ensure that companies remain up-to-date with respect to POSH, EPF, ESI, gratuity, and the wage and notice period norms that have come into effect through the new labor laws by conducting HR audits on a periodic basis, which helps us identify any compliance issues before the inspection officer comes and finds them out for you. A manufacturing company looking to scale up its contract manpower sought our services in the form of an audit that would help them determine whether the social security and benefits of their contract employees were being taken care of, or whether someone else was taking responsibility for it. This becomes very important when companies employ people from different countries, hire remote employees or international contract workers in general, and a technology company wanted to ensure this in case of a truly international remote workforce.

Staffing is a subject unto itself, and we help organizations in recruiting and placing vendor labor, contractual labor, and contingency labor, helping them draft and negotiate the contracts for their vendors, ensuring that the staffing itself conforms to the requirements of the Contract Labour Act, as opposed to outsourcing all compliance obligations to a vendor. A consumer products company expanding its warehouse capacity in preparation for peak seasons found itself in need of contingent labor that was rapidly onboarded without being responsible for the compliance burden of a vendor that had not yet been vetted.