What would happen if your only HR person quit tomorrow?
In most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), all HR work falls on a single person—often someone who “handles HR on the side,” without any formal training or a plan for coverage when they’re unavailable. This is not an isolated case, but rather a structural risk that grows as the company expands, rather than diminishing.
Imagine the following scenario: It’s Monday morning. Your assistant, who also “sort of handles HR” on the side, sends you a message—she’s quitting at the end of the month. What’s leaving with her at that moment isn’t just a vacant position. It’s all the knowledge about how resignations are handled in your company, where the employment contracts are kept, which deadlines expire when, and how onboarding actually works.
Three signs that this is exactly the case for you
- – There is no backup. If that one person is on vacation or sick, requests pile up, contracts go unprocessed, and deadlines slip by unnoticed.
- – There are no documented processes. Onboarding, offboarding, vacation requests, disciplinary notices—many tasks are handled based on a single person’s memory, not through a system.
- – Contracts and documents are “somewhere.” In a folder on the desktop, in an email, in a filing cabinet that only one person knows about.
What happens if the gap actually opens up?
Let’s consider the most realistic scenario: parental leave. Your HR contact goes on leave eight weeks before the birth. These eight weeks will determine whether your company will continue to run smoothly over the next twelve months—or whether you’ll have to improvise, make mistakes, and take on labor law risks that could end up costing you dearly.
At DIGIVI, we’ve built our model specifically for moments like these. When an internal HR gap arises, we take over within one to two weeks the day-to-day tasks: contract management, payroll preparation, and communication with your employees. No months-long handover process, no downtime.
We bring several years of international HR experience to the table—experience that is supported not by a single person, but by a well-coordinated team. If one of us is unavailable, you won’t even notice. That’s exactly the point.
The Real Question
Don't ask, "How likely is that?" but rather: What would it cost you if it happened? Not just in terms of money, but in missed deadlines, uncertainty among employees, and time that you, as management, don't actually have.
An external HR department isn't a stopgap measure for emergencies. It's the insurance that prevents emergencies from becoming a problem in the first place.
