Most agencies that place interim HR professionals are, when you look closely at what they actually do, matching agencies. They keep a database, they run a search, they send three profiles, and they invoice a margin on every hour that person works. If the placement goes well, that is largely down to the person. If it goes badly, the agency sends three more profiles.
We have been on the client side of that arrangement often enough to know how it feels, and it is one of the reasons we built HRhelp the way we did.
What we sell is not a CV
We place interim HR professionals with companies in the Netherlands, usually organisations between roughly fifty and five thousand employees, and very often international companies whose head office sits somewhere else entirely.
What we sell is not a CV. It is an HR function that keeps working while you are short-staffed, and that means the person we place comes with everything standing behind them.
Let me make that concrete, because it sounds like the kind of thing everyone claims.
An interim HR advisor, a works council and a decision made abroad
A little while ago we placed an interim HR advisor at a company near Amsterdam. Solid professional, ten years of experience, entirely capable of running the day to day.
Her second week there, the management team decided to change the mobility scheme, and the works council (the ondernemingsraad, or OR) wanted to know what it was going to be asked to approve. She had done plenty of works council work over the years, but never on a mobility change, never with an OR that had been given very little information up front, and never at a company where the decision had effectively already been taken in another country.
At a matching agency, that is the moment where an interim professional quietly googles article 27 of the WOR, the Dutch Works Councils Act, at eleven at night and hopes for the best, because the only number in her phone belongs to a recruiter who does not know what a WOR is.
She called us instead. We had the conversation the same afternoon, we told her which parts of the plan genuinely required consent and which did not, we gave her a draft adviesaanvraag (the formal request to the works council) from our own library that had already been through this exact discussion at another employer, and we told her honestly that the timeline management had in mind was not going to survive contact with the works council.
She went back into that meeting the next morning knowing exactly where she stood. The scheme was implemented four months later, with consent, without a conflict, and the client still has no idea how close that one came to going sideways.
What stands behind every interim HR professional we place
That is the difference we are describing when we say we work differently. Everyone we place has an HR consultant behind them from day one. There is a call in the first weeks and a call every month after that, and there is a phone number for the days when something lands that nobody planned for.
Behind that sits the rest of what we have built up over the years:
- policy templates that have survived actual works council scrutiny
- employment contracts and handbooks in Dutch and English
- a view on where the Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax authority, is currently drawing the line on Wet DBA
- specialists we trust for the things that need a specialist, including employment lawyers, occupational health providers, payroll partners and immigration advisors for the 30% ruling cases
Our interim professionals borrow all of that. Our clients pay for one person and get the reach of a firm.
We still do the HR work ourselves
There is a second reason this works, and it is less flattering to the industry. We still do this work ourselves. We sit in the HR chair at client organisations, we run projects, we take the same difficult conversations with managers and works councils that we ask our interim people to take.
That keeps us honest about what an assignment really demands, and it means that when a client describes a situation to us we usually recognise it. We have a fairly good sense of which HR professional will hold their own in a company where the decisions come from Chicago or Seoul, and which one will not, and we would rather say so before the contract is signed than three months in.
Sometimes you do not need an interim HR professional at all
Which brings us to the last thing, and it costs us money to say it. Sometimes the answer is not an interim professional at all.
We regularly speak to companies that think they need someone for four days a week when the real problem is that nobody has written anything down and every question ends up with the same overloaded manager. In those cases one fixed day a week plus proper documentation solves more than a full-time placement would, and it costs a fraction. We will tell you that, because we would rather have the relationship than the hours.
Facing a gap in your HR team?
If you are facing a gap in your HR team, a departure you did not see coming, a period of sick leave, a project nobody has the capacity for, we are happy to talk it through before you start looking at profiles.
You can book a free 30-minute consultation, reach us at [email protected] or on +31 85 760 8188, or use hrhelp.nl/contact.
