HR department org chart example
A people team of a dozen supporting about a thousand employees, drawn on the model most HR functions of that size converge on: business partners facing the business, specialists holding the craft, and an operations team running the machinery underneath both.
How an HR department is usually structured
The department has a head — a chief people officer, HR director or head of people, depending on size and vocabulary — reporting to the chief executive. Put the chief executive on the chart. Whether HR reports to the chief executive or to an operating or finance officer says a great deal about how the function is treated, and it is the card most HR charts leave off.
Underneath sit three legs. Business partners are embedded with the parts of the business they support: a solid line to HR, a dotted line to the leader whose team they sit with. The dotted line is the point of the role and the solid one is what protects it — a partner reporting to the manager whose grievance they are handling cannot do the job. Centres of excellence hold the specialisms: talent acquisition, reward, learning and development, employee relations. HR operations runs the systems, the data and the transactions, and has quietly become the most technical part of the department.
Payroll is the perennial argument. It sits in HR operations at some companies and in finance at others, and both are defensible: it is people data and it is money. What is not defensible is leaving it off the chart, which happens constantly. If it sits in finance, draw the dotted line from HR to it; if it sits in HR, draw the dotted line to the finance director. Somebody in finance is accountable for it either way.
Typical titles by level
The vocabulary these charts use, from the top down. Titles vary by country and by company; the levels don't.
| Level | Titles you'll see |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Chief People Officer, HR Director, Head of People, VP People & Culture |
| Business partnering | Senior HR Business Partner, HR Business Partner, HR Advisor, HR Generalist |
| Centres of excellence | Talent Acquisition Manager, Recruiter, Reward or Compensation & Benefits Manager, Learning & Development Manager, Employee Relations Manager, Inclusion Lead, Organisational Development Consultant |
| HR operations | HR Operations Manager, HR Systems Analyst, People Analytics Analyst, Payroll Manager, Payroll Administrator, HR Coordinator, HR Administrator, Shared Services Advisor |
Where these charts go wrong
The usual failures: business partners drawn under the departments they support; payroll missing entirely; a single learning and development coordinator labelled a centre of excellence; an HR director with eight direct reports and no operations manager; and a chart that shows the function as it was designed rather than as it is staffed, with three of the boxes quietly vacant.
Questions people ask
- What is the three-legged HR model?
- A structure that splits HR into business partners embedded with the business, centres of excellence holding each specialism, and a shared operations team running systems and transactions. It concentrates expertise instead of asking every generalist to be adequate at everything, and it needs roughly five hundred employees underneath it to be worth the overhead.
- Who do HR business partners report to?
- The HR director, with a dotted line to the business leader they support. The dotted line is where their day goes; the solid line is what lets them handle a grievance about that same leader. Charting them under the business unit removes exactly the independence that makes the role useful.
- Should payroll sit in HR or finance?
- Either, as long as the chart says which. In HR it stays close to the employee data that drives it; in finance it stays close to the controls and the audit. Whichever you choose, draw a dotted line to the other side — payroll always has two stakeholders, and the one that is not on the chart is the one that gets surprised.
- How big should an HR team be?
- A common planning figure is one HR person per hundred employees, higher in regulated or high-turnover industries and lower in stable ones. The first dedicated HR hire usually lands around fifty employees, a manager around a hundred and fifty, and the three-legged split past five hundred.
Other industries
- ManufacturingTwo shifts, and quality kept out of production's line.
- LogisticsDispatch runs the day; supervisors run the people.
- ConstructionOffice and field, meeting on every project.
- Software startupSquads under a CTO; product managers on a dotted line.
- NonprofitThe board on top, programmes beside the money.
- Medical practiceA clinical line and a business line, crossing at nursing.
- SchoolDepartments led by teachers who also manage.
- HotelSix divisions around one general manager.
- Marketing agencyDisciplines own people; pods own the work.
- Security & facilities servicesSites stacked under supervisors; a 24-hour control room.
- Sales teamRegions for closers, a team for openers, RevOps beside them.
- Accounting firmA partner pyramid, three service lines.
- Law firmPractice groups, and the business side that runs the firm.
- ChurchA board that governs, a pastor who leads, ministries below.
- RestaurantFront of house and back of house, meeting at the pass.
- IT departmentRun, build and secure, under one director.
- Local governmentElected above appointed, and two officers who answer to the council.
- Utility companyField crews, a 24-hour control centre, and a regulator in the room.
- BankThree lines of defence, drawn as lines.
- Staffing agencySales desks, recruiting desks, and a back office that pays two thousand people.
Or start from a structure — functional, divisional, matrix or flat — or from your own spreadsheet. The guides cover a reorg, a merger, an assistant's chart and a consultant's deliverable.
Make it yours
Download the spreadsheet, replace the names, import it — the chart redraws itself. Or start empty and drag people until it's true. Building is free at any size.