Building HR From Scratch: What Nigerian Startups Need to Get Right
July 1, 2026
Most Nigerian startups hire their first HR person too late.
By the time the company is 50 people, the organisation is already shaped by its early hiring decisions, its informal cultural norms, and whatever management styles the founders brought in. A new HR hire spends the first six months untangling problems that would have been easy to prevent.
The good news: you do not need a full HR function to get the foundations right. You need four things, and you can put them in place at 20 people, or even 10.
1. A clear employment framework
This is not just contracts. It is clarity on how people are classified (full-time, contract, consultant), what your probation period means in practice, and how you handle exits. Nigerian labour law has specifics that catch founders off-guard: notice periods, severance requirements, and the NSITF and ITF contributions that most small companies ignore until they are audited.
Get your employment framework right early. It protects you and it signals to candidates that you are a serious employer.
2. A job architecture that can scale
This means knowing what each role does, how roles relate to each other, and roughly where they fit on a compensation band. You do not need a formal grading system at 20 people. But you need to be able to answer the question: what would it take to promote someone here, and what does that actually mean for their pay?
Without this, your best people leave because they see no path forward. And the people who stay resent the ones who negotiate better offers.
3. A performance conversation cadence
Annual reviews do not work. They are stressful, backward-looking, and disconnected from the day-to-day reality of fast-moving companies. What works is a simple, consistent check-in rhythm: a weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one between manager and report, with a light quarterly conversation about performance and development.
This does not require HR software. It requires managers who know what good looks like and have had some basic training on how to give effective feedback.
4. A policy on what matters most
Not a 60-page HR handbook. A clear, written position on three or four things that affect trust: how pay decisions are made, how complaints are handled, what the working hours expectations really are, and how time-off is managed. These are the policies that, when they are missing or inconsistently applied, generate the most resentment and the most legal risk.
If you are between 20 and 150 people and you are not sure where to start, the place is not a software purchase or a policy template. The place is an honest audit of how your current people decisions are being made, and who is accountable for making them well.
That is the conversation we start with every client at UR People Partner.