Member Article

HR firm celebrates 10 years

A North East HR consultancy has set out plans to expand its global reach after celebrating ten years in business.

Darlington-based We do HR, which offers outsourced HR services to businesses covering a wide variety of industry sectors and employing between three and 3,000 employees, was launched in 2003 by current managing director Alasdair Ross and has since grown a national presence with over 150 clients across the country.

Having just marked its tenth anniversary, the company is now gearing up for further growth in the future, and next year is aiming to roll its services out into Europe, the US and Canada.

Mr Ross first set the company up after he spotted a gap in the market for quality HR support for SMEs which had a business-oriented approach.

Despite now servicing many large clients, the SME market place is still an important area that We do HR continues to support.

The firm quickly grew and since its inception has diversified into several additional areas, including recruitment, consultancy around employment tribunals, learning and development, psychometrics and has also developed an in-house HR system, Proactive HR.

Mr Ross, whose wife Julie and daughter Hannah are also part of the business, said: “I started the business because I believed I could make a difference.

“There was a real lack of quality HR support available at the time and what existed elsewhere on the market tended to be too weighted towards the personnel function.

“I’d like to think I have achieved what I set out to do and we are playing an important role in the success of the companies we work for, helping them to save money as well as increase profits.

“Looking forward, the next stage for the business is global expansion. I successfully tested the water in 2009 in Canada and have spent the last few years planning how to develop what we have across Europe, the US and Canada. We are hopeful of achieving this in 2014.”

In the meantime, We do HR is focused on helping its clients become better prepared to handle HR issues and challenges before they escalate into problems for their business.

Mr Ross said: “The industry is still spending too much time fire-fighting and reacting to employee issues. There is also still too great a focus on the admin function and insufficient time spent on the real engagement of staff.

“If we focus on getting the foundations right first time and early on, we can start to develop a proactive and positive culture in the business that genuinely sees its employees as having value.”

As well as its extensive range of HR services, We do HR also offers its clients access to a fully customisable and integrated cloud-based HR data management solution which caters for the special needs and size of individual businesses.

The company’s clients include hotels, recruitment firms, developers, hairdressers, solicitors, accountants, community housing businesses, construction, transport, manufacturers and public sector bodies.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Martin Walker .