Most HR functions are doing the wrong work, well.
The transactional layer is automating and the strategic layer is consolidating with senior leaders. The middle — where most departments live — is hollowing out.
Walk into the people function at most 150-person companies and you'll find capable people working hard on the wrong things. Benefits administration. PTO tracking. Birthday cards. The mechanics of employment, run competently.
None of that is the work that moves the company. The work that moves the company is whether you can hire fast enough to hit the plan, whether your managers can run a team without you, and whether comp decisions are made by a system instead of by the founder at 11pm.
Busy is not the same as shipping. A function can be fully utilized and contributing almost nothing to the outcomes the CEO actually tracks.
Why the middle hollows out
Two forces are pulling the function apart. The transactional layer — payroll, compliance, the ticket queue — is automating and outsourcing. The strategic layer — org design, executive hiring, the board conversation — is consolidating with founders and a small number of senior operators.
What's left in the middle is the part nobody automated and nobody senior owns. So it defaults to process for its own sake. That's not a people problem. It's a design problem.
The fix isn't more headcount
The instinct is to hire a Head of People and hope. But you can't hire your way out of a function that's pointed at the wrong work — you'll just have a more expensive version of the same output. First you fix what the function is for. Then you staff it.
That's the whole premise of a rebuild: change the work before you change the org chart.