According to Ted Baker and Howard Aldrich, hiring a human resource (HR) specialist can be damaging to a young, rapidly growing company. That's because an HR specialist is more likely to engage in resource seeking strategies, versus bricolage strategies, in the face of perceived resource dependence [1].

Most firms start with fewer than five employees and less than $10,000 of capital. Consequently, it is an "indisputable proposition" that entrepreneurs have to tap external resources -- sources of financing, key customers, cooperative suppliers, and employees -- to survive. To the extent that a resource is perceived to be (a) valuable and (b) hard to replace, there is risk in the form of resource dependency.

Baker and Aldrich assert there are two classes of improvisational strategies for dealing with resource dependency:

• Bricolage - making do with the resources currently at hand
• Resource seeking - finding additional resources

Bricolage strategies include (a) doing nothing and just living with the risk of resource dependence, (b) de-emphasizing the part of the business that is subject to resource dependency, and (c) reducing the uncertainty of the relationship with the scarce and valuable resource provider.

In examining perceived dependence on employees, Baker and Aldrich found that resource seeking often leads to the following outcomes:

• Resource buffering - hiring in anticipation of an increase in workload
• Resource squandering - raising capital to support employment growth too early and at too high a cost
• Stakeholder conflict - as the result of cutting deals with new employees
• Delegating dependency management to others - hiring an HR specialist to manage the hiring process

HR people tend to emphasize recruitment, so they also tend to engage in resource seeking strategies. (Similarly, CFO's skilled in raising capital will tend to have a bias toward raising capital.) By hiring an HR specialist, an entrepreneur, who otherwise might emphasize bricolage, may well find his or her company engaging in wasteful and contentious resource seeking behavior.

While Baker and Aldrich acknowledge that resource seeking strategies can make sense, particularly in the short-run, they point out that resource seeking can lead to a rather homogenous workforce. That isn't bad, if the environment is stable, but can be a disadvantage in an uncertain environment. Bricolage strategies, which emphasize hiring just the right person and just the right time, can lead to a more diverse workforce, which leads to greater firm adaptiveness.

The two researchers also observed that entrepreneurs will often overestimate the uniqueness of an employee's skills, which leads to an overestimation of resource dependency. Many "critical" employees aren't that critical, after all. An emphasis on resource seeking can, therefore, result in an expensive solution to a non-existent problem.

[1] Bricolage and Resource-Seeking: Improvisational Resposes to Dependence in Entrepreneurial Firms, working paper dated July 28, 2000.