u/burncom21

I started June 1st. I took a pay cut to come here after leaving a company I’d been with for 4 years due to layoffs, I wanted job security. For some context we have over 415 employees, one HR Director, one Coordinator in a different country and myself looking over the United States hires. Over the last 2.5 months, my role has quietly expanded to cover:

Full-cycle onboarding (about 12-15 new hires a week, tracking their equipment and answering any questions they might have leading up to day 1)

Offer letters, done manually, up to 11+ pages, in Google Docs (not even automated in our ATS)

Background checks, on an inconsistent system, and I’m told to clear new hires to start with items still pending

I-9 compliance (asked to parse a 600 page document for audit and organize the docs, reach out to reach individual on issues on I-9s before my time)

DocuSign routing for those offer letters (3 signatures each)

Referral/bonus tracking

SOP creation

Setting up New Hire Orientation, sometimes with only a few days’ notice before a start date, when we normally run it on a set biweekly schedule

Leading those orientations essentially all by myself after only a 2-week transition from the team that used to own them. Answering their questions during the call, if they have tech issues helping them, etc.

Constant firefighting when other departments (recruiting especially) don’t communicate basic intake details, like whether someone is actually remote or onsite, sometimes found out only after onboarding is already underway, in a system that’s a nightmare to correct after the fact

I have 4+ years of experience doing this exact type of work and have handled this volume before. The difference is that at my last company, the systems actually worked, I could pull an accurate report and trust it. Here, I’m juggling 4-5 spreadsheets at once because nothing talks to each other, and I can’t reliably pull a report at all.

This week, after a large restructuring (100+ employees’ roles/titles changed), I manually updated a separate accountability chart in our EOS platform that doesn’t sync with our HRIS. The chart is different from a typical structure and requires you to remember what assignments the employee is assigned to but some employees don’t actually report to their actual hiring manager in the EOS chart. (Confusing I know) I thought I’d gotten it right. I hadn’t, there wasn’t time to do it properly, and it was never fully explained how it should look. The CEO got upset with my HR director, it trickled down to me, and I owned it honestly on the call. I ended up tearing up afterward from the stress.

This isn’t new. In week two, I asked my manager directly if something was wrong because I sensed tension, and got told not to ask that again, I’d “learn some things.” That same week, I was juggling two different onboarding processes from two recruiters who each did things differently, and got called sloppy on a call in front of the whole team over the mixup. Looking back, that was the first red flag and I didn’t listen to it.

We don’t have real 1:1s, just a weekly team call to go over everyone’s work. Nobody checks in on how anyone’s actually doing. A teammate had a blood pressure scare last week and had to leave for a clinic visit, I genuinely think it was from stress and lack of sleep, and nobody on leadership has addressed it since.

I recently got feedback that I should use AI more to move faster. It has its place, but some of what I do (compliance-sensitive documents, careful policy language) needs a human eye, not a quick prompt.

I’m skipping lunch most days, I’ve started crying after meetings, and I’m constantly told to work harder/faster/smarter when the real problem is broken infrastructure, understaffing, and a leadership style that shuts down honest questions.

Is this normal “startup growing pains,” or is this actually unsustainable? Outside perspective welcome.