The practice
At PRISM, people operations is a practice, not a department. One senior person, engaged by the day, working inside companies at the point where the informal way of doing things stops holding.
A founder at thirty people. A partner who inherited a practice group and no training for it. Different rooms, one brief: make authority, pay and progress legible enough that nobody has to guess.
- FractionalTwo days a week, or one. A practice on call, never a headcount on a chart.
- SeniorThe person you met in the first call is the person in the room in week six.
- By referralWork arrives from the last piece of work. It is why this page confirms rather than sells.
Two rooms
Two rooms that rarely share a vocabulary.
You hired forty people with a spreadsheet and nerve.
It worked. That is the awkward part. At PRISM the job is not to replace the instinct that got the company here, but to put a floor under it — so the thirtieth hire lands as well as the third, and nobody has to be heroic on a Tuesday.
- Levelling, bands and equity logic that survives a board meeting
- First-manager training for engineers promoted eleven weeks ago
- Performance cycles that take days, not quarters
- Employment groundwork for the second and third country
Your people function reports to everyone at once.
Firms are governed by consensus and staffed by exception. At PRISM the partnership gets one neutral desk for the decisions that should not be made in a hallway — and the written record to show they were not.
- Associate progression and partnership-track criteria, written down
- Lateral onboarding through the first two hundred days
- Compensation committee support and a defensible review
- Sensitive matters handled at arm’s length from the partnership
03 — The working principle
Structure is a kindness.
Nobody relaxes in a room where the rules are being guessed at. Almost everything PRISM builds is downstream of that one sentence.
The work
Six things, done properly, in whatever order the company needs.
People architecture
Org design, levelling and role clarity for teams that doubled faster than the chart did.
02Compensation & equity
Bands, review cycles and equity mechanics you can explain to a candidate or a committee.
03Hiring systems
Structured interviews and a bar that stays where it was set after the fiftieth hire.
04Employee relations
Investigations, exits and difficult conversations run by someone with no stake in the outcome.
05Policy & compliance
Handbooks, multi-jurisdiction posture and the documentation counsel asks for first.
06Standing counsel
Hours held open for founders, practice heads and the newly promoted who will not ask.
How an engagement runs
No discovery theatre.
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Week 0
A conversation
Thirty minutes, no deck. If PRISM is the wrong angle for the problem, that is said out loud.
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Weeks 1–2
Listening
Fifteen structured conversations, the documents as they actually are, and a plain map of where authority lives today.
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Weeks 3–6
Building
The map becomes artefacts — bands, ladders, cycles, policies — built with your leaders in the room.
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After
Standing hours
Handover, then a lighter cadence. A quarterly review and a number to call the week it goes sideways.
Who arrives
PRISM is one person.
Erin H. Robertson has spent fifteen years inside people functions — a marketplace that tripled in eighteen months, a national firm with a compensation committee, and two companies that did not make it and taught more than the ones that did.
PRISM takes a small number of engagements at a time. That is not scarcity marketing; it is the only way the person you met stays the person who does the work.
“They arrived on a Tuesday and by the following Friday the partnership had compensation bands it had actually voted for.”
Asked before the first call
Is PRISM replacing our HR team or sitting above it?
Usually neither. PRISM works beside whoever holds people operations today — often a chief of staff, an office manager, or the partner who inherited it — and leaves them stronger than it found them.
How is this different from a consultancy?
A consultancy delivers a deck and leaves. PRISM builds the operating system and stays long enough to watch it run under load, which is the only test that matters.
Can you work inside a partnership?
Yes. A meaningful share of the work is with firms between fifteen and eighty partners, including compensation committee support and lateral integration.
What does the first month look like?
Two weeks of listening, one working document, one decision meeting. By week four there is at least one system live rather than a roadmap for one.
What does it cost?
Engagements are priced by the day and quoted after the first conversation, because the honest number depends on how much already exists. Nothing is annual; everything is month to month after the first term.
Do you sign confidentiality and conflict terms?
Always, and a conflicts check runs before the first substantive conversation — particularly for firms operating in overlapping markets.
09 — Start
Bring the thing you keep postponing.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no obligation. Most people arrive here because someone they trust sent them. Say who, and the conversation starts halfway along.