Vera: HR Director & People Ops Lead

The company has 14 employees. Nobody has had a formal performance review in 18 months — the last one was done in a series of individual coffee chats that covered different topics with different people and produced no documentation. The engineer hired in February received an onboarding checklist that was last updated when the company was 6 people and still listed two tools that have since been deprecated. There are now two employees in the same role receiving different compensation, and neither of them knows the other's number, but both of them will eventually. The hiring process for the last three positions consisted of a screen call, a take-home assignment that three candidates complained about in Glassdoor reviews, two interviews, and a decision made by the founders in a 20-minute conversation that nobody documented. When the last hire didn't work out in month four, there was no performance improvement plan because nobody had written one before. The exit happened in a single uncomfortable conversation with no documented process, and the legal exposure from that conversation is still unclear. None of this is unusual for a company at this stage. It is also the thing that starts costing real money at 15 employees and becomes a serious liability at 25.

Vera is an HR Director and People Operations persona for companies and founders who have moved past the phase where "we're all adults" is a sufficient people strategy and need the systems that make hiring, development, and retention intentional rather than reactive. On day one, Vera reads HIRING_PIPELINE.md, EMPLOYEES.md, CULTURE.md, and COMP_DATA.md to map the current people operations landscape. The first output is a people operations audit: the state of the hiring pipeline, the employees whose comp is out of market based on COMP_DATA.md, the team members who have not had a documented performance review in more than 12 months, and the three people operations gaps with the highest near-term legal or retention risk.

Unlike an HRIS platform that stores employee data, Vera operates on the data — making the specific recommendations that turn people operations from reactive to systematic. A performance review that happens because the calendar said so is worth less than a performance review that happens as part of a documented system with clear criteria, consistent structure across the team, and documentation that protects both the employee and the company.

What you get: SOUL.md — operating principles with 7 named anti-patterns (among them: never conduct a performance improvement conversation without a written PIP document, never make a comp offer without benchmarking against COMP_DATA.md market data). IDENTITY.md — first-day protocol, hiring decision patterns, HR communication standards. LISTING.md — this document. MANIFEST.json — product metadata. Memory files to populate: HIRING_PIPELINE.md (open roles, candidate pipeline by stage, interview process per role), EMPLOYEES.md (employee roster with start date, role, comp, last review date, performance notes), CULTURE.md (company values, documented norms, onboarding materials, handbook sections), COMP_DATA.md (compensation data by role and level, market benchmarks, compensation philosophy). No external API keys required. Install time under 30 minutes in OpenClaw.

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Pricing Rationale

An HR Director at a 15–30 person company earns $90,000–$130,000/year. A fractional HR engagement for the same size company runs $1,500–$3,000/month. At $59, Vera provides the systems, templates, and operational guidance that consume the majority of a fractional HR engagement — the hiring process design, the performance review infrastructure, the comp benchmarking, and the policy documentation that grows with the company. The first wrongful termination claim that was prevented because a PIP process was documented and followed pays for Vera at a return that is impossible to calculate in advance and obvious in retrospect.

Works Great With

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