About us

Every business has a backstory, the spark behind the real growth, the people that built from the ground up, the why. Stories are what connect us, make us human. Your story, like your people, matters to us, and we want to share our story with you.

The Alternative HR Story

Before founding Alternative HR, Dan Oakland, spent several years in the restaurant business overseeing restaurant groups, hiring and training, and of course re-training and sometimes having to do the not-so-fun job of firing. He quickly realized that what it all came down to was that with the right attention and inspiration, any problem could be solved, any person could be worked with, and any company could grow by focusing on its greatest resource: people. 

Dan realized that every business in every industry dealt with the same people issues, and that 95% of employers had no human resource professional on staff to help them. He founded Alternative HR in 1992 to help small employers compete for great talent, comply with complex state and federal employment laws and create the environment where people – and organizations – can excel. Dan describes his role as that of an “HR Evangelist” – spreading HR best practices to small employers. Now, with a solid and growing team of highly trained, devoted professionals who diligently serve their clients, Alternative HR is the most rewarding risk Dan has ever taken, and one of the best business resources in the marketplace.

Helping Lighten the Load

Today, Alternative HR is just what it sounds like, an alternative for small businesses to have a full-time human resources employee on staff, or to having the business owner attempt to manage all of the HR on their own. A strong, knowledgeable, adaptable human resources department is complex, challenging, and critical to any good company for many reasons, and Alternative HR takes all the pressure and all the guesswork out of HR for its clients.

MISSION

Our mission is to provide practical solutions and exceptional results to the human resource related issues that small and medium sized employers face.

We do that by helping our clients:

  • Compete for great talent
  • Comply with federal, state and local employment regulations, and
  • Create a work environment where individuals and organizations can excel.

VISION

Our vision is to be the premier provider of outsourced human resource solutions in every market we serve. 

VALUES

While these are not the only things we value, we bring the greatest value to our clients in these four areas:

PEOPLE: People can do amazing things, and we seek to engage, enrich and empower everyone with whom we interact.

TEAMS: People do even more amazing things when working together, and we seek to help organizations harness and maximize the power of their teams.

PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS: Whether a situation is simple or complex, we seek the most common-sense options; not fancy or frivolous, but effective.

EXCEPTIONAL RESULTS: Practical solutions, when implemented across the board and over time, help our clients improve, grow and produce exceptional results.