Full-service HR: payroll, benefits, leave, compliance, and recruiting, delivered by a dedicated team that operates like part of yours. You keep the EIN. You keep control.
PEOs solve real problems. They also create new ones. Most HR leaders we talk to are not unhappy with HR outsourcing as a concept; they are unhappy with the model they signed up for.
The PEO put you on its master plan. Your trusted broker is gone. Renewals are opaque. Plan changes happen on the PEO’s timeline, not yours. The benefits that helped you win talent are now a black box.
PEO pricing is a flat fee on every employee, every month. Grow from 50 to 150 and the bill triples whether you used more service or not. Modular HRO charges for the functions you outsource. Add a head, do not add a fee.
A new ticket every time. A new rep every call. Nobody who knows your business, your people, or what you said three weeks ago. HR is a relationship job. Pooled support kills the relationship.
One team. One point of contact. Every function that used to need an HR hire or three. All under your EIN, on your timeline.
Pick the modules you want. Add more when you outgrow what you have. Everything below is operated by your dedicated Humareso team.
Open enrollment, life events, COBRA, FSA/HSA, and carrier coordination. Your brokers, your carriers, your renewals. We administer.
Sourcing, interviewing, offer letters, background checks, I-9 verification, and first-day handoff. Permanent, contract, and seasonal hires.
Investigations, performance counseling, terminations, severance, and the conversations nobody wants to have. Documented, defensible, humane.
Market benchmarking, pay equity audits, structure design, and incentive plan engineering. Pay your people right, defensibly.
Inclusion strategy, harassment prevention, manager training, and the training your insurer asks about. Built by HR pros, not vendors.
Each model is right for somebody. PEO is right for some teams. Here is the honest comparison so you can make the call without a sales pitch.
| HRO (Humareso) | PEO | ASO | In-house | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employment model | You stay sole employer | Co-employment | You stay sole employer | You stay sole employer |
| Tax filings under | Your EIN | PEO’s EIN | Your EIN | Your EIN |
| Benefits plan | Your plan, your brokers | PEO master plan | Your plan, your brokers | Your plan |
| Pricing model | Scoped to functions | Per-employee, every month | Per-employee or scoped | Salaries + tools |
| Dedicated HR pros | Yes, named team | Pooled support | Varies | Yes, if you hire them |
| Implementation time | ~14 days | 60–120 days | 30–60 days | Months to hire |
| Exit ease | Month-to-month, modular | Multi-year + EIN migration | Contract-dependent | N/A |
| Best when | You want control + expertise | You want benefits arbitrage | You have HR, need admin | You have scale + budget |
When a PEO is the right call: you are a 5–25 employee company that needs Fortune-500 benefits and you do not yet have anyone running HR. PEO master plans + co-employment can give you medical and 401(k) options you could not access alone. The trade-off is real, and it is a fair one at that stage. Past ~50 employees, the math usually flips toward HRO.
If you are evaluating HRO providers you have probably looked at the names below. Here is what differentiates Humareso in one line each. No bashing; just the factual contrast.
Co-employment with 300+ courses and dedicated HR support. Strong on training; the co-employment trade-off is the same as any PEO.
Co-employment with an ASO option. Tech-forward but bundled HRIS. Recent pricing changes have driven outbound interest in alternatives.
ESAC-accredited PEO. Excellent at master-plan benefits. Cost: your benefit broker relationships and renewal control.
40+ years, 745K+ businesses. Solid payroll. Trustpilot pain points: difficulty canceling, fee creep, inconsistent call-center support.
Policy and compliance basics for under-20-employee teams. Excellent entry point. Outgrows itself once you need payroll, benefits, or leave operations.
Scales with you across employment models. Co-employment kicks in at PEO tier; modular HRO keeps the same model at every size.
Detailed side-by-side comparison pages are coming. In the meantime, the same wedge applies to every PEO: HRO keeps you the employer of record, the proprietary Humareso platforms are available alongside your engagement and licensed per platform, and pricing is scoped to the functions you outsource.
HRO scope and emphasis change by industry. Here is how we typically engage in each.
Billable hours are not a people strategy.
Law firms, agencies, consultancies. We run payroll, leave, recruiting, and employee relations so your principals can sell and deliver. Benefits stay with the broker who built your plan.
Turnover is the budget line that quietly bleeds you.
Practices, clinics, ambulatory networks. We absorb the hiring, onboarding, and employee-relations load that clinical turnover creates. FMLA + state PFL handled end-to-end on our leave platform.
Floor supervisors are not HR pros.
Plants and warehouses. We absorb employee relations, OSHA-adjacent compliance, multi-shift payroll, and the leave cases that hit production lines. Supervisors focus on output.
Mission first. HR overhead, not so much.
Foundations, social-service orgs, advocacy. Lean operating budgets mean HR cannot be a full-time hire. HRO gives you a complete HR function at a fraction of an FTE cost.
Series A is too early to hire a CHRO.
Software and venture-backed teams. Drop in equity-aware comp, multi-state remote payroll, and offer-letter velocity that matches your hiring plan. Scale up scope at each round.
Hourly workforces eat HR teams alive.
Multi-location retail, restaurants, hotels. We run high-velocity hiring, tipped-wage payroll, and the leave + ADA cases that come with hourly workforces. Manager training included.
Most PEOs resell a generic HRIS. We build our own platforms around the way HR pros actually work, and each one is designed to work alongside your HRO engagement.
Six platforms. One workforce intelligence layer that works alongside your HRO engagement.
Plug in your numbers. See what shifts when payroll, benefits admin, leave, and compliance come under one HRO scope. Software stays licensed separately, so it sits on both sides of the comparison.
Assumptions: one HR FTE costs $102,960/yr, built from a $72,000 base salary plus a 43% benefits and payroll burden. That burden rate comes from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series, where benefits run 30% of total compensation. HR tools are budgeted at $240/employee/yr, which is $20 per employee per month and sits mid-range for mid-market HRIS. The PEO benchmark of $130/employee/month sits at the low end of the current $110 to $200 administrative fee range. Humareso scope covers an HRO base fee plus a per-employee fee for full-service operation. The Humareso platforms are licensed separately, so tooling stays on both sides of this comparison and is never counted as a saving.
Directional estimate. Your actual scope and pricing land in the 20-minute discovery call. We do not quote without understanding your operation.
HRO is a relationship. These are clients who run their business with our team alongside them, not above them.
“Humareso operates as an in-house member of our business. They know our people. They show up when something is wrong, not when a ticket gets assigned. We left our PEO to work with them and never looked back.”
“We kept our benefits broker, kept our renewals on our timeline, and offloaded the operational HR work that was eating our COO’s schedule. The ROI showed up in month two.”
“Their team runs our leave program, our compliance, and our recruiting. We have a single point of contact who treats my organization like she works here. That is the part nobody else delivers.”
We can put you in touch with operators in your industry who can talk about what HRO actually looks like day to day.
Talk to a ReferenceNo EIN migration. No employee paperwork avalanche. No 60-to-120-day enterprise implementation project.
20-minute discovery. We map your current HR stack, gaps, and the functions you want to outsource. Walk away with a written scope and price within 48 hours.
Transition plan with your payroll, benefits, and HRIS vendors. Document handoff. Your dedicated team gets named and trained on your business.
First payroll runs under our operations. Your team attends your leadership meeting. Employees meet their new HR point of contact.
You stop touching the operational HR work. Quarterly business reviews. Annual scope review. Scale up or down as your business changes.
Straight answers. No sales pitch.
HRO (HR outsourcing) is a service relationship: a third party operates your HR functions while you remain the legal employer of record. A PEO (professional employer organization) is a co-employment relationship: your staff are legally employed by the PEO too, filed under the PEO’s EIN. PEOs offer master benefit plans and payroll under their tax ID; HRO keeps everything under yours. Humareso is HRO. You keep your EIN, your benefits brokers, your renewals, and your control.
No. With Humareso HRO, all payroll, tax filings, and employment records stay under your company’s EIN. We operate as your outsourced HR team, not your co-employer.
Yes. Humareso administers the benefit plans you already have with the brokers and carriers you already use. If you want help shopping the market we can run that process, but you are not forced into a master plan you do not control.
Most HRO engagements are live in 14 days from signed scope to first operational handoff. There is no multi-month EIN migration because there is no EIN migration.
We work with employers from roughly 20 employees through several thousand. Below 20, our consulting and policy services are usually the better fit; above 20 the full HRO scope tends to make economic sense.
Pricing is scoped to the functions you outsource, not a flat per-employee tax on every head. Modular and month-to-month: add payroll only, add benefits later, scale up to full HRO when you are ready.
Yes. We manage federal compliance and the patchwork of state-level employment law including paid family leave, sick leave, pay transparency, and required postings. Multi-state employers are a common engagement.
We build six platforms: Engage (engagement), Perform (performance), Lead360 (assessments), Verify (employment verification), Leave (leave-of-absence cases), and Hub (compliance and handbooks). Each one is licensed separately from your HRO engagement and priced per platform, so you take only what you need. Your HRO team operates whichever platforms you license, and works with the systems you already own if you would rather keep them.
That is fine. HRO is modular. You can engage Humareso for payroll only, leave only, recruiting only, or any combination. Add more scope when you are ready.
Leave administration is a core HRO function and runs on Humareso Leave — our own case-management platform purpose-built for FMLA, ADA, state paid family leave, and corporate leave policies. Case intake, eligibility, certification, intermittent tracking, and return-to-work are all handled.
20 minutes on the phone. We map your current HR stack, identify what to outsource, and quote it. No co-employment ask. No multi-year contract.
No commitment. No co-employment. You keep your EIN.
