People Advisory & Mobility
HR Consultation Thailand
HR audits, work rules and pay structure advice for Thai employers
Two kinds of work. Reviewing the employment documents and practices a Thai employer is judged on when something goes wrong, and designing the pay and benefits structure underneath them. We produce the analysis and the drafting. Your team decides and implements. Projects, retainers, day rates, or a scope built to fit.
24+ years
of group HR-adjacent practice across SEA
DOE Licensed
Licence น.1830/2565 - recruitment-grade depth informs every HR engagement
Confidential
NDA-governed engagements - findings shared only with authorised stakeholders
4 engagement models
project · retainer · day rate · custom
How it works
1
Discover
One private conversation to begin, usually with the HR director or whoever has inherited the problem. What we need is the trigger. Sometimes it is an inspection. Far more often it is a termination that reached the Labour Court and cost several times what anyone had budgeted, or work rules written when the company had forty staff and never revisited at four hundred, or pay grades nobody can now explain to the people inside them. We also ask what has already been attempted internally, since that shapes what will be accepted. Scope, deliverables, timing and fees go into an engagement letter before any diagnosis begins.
2
Diagnose
Diagnosis means reading the documents and then checking what actually happens. The work rules as filed, the employment contracts in circulation, how overtime and allowances are really calculated against what the policy claims, whether Social Security Office contributions reconcile to payroll, how PND 1 has been filed, and what past terminations looked like in practice including what was paid and on what basis. Severance exposure gets quantified rather than described, because that number decides how urgent everything else is. On the pay side: benchmarking against comparable employers, checking where provincial minimum wage increases have compressed the lower grades, and finding where internal equity has quietly broken.
3
Design
Design produces documents you can use, not recommendations about documents. Work rules redrafted and ready for legal review and filing. Each policy change annotated with the reason behind it, because somebody will have to justify it across a table one day. An audit report ordered by exposure rather than by topic. A grade and pay structure with the workings shown and the provincial wage floors modelled in, so it holds when the next adjustment lands. Benefits proposals that sit sensibly alongside the statutory schemes instead of duplicating them.
4
Handover
How it closes depends on how it opened. A project ends with a working session for your HR team, help planning the communication, and a documented handover. Retainer clients simply keep talking to us. Implementation always turns up something the design phase could not see, usually the first time a new structure meets a real payroll run, and that gets picked up separately by the day or as a small fixed fee.
HR consultation in Thailand, built on 24+ years of watching HR actually work
Two things make Thai HR policy work different from its neighbours. The first is that work rules are not optional documentation: an employer above a modest headcount is expected to have them, in Thai, available to employees and filed, and a handbook that exists only in English at head office does not satisfy that. The second is that termination is costly enough that policy decisions made casually years earlier become expensive later, because severance scales with service and disciplinary process is what determines whether a dismissal is defensible at all. Add the Personal Data Protection Act, which caught a lot of employers holding personnel files with no lawful basis documented, and the gap between what the handbook says and what the company does is where the risk sits. Our Thai advisory work runs through People Profilers Bangkok Recruitment Co., Ltd. What it brings that a strategy firm cannot is the operational lens: we also recruit, run payroll and act as employer of record here, so we see which policies survive contact with real employees.
What our HR consultation engagements cover
The practice does two things: it reviews and rebuilds employment documentation and the practice behind it, and it designs pay and benefits structures. Four commercial shapes exist because the work genuinely varies, from a bounded project to continuous access on retainer, a day rate where scope keeps moving, and bespoke where none of those describe it.
HR audits & policy
- ✓HR health checks & gap diagnostics
- ✓Employee handbook development & revision
- ✓HR policy reviews & gap remediation
- ✓DOE compliance audits
Compensation & benefits
- ✓Salary banding & structure design
- ✓Market benchmarking by sector & region
- ✓Benefits structure & total rewards philosophy
- ✓Internal equity analysis & remediation
Engagement structures
- ✓Project-based fixed fee (defined scope)
- ✓Monthly retainer (ongoing advisory access)
- ✓Day rate (specialist consulting)
- ✓Custom-scoped per engagement
Our role ends at advice and drafting. Decisions and implementation stay with you, which is deliberate, because a policy your own managers did not put in place rarely survives contact with the organisation. Where you want the function operated for you instead, from payroll through to statutory reporting, that is HR Shared Services.
When HR consultation makes sense in Thailand
Advisory work on top of an internal HR function, rather than instead of one. Three triggers account for most engagements here.
Work rules that do not match the company
A handbook inherited from a parent company, translated once and never revisited, or work rules that were filed years ago and no longer describe how the business runs. The gap matters most in disciplinary cases, where the process you actually followed is measured against the process you wrote down.
Pay structure has drifted
Minimum wage revisions lift the floor without moving the bands above it, and Bangkok salaries for English-capable and Japanese-capable staff have moved faster than most internal structures have. Benchmarking against what employers here are actually paying, then rebuilding the bands, is a different exercise from an annual increase.
Something external is about to look at you
A labour inspection, a client audit of your employment practices, a data protection review of how personnel files are held, or an acquirer's due diligence. Independent verification before the inspection costs considerably less than remediation after it.
Where you need ongoing HR delivery rather than advice, that is HR Shared Services. Where a restructuring will involve departing employees, Outplacement handles the transition.
HR ADVISORY
Thai employment policy, written to Thai law
Work rules, handbooks and contracts drafted against the Labour Protection Act · Thai-language documentation employees can actually be held to · 24+ years of regional employment practice
Industries & Functions We Cover
Sector decides most of the answer. Overtime and shift exposure dominates in manufacturing and automotive, service charge structures complicate pay in hospitality, site allowances and rotation shape construction and energy, and each reads the same rule differently once it reaches a payslip. Our consultants come out of recruiting into these industries, so that context is the starting point rather than the first month's work.
Aerospace & Aviation
MRO technicians and licensed engineers, ground handling and cabin services leadership, and aviation supply chain roles around Suvarnabhumi, Don Mueang and U-Tapao.
Automotive
Production and quality engineers, supplier development, sales and aftersales management across the Eastern Seaboard assembly and parts cluster.
Banking & Financial Services
Relationship managers, credit and risk analysts, compliance and AML officers and operations specialists across Thai commercial banks, insurers and asset managers.
Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical
Regulatory affairs, QA and validation, medical affairs and market access roles for manufacturers, distributors and clinical research organisations.
Chemical
Process, production and reliability engineers, HSE officers and technical sales across the Map Ta Phut petrochemical complex.
Construction & Civil Engineering
Project and site managers, civil, structural and M&E engineers, quantity surveyors and safety officers on Bangkok and EEC infrastructure.
FMCG & Retail
Brand and trade marketing managers, key account and modern trade specialists, and retail operations across Bangkok and upcountry networks.
Healthcare
Clinical operations, nursing leadership, medical representatives and regulatory specialists for private hospital groups and device companies.
IT & Telecommunication
Software engineers, cloud and data specialists, product managers and network engineers across Bangkok technology employers and the telco operators.
Logistics & Transportation
Freight forwarding, customs and import-export specialists, warehouse and distribution managers around Laem Chabang, Suvarnabhumi and the EEC.
Marine & Offshore Engineering
Marine and subsea engineers, vessel and yard operations, project managers and HSE specialists supporting Gulf of Thailand operations.
Media & Publishing
Account management, content and performance marketing, creative and production roles across agencies, broadcasters and digital platforms.
Oil & Gas
Process, drilling and project engineers, HSE coordinators, commercial analysts and terminal operations for upstream and downstream employers.
Real Estate & Property
Development and project managers, leasing and property managers, facilities leads and investment roles for Thai developers and hotel groups.
Semiconductor
Process, test and equipment engineers, packaging and assembly specialists and production leadership across the electronics estates.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between HR Consultation and HR Shared Services?
One finishes; the other does not. Consultation ends when the documents are in your hands and your team begins using them.
Shared services runs every month without stopping. Payroll, Social Security Office contributions, PND 1 withholding and the year-end filings, joiners and leavers, the statutory reporting.
Most companies arrive wanting the first. A few conclude partway through an audit that the second is what they actually needed, and that conversation is easier once the documentation exists.
How is HR Consultation priced?
Four arrangements. Matching the arrangement to how bounded the work really is matters more than the differences between them.
Bounded work takes a fixed fee. Redrafting work rules, or benchmarking a defined set of grades, has a beginning and an end.
Continuous but unbounded work takes a retainer. It suits a company with capable HR administration but no senior adviser, where the value is in asking before deciding rather than afterwards.
Work that keeps changing shape takes a day rate. Restructuring support is the obvious case, since each finding moves the next step.
Genuinely complicated work is quoted on its own terms: several provinces with different wage rates, or an integration where confidentiality itself limits the method.
No diagnostic work starts before the fee is in the engagement letter.
How long does a typical HR Consultation engagement take?
Estimates, not commitments, and here is what moves them.
Three to five weeks for a health check, assuming documents reach us. Retrieval rather than analysis is what usually holds this phase up.
Four to eight weeks to redraft work rules before legal review. Fixing a document that was broadly right is far quicker than replacing one that never fitted the company.
Six to ten weeks for benchmarking plus a pay structure rebuild, which is the one that surprises people. Comparable Thai data is slow to gather, and the model has to be tested against your real payroll and every provincial rate you are exposed to before anyone signs it.
Retainers run until ended, reviewed at six or twelve months.
None of these become fixed dates at kickoff. Discovery finds things, and when it does the engagement letter is amended in the open rather than the schedule slipping quietly.
How do you handle confidentiality on sensitive engagements?
An audit produces a written list of what is wrong, and a quantified severance exposure. Pay work produces something more sensitive again: what everybody earns and what you intend to do about it.
Nothing moves before an NDA is signed. Circulation is limited to the people named in the engagement letter, and we neither reference engagements in marketing nor discuss them with other clients.
Some engagements need more than that. An unannounced transaction, or separations still under consideration, get a restricted team, controlled document exchange, and a project code name where that helps.
What deliverables do we get from an engagement?
Working documents. Anything your team could not pick up and act on should not have been produced.
From an audit: findings rated by severity, a quantified severance exposure, a remediation sequence with effort attached, and a condensed version for whoever briefs the board.
From policy work: redrafted work rules, annotations explaining each change, and a plan for announcing it.
From pay work: benchmark data at role level, an equity analysis, a grade and band structure with its workings exposed, benefits proposals, and a phased path from the current structure to the proposed one.
The standard is whether your HR director could take any of it into a room alone and defend it.
Can you support implementation after the advisory work?
Yes, scoped separately once the advice has landed. It takes one of three forms.
Short hands-on help, by the day or as a small fixed fee: launching new work rules, sequencing a band rollout, briefing managers on what changed and why.
An ongoing retainer, which is what most project clients choose once they find the questions did not stop when the report arrived.
Or handing the operation over, where the audit showed the function is not viable in house. Everything already being documented makes that transition considerably faster than a cold start.
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