In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team.
- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding
We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
What are you talking about?
The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.
Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.