Hiring going into Hyper Growth - HR

You work in a startup that is ready to jump into the hyper-growth mode. How do you prepare your hiring team for this challenge? Analysis focused on the Human Resources side

When a startup or company initiates the journey of hyper-growth there are 2 dimensions, at least, that are crucial for the success of such a trip: Human Resources and Engineering. In a future issue, I’ll focus on the Engineering dimension but, in today’s issue, I will focus on the Human Resources side.

In more detail, you will read about:

• Challenges you will face incoming into a hyper-growth mode

• What to do to be prepared for those challenges

However, maybe we can start with a couple of basic questions:

How do I know if I’m working in a hyper-growth company?

Well, basically, your manager will tell you, if not your CEO directly. One common scenario is that your startup raises a lot of money, in an investment round, and that is announced to the whole company by the CEO. From there, the company will want to grow fast, very fast, to make your product better, and wider, getting more users/customers, and ensuring supremacy over the competitors. And for that hiring is a must.

What does it look like the numbers that, in terms of hiring, a startup in hyper-growth has?

Here I can share with you some real numbers from a company (I’ll keep the name anonymous) that went into hyper-growth. The chart below represents the number of employees for a startup in the last 9 years. If you look up carefully, you can see that in 2016 there was a small bump, and later another in 2018, from which you clearly see that the number of employees moved from ~350 in 2018, ~520 in 2019, to ~900 employees in 2022. From 2021 to 2022 more than 200 people were hired.

Now we can jump into some of the challenges that you, and your company, will have to face surfing the hyper-growth ride.

One of these challenges is the lack of documentation about the technical profiles that you have within the company and the ones that are required for the new hires. The company starts to create new features and even new products for the customers very fast and, because of the need for speed, you will find it difficult to know what skills to look for to satisfy those requirements. Do you need an AI expert? A cloud engineer? is it mandatory to program in RUST? What is the company culture that the hires will have to share? You will find that all this information is missing.

Another challenge that you will face is the lack of a proper department structure. You will find that, your current department structure, does not fit properly at the time to hire fast. The process that made you successful in the past, now, makes you slow, because before was not so important to hire fast, but now it is. Everything is about speed.

When you are a small company you have a concrete hiring process, whatever it is, and it works for you. Is that hiring process the one that will help you to hire 200 persons in one year? Probably not.

So, what are the actions that you could put in place to overcome those challenges?

One is to reconfigure your human resources department. A configuration I saw working pretty well was about working in tuples. This means that 2 people, from human resources, will work together for one of the open positions. This couple will work together from 2 angles

• One person will focus on the strategy for the search of candidates for the open position assigned

• The other person will focus on the management of the candidates’ applications

This strategy helps to scale, dividing the workload between 2 people in continuous communication, allowing to speed up the recruiting process.

Another action would be to enhance and improve communication. The way that I managed to do this was by scheduling recurrent one-on-one meetings with the human resources person assigned to the open positions I had. Here what I want to achieve is to have fast feedback. It sounds a bit obvious, maybe, but it worked pretty well for me. Also, I saw it very efficient to work with a human resources person who is based in the same region we are hiring.

Last but not least, a continuous adaptation of the hiring process. You have to iterate and change your hiring process. The communication between human resources and engineering, for example during the one-on-ones I’ve mentioned before, will lead you to adapt the hiring process, based on the things you tried and did not work, and new problems identified. If you stay, you lose hiring. Remember that you will fail from time to time but it’s important to fail fast and adapt.

I would like to highlight that I did not talk about tools but just about techniques, which I believe are more important than the tools to make them happen.

I related issue I wrote past year, which is related to this topic, and might be of your interest.

This is it for today’s issue. Hope this is useful for you in driving the hiring in the human resources dimension on the hyper-growth journey.

Did some of these techniques help you? Any other strategy that works for you? Write in the comments anything you want to share or if you have any questions.

Best,
Marcos