Scaling a business from a HR perspective - my lessons learned

Today I was speaking at the H.U.G. event of Personio about the hyper-growth times at a start-up or mid-sized company. If you have missed the speech, here is a short summary:

How can we manage the growth phases of a start-up with a small HR team? How can we prevent this mission from failing and what challenges do HR professionals expect in this phase?

These are my insights and lessons learned from my scaling phases at Talentry (from 25 to 50 employees in 6 months), at YFood (from 50 employees to 100 employees in 4 months) and at New Flag (from 150 employees to 320 employees in 9 countries within 11 months):

1. Recruit like a soccer manager

• Build a strong reserve bench to fill open positions more quickly.
• Keep an eye on internal talent and offer career opportunities.
• Proactively scout top talent externally. Don’t wait for them to come to you.
• Involve your employees as talent scouts, because they know best who fits the organization.
• Build a community of fans by turning your players into ambassadors.

By applying these five sporting tips to your recruitment processes, you will equip your company with a?proactive recruitment strategy?to compete for the best talent. And just as the Liverpool Reds, Klopp’s current team, “never walk alone”?you’ll “never recruit alone” either.?

2. Define automated processes for all key people tasks

Free up time for the really important tasks by defining all recurring hr processes, eliminating unnecessary interfaces and automating as many steps as possible. This way, standardized tasks such as welcome mailings or mailings to managers can be automated, while you can really take care of the onboarding and the people. This is how our automated Onboarding process looks like nowadays:

3. Train your (young) leaders and establish a feedback culture

Young managers will suddenly become leaders. Since they have never led before, we have created a 6-month leadership program with monthly workshops, 1:1 coaching and e-learning content. In addition, we provide templates and guidelines for role descriptions or development talks. Actively work to establish an open feedback culture, ideally with 360 degrees feedback and lots of retrospectives in the teams. I can highly recommend the book 'Radical Candor' by Kim Scott when you start implementing a great feedback culture.

4. Define and establish your company culture and values

For companies to be agile, they need stability as a counterpart. Companies get this through a strong purpose and company-wide values. Develop these values together with your employees and managers. The best way to do this, is through focus groups or individual interviews with about 10-20 internal ambassadors from different areas. Then you can derive your values and working principles and anchor them in the company.

Values must be anchored in all phases of the employee experience, from the career page, to the evaluation in the interview, in the context of onboarding, in feedback discussions, to performance assessments. This is how we launched our new values at New Flag:

If you manage to solve these four main challenges in this exhausting, nerve-racking phase, then you will be in good shape for the success of the growth phase!

Curious and you want to listen to the whole session?

Here is the full 30minutes speech:

Good luck!