Scaling Recruitment & People Operations for the Scrappy Startup

Being part of one of Australia’s fastest growing startups I always wonder: is this normal? 

With so much to do, and so little time. How do you prioritise? 

In any startup, hiring into the People and Culture team is a critical first step in ensuring the right building blocks are in place so that the business has the best chance to succeed. So, how do you hire, create those building blocks, and cultivate a successful culture that can stand the test of time through a lot of ambiguity as the business scales. With limited resources, what do you spend your time and money on. 

If you are one of the first hires into the People and Culture team, in a high growth startup, you will wear many hats. Every business will have different needs, but, I want to share some things I’ve learnt in the hope that it could be helpful for you. 

Hiring

In the early stages, a lot of startups hire recent grads, or mid level employees, in more generalist roles that are capable of a lot but not an expert in one thing.

Why? Usually due to budget constraints. Employees will get exposure to a lot more responsibilities outside of their prescribed remit. I would advise hiring with the following competencies/skills in mind - a growth mindset, smarts/commercial acumen, proactive, adaptable, driven, hustle, positive, humble, collaborative, problem solver, and helpful. 

When the company starts to grow, it is time to build leadership capability and hire C level or middle management (T’s). People who have experienced a similar growth trajectory before, who can take the company and the team to the next level. This is also where you hire more specialised individual contributors also (I’s). Hire more people to divide and conquer in their roles so the business can really start to scale. 

Some pain points to be aware of during this scale: 

• Training new/inexperienced managers
• Onboarding new staff and ensuring information is shared
• Coaching long-term employees to let go of responsibilities & psychological safety

As a business grows, there is a necessary shift away from the ‘company team’ of all-rounders that must be able to wear many hats, towards the creation of more specialised roles that have the expertise to support the scale of the business. 

Tech Stack

One of the biggest things to think about in the beginning, is what you should spend your limited budget on. As you can see from the picture above, the HR tech landscape is crowded. The first step is to work with the founders to understand their strategic goals, and then decide what tools you need to support them in achieving this. 

No system is perfect, but as you scale it becomes even more important to streamline your processes and have technology that integrates with each other. Questions to think about: Can you onboard manually, do you really need software yet? Can you recruit with just a LinkedIn licence? What technology do you need now and will you need next? Will the software integrate with one another? etc.

The Tech I've shortlisted:

Employee size: <150: If your hiring needs are small. My advice would be to use an all in one HR/Recruitment/Onboarding system like JazzHR, HappyHR, Jobsoid, or BambooHR. If you have higher hiring needs then definitely invest in an applicant tracking system like Lever, Smartrecruiters or Greenhouse.

Employee size 100-500: Invest in more specialised systems that integrate with each other Lever, Smartrecruiters, Greenhouse, Enborder, Sapling, Small Improvements or Lattice. 

Employer Branding

In the early stages, it is likely that not many people will know who you are or be proactively watching your website for new roles. This can make it difficult to attract great people to your business.

Building your company’s “employer brand” to be recognised in the market is key. 

Some bootstrap branding initiatives:

• Events: Hosting Meetups (if you can afford to) or sending employees to attend other meetups to advertise your job openings. 
• Content/Thought Leadership: Create cheap recruitment videos with university students or your internal staff. Encourage staff to write blogs with thought leadership pieces or post photos & testimonials on social about the culture
• Referral schemes: your employees are your best brand advocates! Set up a referral program. Encourage referrals. You never know where a referral might come from. One of our employees hired their Uber driver! 

When you have more capital, you can start to think about improving those recruitment videos, creating a LinkedIn home page, starting a podcast, directly targeting potential new hires through social media. Be creative, whatever works for you. 

Onboarding

Onboarding is easier when the team is smaller. Knowledge and ideas are naturally shared. Once you start to grow, it gets harder to ensure that there is an ongoing collaboration and alignment on vision, mission, culture, product or general internal knowledge. 

Ideas as you grow:

• Create a central place to store information, like “G drive” (free) or Confluence. 
• Help ease onboarding pressure by onboarding every 2 weeks
• Create content that you can roll-out globally - example videos from founders/teams/departments or demos on the product. You can create this yourself. It doesn’t need to be a perfect production. 
• IT Onboarding - Assign a dedicated person to own this. if you can afford it, purchase an access management platform like OKTA to help set people up on the right platforms easily.  
• Create a “buddy” program to help get the new hire up to speed with their role and information around the office. 
• If your business uses Slack, then you can use the Slack donut feature to introduce people who don’t usually work together to meetup. Thus helping to strengthen relationships and create more collaboration. 

In conclusion, everything and nothing is ‘normal’. 

If your willing to be open to experimenting ‘the new normal’ and changing often, startups can be an incredibly fun and fulfilling environment where you make a real impact on the future of a growing business. 

Some final tips:

1. Stay close to the founders and leaders in the business to ensure that you can be as effective as possible in your role.
2. This might be obvious, but if in doubt don’t hire. Yes you need to hire fast but it will be far more detrimental to the business in the long run if you hire wrong. Hire based on your values/the principals in which you would like your employees to portray. 
3. Enable employees to drive culture so that it is not solely responsible on the People and Culture team. 
4. Over-communicate your vision and mission. 
5. Coach and support your managers. Many might be first time managers or feel overwhelmed. Ensure they understand the importance of one on one meetings and instilling a purpose in their teams, especially as new hires join.
6. In a hyper growth company, some people will get the opportunity to grow with the business and some roles will naturally run their course, so treat your employees with as much respect when they join as to when they leave.