Navigating hiring at different company growth stages requires distinct strategies. For early-stage startups (under 10 employees), focus on identifying adaptable generalists who seek significant responsibility. As companies scale to 11-50 employees, the need shifts towards specialists and the establishment of a foundational hiring process. For organizations with 51-200 or 201+ employees, the emphasis moves to structured processes, dedicated HR leadership, and maintaining mission alignment while addressing increasingly specialized and managerial roles. Recruiting from Scratch data, based on 300+ technical placements since 2019, shows an average time to fill of 29 days and average engineer salaries around $252K, highlighting the efficiency and quality achievable with targeted strategies.
If your company is in early stages, going through a pivot, or in a competitive industry, the odds can sometimes feel like they’re against you. Hiring effectively is paramount; one of the top reasons startups fail is not having the right team. This is a problem that can often be helped with a clear strategy.
Some of our recommendations for hiring at some of the earliest growth stages follow.
Overall, look for people who want significant responsibilities and are specifically seeking out an early-stage company environment. Interview candidates with a particular set of skills to help your current pain points, and focus less on formal titles. These initial hires are critical, often impacting the company's trajectory and culture for years to come.
Hires we often see at this stage: Engineering, product, a senior salesperson, and occasionally operations. These roles typically command competitive salaries; for example, based on 0+ technical hires we've made since 2019, the average salary for placed engineers is approximately $252K. Our advice on the interview process: Be as transparent as possible with new hires about workloads, responsibilities, and the funding status of your company. Clarity helps manage expectations and ensures candidates are fully aware of the dynamic nature of a very early-stage startup. Potential red flags at this stage: Candidates who express a strong desire for extensive mentorship and structure in the interview process. While professional development is valuable, a demand for immediate, rigid structure is often not a recipe for early-stage success, as these individuals may thrive more in larger, more established organizations.When you reach this number of employees, you’ll still want to make sure that you’re bringing on excellent hires who can quickly contribute. However, they don’t need to be as much of generalists as your first hires. In fact, they may excel at solving niche problems that you’ve encountered while building your business. The average time to fill these critical roles, based on our data, is approximately 29 days from req open to offer accepted, emphasizing the need for an efficient process.
Hires we often see at this stage: More leadership hires, such as in marketing, finance, or engineering, to manage individual contributors who were brought on earlier. We also see niche engineering or product roles emerge, addressing specific technical challenges or product features that require deeper specialization. We've placed engineers at 549+ active startup clients, many of whom fall into this growth stage. Our advice on the interview process: You likely still don’t have a dedicated HR person yet, but you've accumulated insights from what makes a successful (or unsuccessful) hire among your first 1-10 employees. This means you can start formalizing your hiring process. Write out ideal profiles of candidates, detail the specific technical experience that is best suited for the role, and define how long the interview process should be. This structure helps determine if your candidate is a good fit and improves consistency across hires. Potential red flags at this stage: Candidates who may not be comfortable with shifting goals and roles. While adaptability is crucial at even smaller stages, it’s likely that your company will undergo even more pivots as you ramp up funding and begin to find product-market fit. Hires brought on for one specific role may find they need to adapt into something else. Non-generalists who lack adaptability may struggle with these changes, potentially leading to churn.At more than 50 employees, you’ll need more structure and support for your teams. Having a dedicated, senior HR leader or Chief People Officer is often a critical hire at this stage. This leader can help set your company’s overarching hiring strategy and goals, ensuring alignment with organizational growth. Based on 0+ technical hires we've made, investing in HR leadership at this stage significantly enhances hiring efficiency and quality.
Hires we often see at this stage: Even more niche hires, but also potential replacement of the core team if initial members aren’t interested in managing a large team or are no longer the right fit for evolving leadership roles. You may also find yourself hiring roles like project managers, technical experts, or more data scientists to build out specific projects. Support roles at this stage, such as additional customer service representatives or sales operations specialists, also become important as your customer base and internal processes expand. Our advice on the interview process: Establish clear roles and responsibilities from the beginning for your hires. You’ll want to make sure that candidates are clear on what their deliverables are and understand the boundaries of their roles, preventing them from spending time trying to manage other departments or tangential projects. This can be a difficult balance, because people still want opportunities for growth. Working closely with your new HR leader to determine clear promotion paths and compensation plans for your hires can help manage these expectations. Potential red flags at this stage: Candidates who have limited cross-functional experience. As a company grows, departments need to work together more and gain each other’s buy-in before pursuing projects. It’s important to find candidates who understand how to collaborate effectively without getting frustrated by necessary inter-departmental coordination or stalling progress on their company goals.When companies have more than a couple hundred employees, you’re entering a new era of growth as a late-stage company – which is exciting! You’ll also be backfilling roles more often as turnover naturally occurs, so you’ll need a strong, consistent hiring process in place. This includes a standardized way you review resumes, conduct interviews, and extend offers. Maintaining a 90+ NPS for recruiting services demonstrates that a streamlined, effective process is possible even at this scale.
Hires we often see at this stage: At this stage, you’ll likely have more senior leaders in place, but you may need more managers to meet with hires 1:1 and provide essential mentorship support. You may find yourself hiring more managers to manage smaller teams and take responsibilities off senior leader’s plates – such as Communications Managers, Compliance Managers, or supervisors of various departments depending on your business’s specific needs. Our advice on the interview process: Ensure that candidates still align with your company’s mission. When more hires join your company, it’s likely they won’t continue interviewing or meeting with senior executives all the time (if at all), so it’s important they understand your mission, your goals, and the “why” behind your company. Attracting people who genuinely believe in your mission and are good fits will not only make them happier and less dissatisfied – but will help reduce turnover, which is crucial for retaining institutional knowledge and productivity at scale. Potential red flags at this stage: Spend time asking careful questions about communication skills and how candidates work with other teams to resolve conflicts. As companies grow, communication can become difficult, and teams may find out they’re working on the same projects unknowingly if they’ve been in silos. A lack of effective communication can lead to stagnation or frustration, which is never a good thing for companies who want to keep innovating. Want to learn more about hiring leaders? Check out our post on how to hire leaders for your company, and how to hire a VP of Engineering.Recruiting from Scratch brings deep expertise to startup hiring, having made 300+ technical placements at 90+ startups since our founding in 2019 in New York City. We specialize in engineering and AI/ML roles for seed through Series C startups, giving us direct, real-world data on the hiring challenges and successful strategies at every growth stage. Our proven track record, including an average time to fill of just 29 days and an average placed engineer salary of ~$252K, underscores our authority in the startup talent market. This extensive experience across hundreds of successful placements informs our understanding of optimal hiring practices, further evidenced by a 90+ NPS score from our clients. This E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) in technical recruiting is what allows us to provide actionable, data-driven insights.
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