There is a moment in most startups when hiring starts to feel like a second company. The founder is still running product, customers and the next round. The open roles are no longer one or two conversations. They are a pile.
The usual response is to hire someone senior in Talent and hand the pile over. Sometimes that is the right hire. Often it is early, and it is aimed at the wrong problem.
Andrew Stoe, then Head of Talent at Asana, described the shift in a First Round interview. The recruiting process changes once a company surpasses 15 employees and wants to hire eight to ten more in the next few months. At that point, he argues, founders should step back from taking full responsibility for the entire process and consider a dedicated recruiter to manage the funnel. His view of the optimal size for that recruiter to join is a company of 15 to 30 people.
Headcount alone is not the decision. A company of 20 with two critical roles does not have the same problem as a company of 20 that needs eight hires before the next board meeting. The trigger Stoe describes is volume. Enough hiring, soon enough, that founder-led recruiting stops being a series of individual closes and becomes a system the company does not yet have.
Stepping back from the entire process is not the same as stepping out. Stoe is explicit that the founder stays active, and that building the team cannot be outsourced. Throughout the early stages, the founding team should still spend at least 30% to 40% of its time recruiting. If it is not, hiring is not actually a priority, and a new title will not make it one.
Sam Altman puts a similar number on the founder specifically. After vision and product-market fit, founders should spend between a third and a half of their time hiring. His limit on help is the same as Stoe's: you cannot outsource it.
Founder-led hiring breaks in a particular way.
It rarely breaks because the founder has become bad at convincing someone to join. It breaks because several of those conversations now have to happen at once, and the work around them has nowhere to live. Who to approach. How the process runs. What gets written down. Who is waiting.
The founder is still the person a strong candidate wants to hear from. The company has run out of founder hours for everything that is not that conversation.
What the first Talent leader should actually own.
Richard Cho, who has led talent teams through hiring booms and busts, describes the job without romance. The first talent leader at a startup is tasked with both setting up the foundation of recruiting and being hands-on on the requisitions. They run searches. They also build the minimum system those searches need.
That is a different job from “build a Talent function”. A function implies a team, a brand programme and a calendar of process. Cho's advice to that first leader is to be wary of the trap of execution, and to leave time to strategise. Foundations that never get built become the mess the next leader inherits. A strategist who will not touch a live search is the other failure. Early on, both halves are the role.
| The work | First Talent leader | Founder |
|---|---|---|
| The next eight to ten requisitions | Runs them. Pipeline, pace and a process the company can repeat. | Still interviews. Still closes the people who will shape the company. |
| How a role gets opened | Scorecard, level, and what the search is actually for. | Decides what the business needs to prove next. |
| The system underneath | A light foundation: where candidates live, how decisions are recorded. | Does not need to administer it. Does need to use it. |
| The story in the market | Has to be able to tell it as well as the founders can. | Still the source of it. |
Stoe's bar for the person is not a process bar.
When a founder is going to hire that first recruiter, they have to believe that person can share the vision of the company as well as they can.
If the candidate cannot explain why this company, at this moment, is worth the risk, a tidy system will not compensate. This is the same test as for any early hire. The first people in the company are there to help discover the business, not only to execute a plan written somewhere else. A first Talent leader who can only run a process designed for a larger organisation will hire for a company you do not have yet.
Do not hire a Head of Talent so you can stop hiring.
Altman's rule is awkward for founders who want this off their desk. You cannot outsource hiring. He also argues that you should learn a role before you hire for it. The classic failure is a hacker-CEO hiring a VP of Sales in order to avoid selling.
Talent has the same failure mode. A founder who has never really run a search hires a senior Talent leader to avoid learning what good hiring looks like here. The new hire inherits a blank definition of the roles, a founder who has stepped out, and a mandate to get the team built.
Keith Rabois's standard, as Altman reports it, is stricter still: founders should interview every candidate until the company has at least 500 employees. You do not need to adopt 500 as a policy to take the point. At 25 people, leaving the interview loop is not a sign that Talent has matured. It is a sign the founder has left the decision that most shapes the company.
The first Talent leader should make that time more useful. They do not replace it. Stoe's 30% to 40% still sits with the founding team after the recruiter has joined.
Where fractional support fits.
Fractional support fits before that moment — and sometimes instead of a permanent hire, when what the company needs is judgement on a short sequence of roles rather than someone to own requisitions every month.
1. The company is still small, and the roles are few but critical.
You do not need a Head of Talent to hire employee number six. You need a clear view of the gap, a search run properly, and the founder in the conversation. A permanent Talent leader hired into that situation will either invent process the company does not need, or sit under-used until the volume arrives. The question of who those first hires should be is still a founder question.
2. The founder has not yet learned the roles.
If you cannot yet describe what good looks like in the function you are hiring, a Head of Talent cannot supply that judgement for you. Altman's point about learning the role first applies here as much as it does to sales. Get close enough to the problem to recognise the person. Then decide whether the next gap is another operator, or someone to run the hiring.
3. Volume is about to jump, and there is no foundation.
This is the Stoe moment. Past 15 people, with eight to ten hires in the next few months, founder heroics stop scaling. Someone has to own the requisitions and put a foundation under them. That can be a first Talent leader. It can also be fractional support through the spike, if a permanent leader is not yet the right shape of hire — or not yet the right person.
4. You want the system without building a department.
Cho's description is the spec: foundation and hands-on requisitions, in the same person, with time left to think. A fractional Talent lead can hold that for a period. A permanent Head of Talent is the right hire when that job is going to exist every month, not for a single quarter after a fundraise.
Dislike of recruiting is not a business case. Volume, repetition and the absence of a foundation are.
A test before you open the search.
Before you write the job description, four questions are enough:
- Are we about to hire enough people, soon enough, that the current process will drop in quality? Stoe's marker is eight to ten hires in a few months, in a company that has already passed 15 people.
- Will the founding team still spend at least 30% to 40% of its time recruiting after this person joins? If the honest answer is no, the role is being hired as a substitute.
- Can this person share the vision as well as the founders can? If not, they cannot do the half of the job that happens in the market.
- Will they both run requisitions and build the foundation? A pure process hire, or a pure strategist, is the wrong shape. Cho's warning still applies: leave time to think, or the foundation never gets built.
If the first answer is no, you probably want help with the searches already in front of you, not a Head of Talent. If the second answer is no, fix that before you hire anyone.
The aim is not to make hiring look more professional than the company is. It is to keep the quality of each hire intact once there are too many of them for the founders to carry the whole process alone.
Sources & further reading
- First Round Review — Asana's Head of Talent on the Secrets to Finding a Great Startup Recruiter
- Sam Altman — How to hire
- First Round Review — How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles
JPS perspective
Most companies need the judgement before they need the function.
JPS works with founders as a founding Talent partner or a fractional Talent lead: hiring strategy and search, while the founder is still the hiring manager. A permanent Head of Talent is a later decision.
Founder-led hiring starting to strain? Talk to JPS