Why startups should hire an HR person sooner rather than later
At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. I couldn’t agree more, and I think startups should make that hire sooner rather than later. If you can hire only one or two handful of people with your seed round, hiring anybody who doesn’t either code or sell is hard to justify. Being willing to invest in an internal recruiter or talent manager (or more broadly, an HR person) early on requires pretty big balls a lot of confidence. The right time for making that hire obviously depends on a variety of factors, but I would argue that most startups should hire an HR person sooner than they think. Here’s why. 1) A great HR person can free up a lot of your time Anybody who ever hired people knows that it’s extremely time-consuming. Let’s say you want to hire 10 people in the next 12 months. That means that you’ll have to: screen around 500-1000 CVs interview aroun...