How to build your early-stage hiring plan

Building a hiring plan means deciding on and writing down the list of roles you want to hire for. 

While this may seem simple enough, after all, a great engineer is a great engineer, there is more of an art and a science to hiring for your first team. So much depends on where your company is at, and what you need to accomplish before you raise your next round. 

You’ll also need to question your thinking on whether you truly need a certain role today, or if you are, consciously or unconsciously, trying to offload things you as a founder don’t love doing.

Here are a few things from our experience that you should consider. 

What roles to hire for at the Seed stage                                          

At the seed stage, your goal is to hire a team of “founding” players. This team will build the initial iteration of your product, deal with growing operations and project complexities, and start engaging with your early users. They will also define the culture of your company. 

The way to answer “who do I need to hire” is to work backwards from your goals:

• What product milestones do you need to hit in the immediate future?
• What do you need to accomplish before your next round of funding? (these two are usually intertwined)

Take a look at your existing team:

• What skills / experience do you already have on the team?
• What skills / experience are you missing in order to achieve those goals?

There will be some obvious things, like when you need a frontend engineer and the entire team is backend engineers who don’t know React from JQuery. But sometimes skill gaps will be more subtle, and require more thinking. 

And then there is opportunistic hiring:

• In what areas are you willing to hire someone amazing who isn’t on the hiring plan? 
• How will you determine whether you should invest in them preemptively? 

Let’s get even more specific. 

Types of roles to consider hiring 

→ Engineering

Our companies typically invest in 3 to 5 founding engineers, depending on the founders’ skill sets and experience. Is the problem space deeply technical, and you’ve raised a solid seed round? I’ve seen companies hire 8 to 10 early engineers. 

The engineering mix at this stage is usually heavy on backend and infra, with one (maybe two) frontend/product engineer(s). I’m also seeing more AI research and ML Engineering get hired early, depending on the product.

→ Product design 

Hire a product designer early to make sure user-centered thinking is baked into your product from the start. This will save a lot of UX-redo money, hours, and pain down the road. 

→ Operations

I often see a polymath ops hire who can cover everything from accounting and systems to early user testing. Historically this person has been hired at Series A, but I’m seeing companies invest in this role earlier to give CEO and founders additional leverage. This person is an extra arm to take on almost any type of “miscellaneous” strategic or tactical problem the founding team faces. You can also choose to outsource this using tools like Chore before hiring someone full time.  

I also recommend getting an EA earlier than you think you need one. There are a lot of things you can’t outsource, but managing your inbox and calendar will suck the life out of you (and your time!), and you should find someone who can take over the smaller tasks of running a company and your day to day. Sometimes this person can be both the ops hire mentioned above and your EA, other times you’ll want someone more like a Chief of Staff to help leverage your outputs, and someone else as an EA to manage your inputs. 

→ Early go-to-market (GTM) 

Most companies shouldn’t make a sales hire until they’ve demonstrated clear beginnings of product-market fit via founder-led sales, and have a story that’s resonating with potential customers. In some rare cases though (for example, databases), it may make sense to bring in a technical solutions engineer before a traditional seller to help with prospecting and POCs, particularly if the founders are finding themselves to be the only (and overstretched) technical resource. 

→ Should I hire Developer Relations? 

Most likely, no. Most developer advocates hired by early stage Amplify companies have failed: it’s incredibly difficult to find good talent, and even the best lack the requisite go-to-market experience to allocate their time effectively relative to your goals. There are some exceptions, for example if your entire strategy is open source, but they are scant.

If you do choose to hire a developer advocate, consider waiting until you’ve found a good degree of product market fit, and have someone on the team they can report to (like marketing). I’ve seen several companies hire this role too early, before the company’s story, product, and audience are locked in, only for the developer advocate to spin their wheels and not be impactful. 

Roles for Series A and beyond

As you grow past the earliest stages your hiring priorities start to change. After hiring a team of founding players,  your goal shifts towards hiring a bench of lieutenants to support you as founder(s) while creating a mix of levels within your (or their) teams. You’ll want to think about who you want for your executive team, and, on the flip side, where you can invest in junior talent who can grow over time. A range of experiences allows you to funnel strategic work to more senior players and execution-focused work to junior ones. 

Consider candidates with early startup experience and those with growth-stage company experience who will bring in best practices and help you determine what’s coming down the roadmap.

Perhaps most importantly, think about the makeup of your current team. Now is the time to spot your diversity gaps so you can invest in them, and reap the productivity rewards you need at this stage. 

A few areas where it makes sense to consider hiring:

• Leadership: we most commonly see VP of engineering as an early leadership hire, plus a mid-to-senior level product manager as the product gets more complex.
• Go-to-market (GTM): building on your early GTM team with increased sales headcount, plus your first marketer to help position your product as a leader in the market.
• Recruiting: a recruiter helps you find the best people, focus the rest of your team on high-leverage recruiting actions, and build your talent brand for the long term. If you don’t plan on continuous growth (e.g. hiring to a point then stopping), a contractor is likely the right move.

Even further down the line

Here is a small glimpse into hiring in future stages, both to help you calibrate your current needs and, perhaps more importantly, help you not get ahead of yourself: 

• Your execs will build hiring plans for specific departments and teams, hire directors and managers under them, and define growth pathways for those hires.
• You’ll aim to build out hiring plans a year or more in advance.
• You’ll have a list of “long-term candidates” you’ve been courting over time. 
• You’ll work to maintain and increase the diversity of your team

But if you’re a Seed or Series A stage founder, these ideas should not be part of your decision making framework for early hiring. That comes later!

A word of warning: prioritize known needs over long-term ones

Just like you can’t plan your features for where your product might be in five years, it’s nearly impossible to plan hiring several stages beyond where you’re at right now; so much could change between pre-seed and Series B+. 

Ideally, your founding and early hires will stay on for a few years and grow with your company as their skill sets mature, but that’s not always the case. For example, a founder might hire an exceptional engineer at the seed stage, when there’s a lot of greenfield work. But as soon as there’s more structure, the engineer is out of their comfort zone. Most of the time, though, it was still worth making that hire: the greenfield work will have lasted long enough that the engineer will be impactful. 

Consider the magnitude of your current need. If you’re hiring for a project with a finite end date, it’s not a role worth hiring for full-time. If you only need a website refresh, you don’t need a full-time brand designer. If you’re only making three hires in Q1 and none for the rest of the year, you don’t need a full-time recruiter. Hire contractors for projects with specific start/stop dates.

The exception here is often the leadership. The leaders you hire, usually starting at Series A, should be able to grow with you for a while. These hires are expensive to make, both in terms of time and resources, so it's best to try to find someone with more long-term potential if possible.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what roles you want to hire, it’s time to figure out what kinds of people are going to fill those roles—coming up in my next post.