If you’re a founder of a tech startup, scaling is rarely held back by ideas or ambition. It’s held back by people.
Not just any people, but the right people, at the right time, in the right order.
Most founders don’t struggle because they don’t care about hiring. They struggle because hiring becomes urgent, expensive, and distracting at exactly the moment the business needs focus.
How do I know? I run a business that has helped over 93 startups to do their own hiring since 2019.
What follows are the common problems we see when tech startups try to scale, and why simply spending more on recruiters doesn’t fix them.
The reality of scaling a tech startup
As you scale, pressure builds quickly.
Urgency
You need to grow fast. Hit milestones. Reach critical mass before the runway runs out.
Key hires
You don’t just need extra hands. You need game changing people who materially move the business forward.
Strategic hires
You need senior people who can actually deliver the strategy, not just look good on paper.
At this point, hiring stops being a background task. It becomes a core constraint on growth.
Where founders get stuck
1. Methodology
Most founders rely on one hiring method at a time.
A job advert.
A recruiter.
LinkedIn outreach.
What’s usually missing is a joined up approach that uses all methods together, on every hire, in a repeatable way.
Common questions we hear:
- Should we hire senior first or junior first?
- Do we build top down or bottom up?
- How do we plan for succession when we’re still small?
Without a clear methodology, each hire feels like guesswork.
2. Strategy and succession
Hiring decisions are often made role by role, not as part of a wider plan.
Founders know they need people, but don’t always have:
- a headcount plan
- a skills map
- an order of hire
- a view on how roles evolve over time
This becomes critical when raising investment.
If you say you need 10 people this year, 20 next year, and 100 after that, investors expect you to know what roles they’ll do, and how you’ll hire them.
3. Legal and compliance risk
Many founders are unsure of their legal obligations when:
- advertising roles
- interviewing candidates
- handling candidate data
- making hiring decisions
This isn’t about being reckless. It’s about not having the time or experience to build compliant processes while running a business.
4. Cost
Founders are understandably cautious about spending.
- Recruitment fees feel high.
- Budgets feel tight.
- Returns feel uncertain.
So hiring becomes reactive. Money gets spent when things hurt, rather than invested strategically.
Ironically, this usually increases cost over time.
5. Process
Without a defined process, hiring doesn’t compound.
- Interviews vary from candidate to candidate
- Decisions are slow or inconsistent
- Good candidates are lost
- Lessons aren’t captured
Each hire feels as hard as the last.
6. Skills and experience
Most founders are not hiring experts.
They may lack:
- experience attracting specialist talent
- confidence in assessing senior roles outside their own discipline
- clarity on where money is well spent and where it’s wasted
That gap often gets filled by third parties.
7. Technology
There are dozens of tools promising to fix hiring.
Founders are often unsure:
- which technology actually delivers ROI
- what’s essential vs optional
- how systems should fit together
Without guidance, tools get bought but not embedded.
8. Time
This is the biggest constraint.
Founders are trying to:
- run the business
- build the product
- raise money
- manage customers
They don’t have endless time to interview, shortlist, follow up, and manage hiring activity.
So they delegate it.
9. Third parties and recruitment agencies
This is where many startups end up.
Suddenly:
- CVs flood in
- advice feels biased
- recruiters control candidate flow
- your team isn’t learning how to hire better
- hiring costs go through the roof
Most recruitment solutions are designed to keep the database, the process, and the knowledge outside your business, so you remain reliant and keep paying.
If you have got the money to burn, that’s fine for one off hires. It breaks at scale.
Why this doesn’t work for scaleups
If you plan to hire:
- 10 people this year
- 20 next year
- 100 the year after
then hiring is no longer a transaction. It’s a core capability.
This is why 100% of unicorns have internal Talent Acquisition functions.
Recruiters are expensive and scaling businesses cannot afford to outsource hiring indefinitely.
What founders can do instead
At a certain point, continuing to buy recruitment services stops making sense.
If you’re planning to hire regularly, whether that’s 10 people this year, 20 next year, or 100 after that, you need to treat hiring as a capability, not a transaction.
In practice, founders have a small number of realistic options.
Build Talent Acquisition internally
This means hiring experienced Talent Acquisition people who have hired at scale before, and giving them the tools and authority to do the job properly.
To make this work, you will need:
- a system to store and manage candidates
- clear processes that can be repeated
- documentation that defines what good looks like
- legal and compliant hiring practices
This can sound daunting, but it is often far less expensive than it appears.
As a rough rule of thumb, three agency hires in a year can easily equal the fully loaded cost of a full time internal Talent Acquisition person. From that point on, every additional hire through agencies is pure inefficiency.
Get experienced help to build it with you
Some founders don’t want to jump straight to a permanent Talent Acquisition hire, or don’t yet know what that function should look like.
In those cases, bringing in a Talent Acquisition Consultancy that has hired at scale before can make sense, provided the goal is clear – to put the strategy, process, systems, and knowledge inside the business.
Many recruitment and embedded solutions are designed to keep ownership of the database, process, and know-how away from your startup, so you remain reliant on their service and keep paying.
Others exist to solve the problem, transfer the capability, and step away once the function is working.
My own business, Reedmace Talent, sits in the latter category. We work with founders to solve the who problem by building the strategy, process, systems, and internal capability required to hire repeatedly, rather than running hiring indefinitely on their behalf.
About the author
Dan Corcoran is the founder of Reedmace Talent. He helps startups hit funding and growth milestones by turning hiring from a bottleneck into a capability. Rather than recruiting for companies, Reedmace Talent teaches startups how to hire properly, so growth plans can actually be executed. Dan is also a startup mentor, NED, and advisor to UK incubators and accelerators.
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