A strong candidate for a 15-person startup and a strong candidate for a company with 3,000 employees are two very different people.
My name is Ekaterina Selezneva, and I’m an IT recruiter with over 12 years of experience in recruiting. In this article, I’ll explain how to approach hiring IT specialists at a startup, during the scaling stage, and at an established company, as well as explore some of the common hiring mistakes founders make.
At the end of the article, you’ll find a practical reference matrix for founders, outlining the key qualities to look for in candidates at different stages of your company’s growth.

Table of Contents

  1. The MVP and Seed Stages
  2. The Scaling Stage
  3. Established Company
  4. Key Takeaways

The MVP and Seed Stages

While the project is at the value validation stage and in the process of securing its first paying customers, speed of work is of utmost importance. At the same time, there are still no established processes and clearly defined responsibilities in the company. There are also no guarantees that the project will take off and begin to scale.

Who should you look for at this stage?

In many ways, the first key hires become co-founders in all but name, as they need to not only fulfill their core responsibilities, but also build internal processes from scratch. Technical skills are undoubtedly important when hiring for a startup. However, I would focus first and foremost on the following qualities:

  • Ability to bring structure to chaos. A candidate has to have experience building processes from scratch and be able to independently identify what needs to be done first.
  • Being comfortable with a high degree of uncertainty. Can your candidate remain productive even when priorities and tasks change rapidly?
  • A willingness to take ownership. An ideal candidate can make decisions independently, even when clear instructions and established procedures are not yet in place.

My insight: I call professionals like these “zero-to-one” talent.

Who is responsible for hiring candidates?

Hiring at a startup often remains the responsibility of the founder. Founders typically recruit their first 10–15 employees themselves, relying on word of mouth, personal networks, and social media posts. At this stage, a full-time recruiter is usually unnecessary. You absolutely can handle a function like this without a dedicated hire until the business has proven its viability. Bringing in a recruiter starts to make sense when the team grows to around 40–50 people. If the hiring workload is still relatively small, a freelance recruiter may be a good option.

There are exceptions, of course. I’ve been working at Humanoid since the very beginning. It is a UK-based technology company specializing in AI and humanoid robots for industrial and commercial applications. Recruitment had to be a part of the project almost from day one because it was launched in a venture studio. This meant the project already had a team capable of hiring the core team from the outset.

However, during our first six months, we didn’t have a structured interview process in place. The CTO conducted candidate interviews, while recruiters assessed soft skills and candidates’ willingness to work in an uncertain environment. We relied on engineers in our professional networks to evaluate technical skills, as we hadn’t yet built that expertise in-house.

Common Mistakes Founders Make

When a startup is just getting off the ground, there is no established hiring process yet. As a result, candidate selection often comes down to the founder’s personal preferences in what makes someone a good hire. This is why startup founders tend to make the following mistakes:

  • Hiring based on whether or not they plainly like someone. In the early stages of a project, founders often turn to former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, overlooking whether these people have the skills and mindset necessary to succeed in the environment of a startup company. They assume that if they get along well personally, they’ll work well together on a project, too. Despite any pre-existing personal relationships, though, I do recommend you start by evaluating whether the person can actually deliver on the business’s needs.
  • Building a team of people with identical strengths. For example, the entire team might consist of highly skilled engineers, but no one has the ability to carry your project all the way to production. At the early stages, you need a team with diverse backgrounds and different areas of responsibility.
  • Looking for a star employee from a well-known company. Someone may be an outstanding professional in an already established organization with structured processes and clearly defined responsibilities, yet have little to no experience working in a startup.

Tip: How to Sell a Role When Nobody's Heard Of Your Brand Yet
This was exactly the challenge we faced when hiring Humanoid’s first employees. Recruiting IT professionals was particularly difficult because our brand was still new to the market. Three things helped us attract candidates to those first roles:
1. We focused on selling the vision, not the company. Our goal was to build humanoid robots. For specialists in robotics and AI, the field itself was already professionally exciting.
2. We prioritized hiring people who had experience building similar products from scratch. For example, our CTO had previously worked in the autonomous driving sphere: a field with a similar spirit and level of complexity.
3. We leveraged the professional reputations of our first key hires. Once we had recognizable names on the team, mentioning them helped make our vacancies more attractive. For example, we hired a professional from Boston Dynamics to lead our Boston office.

Within the first three months, we had assembled the core team, including several functional leads. By the six-month mark, we had hired approximately 70–80 people.

The Scaling Stage

At this stage, the company typically develops a sensible roadmap of goals for the next 1-2 years. It begins to understand what its target audience is, and starts to articulate its mission, values, and company culture. The first stable processes begin to emerge, including within recruitment. Interview stages are clearly defined, and the team knows what each stage is meant to assess. However, the company is still evolving rapidly. New functions are being introduced, and some processes still need to be built from scratch.

Who should you look for at this stage?

It’s no longer enough to hire someone who can build systems from scratch. You need people who can scale up what’s already been established while remaining productive in an environment that still involves quite a lot of uncertainty.

  • When evaluating candidates, I recommend looking at the following:
  • The scale they’ve worked at before.
  • What exactly they’ve scaled up.
  • How quickly they make up their mind.
  • Whether they can work effectively in an environment where processes exist but are still evolving.

Example: At Humanoid, when hiring leaders for complex technical projects, we look at candidates from companies with a strong project-driven culture and products of comparable complexity. Tesla, SpaceX, and other technology companies are among the organizations we look to for relevant experience.

Who is responsible for hiring candidates?

Once a company grows to around 40–50 employees, the founder and C-level executives can no longer handle the hiring workload on their own.
Initially, bringing in a freelance recruiter may be enough. But when hiring demand becomes substantial, the company needs a dedicated Talent Acquisition function.

Tip: It is key to move away from hiring as a series of ad hoc decisions. At this stage, your company needs a clearly defined candidate profile:

  • What tasks will this person be expected to handle?
  • Which competencies are essential for those specific tasks?
  • What experience is genuinely relevant?
  • How will the company assess these competencies during interviews?
  • What indicators will show that the hire has been successful?

These criteria should be established BEFORE the search begins.

Common Mistakes Founders Make

During the scaling stage, founders often fall into one of the two extremes: they either continue hiring exclusively “zero-to-one” talent or start looking for candidates from large corporations. The problem is that the former may not know how to scale what’s already been built, while the latter may be accustomed to multiple layers of approval, fully established processes, and a different pace of work.

That’s why I wouldn’t necessarily divide candidates into “startup people” and “corporate people.” Instead, I recommend understanding the environment in which each person performs best and determining whether it matches the environment the company is building today.

Tip: How to Amicably Part Ways with Employees Who No Longer Can Keep Up with the Company’s Growth

Someone who aligned with a project perfectly in its early days may no longer be the right fit as the company grows. And that’s absolutely normal!

Before deciding on letting an employee go, take a closer look at the challenges that await the company in its next stage of development. Is this particular person capable of handling them?

Some people adapt well to new conditions, while others recognize for themselves that the new environment is no longer the right fit. For example, Humanoid’s first CTO was a classic “zero-to-one” professional. He enjoyed building processes from the ground up. Once he had accomplished that goal and the processes were running smoothly, he lost interest and moved on to another project.

In some cases, however, a company genuinely needs to part ways with an employee who can no longer handle the demands of their role as the business grows.

If you’ve decided to let an employee go, here are three tips for handling the situation with respect and consideration:

1. Don’t let your decision come as a surprise. If it becomes clear that someone is struggling with the demands of their new role, try addressing the issue early on, rather than putting this conversation off until the actual talk about terminating their employment.
2. Separate the person from the responsibilities of the role. As a founder, it's not your job to feel guilty or come up with excuses. What matters is you understanding the reasons behind your decision and communicating them honestly and clearly.
3. If you’re letting go of more than one person, speak to each of them individually. How you handle these conversations affects your company’s reputation in the market.

Established Company

In a large, established business, processes, team structures, and areas of responsibility are already well defined. But a different challenge emerges: solving a single problem often requires collaboration across multiple teams, navigating internal policies, and going through several layers of approval.

Who should you look for at this stage?

In an established company, employees need to operate within a large, complex system. As a result, the criteria for selecting candidates differ from those that worked at earlier stages of company growth.

When hiring, I would focus on the following:

  • Experience working in large organizations. Does the candidate understand how to get things done when progress depends on multiple people and decisions require several levels of approval?
  • Experience solving similar problems. Don’t focus solely on the job title or company name on a resume. Look at the actual work the candidate has done. If you’re hiring someone to tackle a specific challenge, it’s a plus if they’ve handled something similar before.
  • Ability to collaborate across teams. This means building alignment, negotiating, and both giving and receiving feedback. In a large organization, most tasks depend on other people in one way or another.

My insight: At a startup, people can see the results of their work relatively quickly. In a large company, the connection between an individual task and the overall business outcome can be much less obvious. Employees need to understand how their work contributes to the product and the business as a whole.

Who is responsible for hiring candidates?

At this stage, hiring is a collaborative effort between Talent Acquisition and the hiring manager:

  • Talent Acquisition is responsible for the sourcing strategy, market research, candidate sourcing, initial screening, part of the soft-skills assessment, and overall process management.
  • The hiring manager is responsible for evaluating the candidate’s professional expertise and technical skills.

Additional stakeholders may be involved when hiring for C-level positions. For example, at one company where I worked, the HR Business Partner also conducted a competency-based interview.

Important: Each side should have one clearly designated decision-maker. If five managers all share responsibility for the final decision, the hiring process tends to drag on. And if the candidate then fails to pass their probationary period, no one would be willing to take responsibility for the hiring mistake.

Common Mistakes Founders Make

At this stage, hiring mistakes more often than not are related to how the recruitment process is organized.

  • Too many interview stages. Ten interviews don’t guarantee a more accurate assessment. They do, however, prolong decision-making and exhaust candidates.
  • Delayed feedback. While the company is still deliberating, a strong candidate may accept another offer.
  • No clear agreement on the salary range. In my working life, there was a case where a team publicly advertised a salary range with a specific upper limit. When a strong candidate from Amazon Robotics applied, however, the team offered significantly less than the advertised maximum, without providing a clear explanation. The candidate declined: relocating to a country with a higher cost of living while making the same money as before simply didn’t make sense.

Important: Before the search begins, the recruiter should research the market and establish how much the company is genuinely prepared to pay for the role. Everyone involved in the hiring process must agree on that figure and stick to it.

Key Takeaways

You can’t define the ideal candidate once and use the same profile at every stage of your company’s growth. In the early stages, you need someone who can build systems from scratch. During scaling and growth, you need someone who can develop and expand those systems. In an established business, you need a professional who can remain productive within a large, complex organization.

To stay focused as your business evolves, use my practical reference matrix to identify whom to hire at each stage of your company's growth and what to look for when evaluating candidates.

And if you need help recruiting IT professionals, feel free to let me know in the comments!