G&A recruiting for high-growth tech companies

Our customers are venture capital-backed, high-growth tech companies, from startup to growth stage and enterprise; they range from 15 employees to over 50,000. Companies usually call us about G&A hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, need to make their first finance, people, or recruiting hire, have had G&A hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

• We fill recruiters, technical recruiters, talent sourcers, and recruiting coordinators. When you’re ready to bring recruiting in-house, we can hire your internal recruiting team for you.
• On the people side, we fill human resources business partners, HR generalists, and people operations specialists, up to chief people officer.
  HR recruiting
• In finance and accounting, we fill accountants, revenue accountants, financial analysts, and FP&A analysts and managers, as well as controllers, up to chief financial officer. We fill accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and procurement roles too.
  Finance recruiting
• We also fill chiefs of staff, business operations analysts and managers, operations analysts, project managers and coordinators, commercial counsel, and executive assistants, up to chief operating officer.

G&A sits alongside our GTM and sales recruiting and technical recruiting practices, and the recruiter on your search has hired this function at your stage before.

Most G&A roles don’t come with a quota. A salesperson has a number and activity metrics; a controller, a people partner, or a chief of staff usually doesn’t, so how success is measured has to be defined before the search starts. We ask candidates directly how their success was measured in previous roles. Some G&A work is project and deadline driven, and a candidate who comes from an environment without strong performance management will often move too slowly.

What good looks like also depends on the function. In finance, it’s operational cadence, like closing the books on time. In people and HR, it’s the projects someone has implemented, the HR processes they’ve changed, and the technology they’ve rolled out. Recruiting runs closer to a sales motion: consistent activity, close work with hiring managers, and hiring goals hit. The cultural and behavioral profile stays the same across all of them.

An important thing to consider is which seats can learn on the job. Senior finance and legal hires need to arrive with all of the expertise the role requires. A legal hire should understand your industry and its risks, and be able to tell you where the company’s biggest exposure is. For other roles, the question is whether you need a deep specialist or a generalist who adapts as the job description changes, and we match candidates to that answer.

Business and strategic acumen is often overlooked in G&A searches. A strong finance hire translates complex accounting into clear language for executives outside finance, understands other departments well enough to resource them correctly, and doesn’t block spend on revenue, recruiting, or vendors out of a narrow view of cost. The same thread runs through accounting, legal, and talent acquisition.

Another challenge is the copy-paste playbook. Someone who ports exactly what they did at a 50,000-person company into a much smaller one, or the reverse, without adapting it will struggle. You want relevant experience and the adaptability to adjust to a different environment, culture, and org chart. We look for both in the recruiter interview.

Behavioral fit is often underestimated too. Companies accept that a salesperson needs a specific profile and forget that G&A hires need to be proactive, work well under tight deadlines, and push the company forward. Chiefs of staff and operations hires in particular have to prioritize ruthlessly, work across every department, and think in terms of the outcomes that move the company faster.

Every G&A search starts with the outcomes the role, and the department around it, has to deliver. We work backward from those outcomes to set priorities, define the skills the role needs, and make sure the job description and interview process are built to identify them. That matters most when you’re building a function from scratch, like your first HR, recruiting, or finance hire.

We then match candidates to that scope: the environments they’ve succeeded in, how their performance was measured, and whether they’ve worked at a company like yours.

We also check track records. We tell candidates in the first round that we require references from previous direct managers at the offer stage. How candidates react to that tells us a lot.

At kickoff, we review the roles with your hiring team and align on the interview process. Within 48 hours after the kickoff meeting, we meet with the hiring managers again to have a calibration meeting. We bring 10 candidate profiles to the table to ensure that we’re aligned and only interviewing relevant talent.

1. 48hours

   Calibration meeting

2. 3-7days

   Initial recruiter screens

3. 7-10days

   Hiring manager interviews

4. 2-3weeks

   Full qualified candidate pipeline per role

5. 30days

   Initial hires

6. 90days

   On track against the hiring plan

Initial recruiter screens happen in 3-7 days, and hiring manager interviews in 7-10 days. You have a full qualified candidate pipeline per role in 2-3 weeks. Initial hires typically land in roughly 30 days, and you’re on track against the hiring plan by 90. Time-to-fill runs 15-60 days depending on seniority and scope.

A common hiring mistake is picking the best of the first handful of people you speak to. We focus heavily on outbound sourcing to engage with a lot of talent. This ensures that you’re able to hire the best people on the market.

Along the way, our recruiters meet with your hiring managers weekly and communicate updates daily in your chat channels. You also get weekly metrics from the delivery lead who manages recruiter performance. Our recruiters also have access to our tech stack that accelerates identifying and reaching out to top talent: strategic AI sourcing and AI resume matching, multi-step, multi-channel outreach, and job postings. Everything runs in your systems, and you own your data and your candidate pool.

Most of the G&A hiring we do runs through Embedded Recruiting and RPO: a recruiter working only on your business, inside your systems. If your hiring is consistent, or there’s enough work for at least one full-time recruiter, it also cuts down on cost-per-hire. The engagement scales with your hiring plan, from adding capacity to your internal recruiting team to running recruiting as your talent function. You can see how these engagements run in our case studies.