HR recruiters 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 HR hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, need to make their first HR hire, need to replace a people leader, or need more recruiting capacity for G&A roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill HR business partners, HR generalists, and people operations specialists, as well as senior and lead roles, up to head of people, vice president of people, and chief people officer.

HR is part of our G&A recruiting practice. As an HR recruiting agency for high-growth tech companies, we hire people directly onto your team, and the recruiter on your search has hired HR at your stage before.

HR roles don’t come with a quota, so it’s harder to tell who was good at the job. A salesperson has a number to point to. An HR business partner or people leader is measured on the projects they’ve implemented, how they’ve changed HR processes, the technology they’ve rolled out, and what they’ve done to help the people in the company. When nobody has defined those outcomes, it’s hard to tell a strong HR hire from a weak one until months after they start.

An important thing to consider is whether the role needs a specialist or a generalist. Some companies need a deep expert in one area of HR. Others need a generalist who can adapt as the job description changes. Hiring one when you needed the other is one of the most common ways these searches go wrong.

The stage of your company also has a significant impact. At a startup, the first HR hire usually builds the people function from scratch. At a growth-stage company, process is often still missing, and HR is expected to put it in place while the company keeps hiring.

Another challenge is the copy-paste playbook. Someone who ran HR at a 50,000-person company, or in a very different industry, may try to bring over exactly what worked there. Business is situational. You want relevant experience and the adaptability to fit a different environment, culture, and org chart, and we look for both in the interview process.

Sometimes behavioral fit is overlooked. Most people accept that a salesperson needs a specific profile and forget that HR needs drivers too: people with a bias toward action, who are results-oriented, work well under tight deadlines, and can separate signal from noise to pick the HR projects that matter most.

Scoping comes first. We start with the outcomes the role has to achieve, then work backward: what to prioritize, which skill sets the role needs, and whether it calls for a specialist or a generalist. The job description and interview process are built to identify those things. Defining the outcomes up front also gives you a clear way to manage performance once the person starts.

In the recruiter interview, we ask candidates how their success was measured in previous roles. Someone who can’t answer clearly usually hasn’t been accountable to clear outcomes on defined timelines, and at a growing company, that shows up as HR work that moves too slowly.

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 HR 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.