Founder guide
Building a hiring plan after a Series A
A round turns hiring from a question of whether you can afford someone into a question of sequence, pace and runway. This page is a practical route through that: which roles come first, how to model the cost of the plan, what the board needs to see, and where founder-led hiring stops scaling. It links to the tools rather than repeating them.
The questions a newly funded team argues about
Written for founders, CEOs, COOs, CTOs, people leads and finance leads at a company that has just closed a round. We have deliberately not put numbers on any of it: we have no authoritative source for an ideal headcount, a benchmark growth rate or an investor expectation, so we do not assert one.
- What actually changes after the round?
- The constraint moves. Before the round the question is whether you can afford a hire at all; afterwards it is which hires convert capital into progress fastest, and how many you can carry if the next round takes longer than planned. The plan matters more than the individual role.
- Which hires should come first?
- Sequence by what is blocking the company, not by what is easiest to describe. The roles that unblock delivery or revenue come before the roles that add capacity to something already working. Writing the first several hires down as one plan, rather than one role at a time, is what makes the sequence visible.
- How fast should headcount grow?
- There is no universal ratio, and anyone quoting one is guessing about your business. The useful discipline is arithmetic: model each planned hire against salary, employer costs, recruitment cost and start date, and look at what the burn curve does before you commit.
- How do you protect runway while hiring?
- Two things move the cash picture: when people start, and when recruitment costs land. Staggering start dates changes the first. How you pay recruitment fees changes the second — a percentage of first-year salary invoiced at the start date concentrates cost exactly when the hire has produced nothing yet.
- What does the board need to see?
- A plan they can follow: the roles, the order, the reasoning, the cost and what happens to it if hiring slips. A list of open vacancies is not a hiring plan.
- When does founder-led hiring stop scaling?
- Usually at the point where sourcing, interviewing and closing several roles at once starts eating the founder time the round was raised to spend elsewhere — or when the roles move outside the domain the founders can assess themselves.
Work through it in this order
Everything below already exists on this site and is free to use without contacting us.
- Step 1Frame the first ten hiresA way of deciding what the early hires are for, and in what order, before any single role is written up.Open
- Step 2Model the plan and its costPut the planned roles, salaries and start dates in one place and see the cash shape across the year.Open
- Step 3Budget the recruitment costRecruitment fees across several hires behave differently from a single fee. This is how to budget them.Open
- Step 4Take it to the boardStructure the plan so a board can challenge the reasoning rather than the list.Open
- Step 5Check you are ready to go to marketSigned-off salary, an owner for interviews and a decision-maker, before the first candidate appears.Open
- Step 6Write the first role downThe brief that makes a search possible: outcomes, must-haves and the trade-offs.Open
- Step 7Design the interview process onceAgree the stages, owners and questions before the plan turns into five parallel searches.Open
- Step 8Test whether the hire is the answerSome roles on a post-round plan are a symptom of something else. Worth checking.Open
Where the recruitment cost lands
A hiring plan is also a cash plan. This is the part most post-round plans under-model.
A conventional agency fee is a percentage of first-year salary, invoiced around the start date. Across a plan of several hires in the same quarter, those fees arrive together, at the point when none of the new people has yet delivered anything.
Startup Staffing charges an agreed monthly percentage of each hire’s gross monthly salary instead, for as long as that person stays. It is not automatically cheaper — over a long tenure the cumulative total can exceed a one-off fee, and we show the crossover openly — but it changes when the money leaves the business.
Talk your hiring plan through with us
If the plan is written and the first roles are real, we can talk through what the search would look like and what it would cost month by month. Nothing you have built in the tools on this site is sent to us — bring it with you.
- A specific live vacancy you are trying to fill
- Hiring you are planning over the next few months
- Several future hires and how they would work together
- Whether SUS is the right fit for your business at all
Prefer to talk? 01865 657 000
Prefer email? joseph@humand.co.uk
Related reading
- One hire or a teamHiring several roles at once is a different exercise from filling one vacancy.
- What a hire actually costsThe full cost of employing someone, beyond the recruitment fee — useful for the model.
- For foundersHow the monthly model looks from the founder's seat.
- For finance leadsThe commercial detail, the caveats and the questions to put to us.
- Technology recruitmentWhat we recruit, for whom, and how the search is delivered.