Resources
Startup hiring resources
Straightforward guides and free tools on what hiring costs, how to brief and assess technical people, how to sequence a team, and how the different ways of paying for recruitment actually compare. No benchmark tables we cannot stand behind, and no invented case studies.
Plan a hire
Work out what the hire costs, whether you are ready for it, and which way of paying for recruitment suits your cash position.
- Get a rateModel one hire, or plan a whole team across the year, in your own currency. Your figures stay in this browser.Open
- Which approach fits?Five questions, then one recommended starting point and the reason for it.Open
- Hiring readiness checkNine questions on whether you are ready to hire, and what to fix first.Open
Run a hiring process
Define the role properly, design an interview process you can actually run, and score it consistently.
Learn
The background reading: how the SUS model works, how it compares with a traditional fee, and what the evidence does and does not say.
Not sure where to start?
If you would rather not read your way to an answer, the guided tool asks five short questions — how many hires, how urgent, how much cash-flow timing matters, what would help most today, and whether you are ready to talk — then points you at one place to start and explains why. It takes about two minutes, your answers stay in this browser and nothing is sent to us.
The full library
Every guide, grouped by topic. Each one names who it is written for and when it was last reviewed.
Hiring strategy
Deciding what to hire, when to hire it, and what to do instead when you cannot.
- When not to hire
- A founder's checklist for choosing a technical recruitment partner
- When should a startup make its first sales hire?
Startup hiring costs
What a hire actually costs, when the money leaves, and how to plan for it.
- What a startup hire actually costs
- How to budget recruitment costs across a hiring plan
- What finance should model before approving a recruitment supplier
Technical & deep-tech hiring
Hiring engineers, scientists and specialists when the product is the hard part.
- Writing a technical hiring brief that gets results
- Hiring for deep tech and complex systems
- Hiring for complex systems outside your own technical domain
- Writing a hiring brief for a complex software or deep-tech role
- How to hire for a role you cannot keyword-search
- Must-have versus learnable skills in early-stage technical hiring
- CTO or Head of Engineering: which does your startup need?
- Hiring your first engineering manager
Interviews & scorecards
Structured assessment that small teams can actually run.
Team planning
Sequencing multiple hires against runway, delivery and org design.
- Single hire vs team hiring: planning cost and sequencing
- A first-ten-hires planning framework for technology startups
- How to prioritise hires when runway is limited
Recruitment models
Contingent, retained, embedded, in-house and monthly models compared.
- Recruitment fee models compared
- How to compare an upfront fee with a monthly recruitment fee
- What happens to recruitment fees when a hire leaves
- When should a startup use a recruitment agency?
Founder & board planning
Presenting hiring plans and their cash impact to investors and boards.
Who we recruit for
The same monthly model, applied to three kinds of technical hiring. Pick the one closest to your business.
Technology recruitment
The overview: how SUS covers specialist technology hiring end to end.
See the rolesSoftware & SaaS startups
Engineering, platform, data and product hires.
See the rolesDeep tech & science
Quantum, photonics, AI research and scientific software.
See the rolesEngineering & complex systems
Robotics, embedded, hardware and systems engineering.
See the roles