In Session 3 of the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival 2024, we focused on the People side of building a business, looking into International Expansion. Navigating the complexities of defining needs and making first hires in new markets, including talent attraction and assessment, contracts, metrics and compensation, onboarding, leadership, culture and collaboration was all on the agenda.
Speakers:
Ilana Eides Talent Acquisition Director & People Partner @ Labster
Roxana Dobrescu Chief People Officer @ commercetools
You will find key takeaways and a full write-up of the session below, and the recording can be watched here:
Key Takeaways:
Hiring for different stages: Early hires (Pre-seed) should be founder-led, Series A/B should involve experienced recruiters and managers, and Series C+ requires a focus on branding and a more systematic hiring process.
Balancing roles: Founders should manage a balance between "marines" (startup founders), "army" (scaling employees), and "police" (operations) as the company grows.
Shape culture early: Company culture is easiest to shape in the early stages — set habits and values that will be sustainable as the company scales.
Avoid common hiring mistakes: Ensure your team has the right technical skills, diversity, and value alignment. Don’t hang onto underperforming or toxic employees.
Leverage networks: Use external contacts to help evaluate candidates for senior roles or fields founders aren’t familiar with.
International hiring: Employers of Record (EORs) are a helpful solution for international expansion when setting up new entities is too costly.
The full write-up:
With all the uncertainties that come with founding a startup, and despite the many original paths to success taken by today’s major Edtechs, one thing remains certain: scaling startups requires hiring people. Once these people have been hired, they need to be compensated adequately, motivated, integrated into the company, moved across roles as the startup expands and more. Needless to say, managing people within a startup is far from easy.
Fortunately, the founders of today are not the first to encounter challenges in hiring and maintaining their workforce. The speakers for this session, centred around People, are experienced in the world of hiring and managing an employee base across all stages of the startup life cycle.
Ilana Eides is the Talent Acquisition Director and People Partner at Labster, an Edtech company which provides STEM students with virtual learning experiences. Roxana Dobrescu is currently Chief People Officer at commercetools and has been an HR executive for over 20 years, specialising in leadership development and creating scaling playbooks. Roxana is also one of our trusted Brighteye Mentors.
Here are some of the things we learned in the session:
Scaling a Business: Hiring the Right People
Roxana and Ilana emphasised the similarity between scaling a startup and fighting a war. In war, the marines take the beaches, the army takes the country, and the police govern new territories. For startups, the marines are founders, the army is scaling employees, and the police are “stability people” whose goal is to maintain company operations. Roxana observed the importance of managing the balance between these different groups: marines and army can work together, same for army and police, but marines and police are often highly incompatible. This principle should be kept in mind when hiring for your startup.
Building on this, Roxana set out hiring best practices for 3 stages of the growth process:
Stage 1 (Pre-seed and seed) – Hiring should be founder-led at this stage. Founders should use their network to source candidates, and the bar to entry needs to be very high, even if this makes the process longer. Hires should be a mix of hungry people who are desperate to succeed and senior hires who bring know-how, experience, and can mentor subsequent junior hires in their divisions.
Stage 2 (Series A and B) – Managers should be brought in alongside an experienced recruiter (emphasis on “experienced”!). Even with a recruitment lead, it is still important that founders be involved in the hiring process at this stage to check that new hires align with company values.
Stage 3 (Series C and beyond) – Here, founders should focus on their brand as an employer: the Employee Value Proposition should be competitive, the candidate experience should be considered, and the company should develop a social media presence. Alongside this, sourcing efforts should be broadened to make hiring inbound (applications to open roles) as well as outbound (headhunting and referrals from your network). A focus should be placed on hiring graduates at this stage, and the assessment of candidates should become more systematic to ensure value alignment.
Shaping Company Culture from Early Growth Stages
Another point of discussion was company culture. As startups evolve, the risks and challenges they face evolve alongside them. From Series C onwards, companies start to face cultural risk – if company culture is not conducive to success at these later stages, this poses an existential threat to the business. In this regard, Roxana compared culture to concrete – it is easy to shape when it is wet and new, but if you leave it out to dry, it becomes rigid and impossible to amend if it isn’t shaped as desired. The only solution to this problem is for founders to actively foster a culture which they believe is sustainable in the long run, right from the early stages – habits should be chosen carefully!
Common Mistakes in the Expansion Process
Our speakers also highlighted some of the most common hiring mistakes founders make during the expansion process, which should be avoided. One such case was failing to hire employees with the right background – founding teams which lack sufficient technical DNA typically don’t fare well further along the line. Similarly, founders should ensure that their team is diverse and talented – attempting to disrupt the status quo, as Edtech startups often tend to do, requires a group of individuals who think outside the box and have the ability to put their ideas into action.
Other mistakes relate to lacking fairness or sufficient severity in the treatment of your employees. For instance, over-investing in loyalty towards the early team can be damaging in the long term, as it doesn’t leave room for necessary changes further down the line. Similarly, employees who show undesirable character traits or who simply aren’t good at their jobs shouldn’t be kept just because it’s easier – as Roxana put it, founders should be firm in getting rid of “A-holes and B-players”.
On the hiring side, mistakes are frequent. Some startups don’t identify the need for an in-house recruiter in time, some outsource their recruitment too early in the expansion process – admittedly, the balance is hard to find, and founders should pay particularly close attention to this issue. Regarding the quality of hires, founders often get caught up on recruits from big names and companies with strong reputations, whereas they should only be focused on technical competence and value alignment. Once these hires are made, they should be properly onboarded, as far too often there isn’t a clearly defined and standardised path to integrating new joiners into work life at the startup.
Challenges in Hiring
Hiring is never straightforward in a startup, and there are many hurdles which must be climbed as the organisation evolves. For instance, founders often struggle to make more senior hires or to recruit in areas they are not well versed in themselves – in these cases, it can be difficult to identify a basis on which to evaluate candidates. Ilana and Roxana emphasise the importance of using networks to solve this problem, by setting up hiring committees with qualified contacts from outside the organisation who can help evaluate candidates.
Another challenge comes in the form of international expansion, where oftentimes setting up permanent entities in new markets can be too costly. Here, the use of Employers of Record (EORs) is encouraged – typically, they will charge 15-35% of each annual salary covered, but this expense is worth incurring until the company is ready to fully invest in the new region.
And that concludes this session! It was a pleasure to welcome Ilana and Roxana, and our discussion was very insightful
📘 Finally A Few Book Recommendations by Roxana and Ilana:
Scaling through Chaos – The Founder’s Guide to Building and Leading Teams from 0 to 1’000
Blitzscaling – The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
What the heck is EOS?
コメント