Startup Story: My experience scaling from 30 to 70 people
I never would have thought that the actions taken to grow from 0 to 30 team members would be so different from those required during the 30 to 70 stage. Now I can understand why so many businesses (more specifically startups) get stuck between these two growth phases.
Scaling from a small- to mid-sized startup isn’t something new to me.
I faced the same challenges between 2010 and 2015 when trying to grow my recruitment agency (Urban Linked) beyond the 30 people threshold. Despite my efforts, our progress was stunted by HR, managerial, or organizational issues–areas I had previously tried to tackle before truly understanding their complexities.
Then in March 2015, Amit Aharoni, Nicolas Meunier, and I founded talent.io. After our initial success of gaining traction in the international tech recruitment market and raising 10M€ by 2017, we made a conscious decision to implement projects that would require a healthy increase in headcount within just a few months.
So in 2017, we grew our team from 31 to 70 people.
Based on this experience, I believe 3 key elements were essential in our scaling process:
1. The importance of collective intelligence
If I had to choose the most significant thing I learned from scaling our team, it’d be this.
Intelligent and ambitious people won’t stick with an organisation if they are tasked with repetitive work that doesn’t challenge them. They want to make an impact.
Job hopping is the reality of the employment market. Today, the average turnover rate for executives is 3.5 years–and if we narrow down our scope to the Silicon Valley tech sector, that number drops to an average of less than 2 years.
The link between company and employee has evolved a lot, and it’s my belief that collective intelligence is the best solution to this “job hopping” tendency.
Collective intelligence is generally defined as the shared intelligence that emerges through group collaboration and effort. In a business context, this means involving team members in the development and execution of specific tasks; they define their objectives and are responsible for their overall success.
Personally though, I define collective intelligence as the acceptance of relinquishing control.
There’s no doubt it can be complicated, and for certain entrepreneurs it can be virtually impossible. It requires a significant amount of self-reflection (which, in my case, has taken many years to cultivate and is still an ongoing process).
However, there comes a point where you must face up to the reality that no entrepreneur, along with just a handful of key players, can create a project with great scale and ambition on their own.
At talent.io, the switch to collective intelligence has been fairly simple thanks to my partners who have no control issues (unlike me). A couple of positive consequences emerged fairly quickly as a result:
- Most strikingly, this abandonment of control created an environment where each individual felt more personally invested in decision-making. If the leaders within a company support this shift, the entire team will quickly follow suit. Although difficult to measure quantitatively, we’ve noticed that our operational projects have improved significantly. Similarly, projects are given more attention and completed more proactively, consequently leading to greater success for talent.io as a whole.
- Our team is engaged and loyal. While staff turnover is linked to many factors, I believe collective responsibility has contributed to our high level of retention (only 3 departures in 2017, 6 since launch in 2015).
There’s a fundamental level of trust involved that extends beyond superficial incentives like: “I want to work for this startup because the office is cool and we go on two company retreats a year”. This mentality has been replaced by a deeper “drive” and greater responsibility over projects and talent.io’s success. For this, it’s necessary that the environment encourages the emergence of team leaders and project leaders. We’ve made this a key priority, and a dozen leaders have emerged as a result.
2. Prioritizing recruitment above all else
In the first half of 2017, even with our emphasis on internal recruitment and its associated objectives, we were only able to grow from 33 to 38 team members.
We experimented with different kinds of initiatives in order to promote talent acquisition, from implementing an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), to allocating budget for LinkedIn and display advertising. Even so, our efforts proved to have very little impact.
Recruitment needs to be the sole focus. If it’s not, you can forget about it entirely.
Faced with this failure, Nico, Amit, and I realized that we needed to alter our methods. So we consulted our senior management team (Country Managers and Team Leaders) in a series of comprehensive, day-long sessions.
Our approach was simple and straightforward:
“Stop everything you’re working on and focus all of your efforts on internal recruitment.”
- Question #1: “Which channels should I test?” “All of them.”
- Question #2: “Is there a budget?” “Yes, unlimited.”
Following these discussions, we hired freelance internal recruiters for each country, implemented a variety of new recruitment channels, and defined a more efficient hiring and onboarding process.
Once we shifted to a more methodical approach, we saw an immediate impact. In the months that followed, we were able to bring on 6 new team members per month.
What did we learn from this?
Recruitment needs to be the sole focus. If it’s not, you can forget about it entirely. In our case, making internal recruitment a “secondary task” didn’t cut it.
3. Iterating on company culture at every stage of growth
From the very beginning, we placed a strong emphasis on building a culture that recognizes and empowers every team member within talent.io. This work gave birth to 3 values revolving around autonomy, personal commitment, and taking initiative, namely:
Take ownership.
Think team.
Make impact.
Each value has been galvanized by concrete actions in our everyday activities, and it’s generated positive momentum since day one.
But in our journey from 30 to 70, we were confronted with new obstacles that stemmed from two fundamental factors:
- The vulnerability associated with an environment that promotes autonomy above all else (in particular the balance between autonomy vs. productivity).
- The dilution of our culture at the hands of rapid team growth.
And then it dawned on us–we were entering into the second phase of our company culture. This step forward centered around two key constructs:
- The realization that culture is not only the responsibility of its founders, but also that of its leaders. As such, we focused on empowering our senior management team to drive our culture, conducting training sessions and even hiring an external coach to support us in this effort.
- The launch of an initiative that was very important to us: employee ownership (a topic which will no doubt lend itself well to a later post where we report how it has impacted our future growth).
What do I mean by employee ownership?
This is a topic that my fellow co-founder Amit will discuss in a future post. He’ll explain the definition of employee ownership for talent.io and why it’s made such an impact in how we operate as a company–answering many questions on the subject along the way! Be on the lookout for his post to debut within the coming weeks 📬
- I became interested in the subject of culture and values while talent.io was still very much in its infancy. At the time, we were a team of 20 and only a year old. If you’re interested, check out how we developed actionable–rather than bullshit–values and why it matters.
- I’ve learned a lot about the subject by collaborating with inspiring entrepreneurs like Fred Mazella, Tatiana Jama, Geoffroy Guigou, and Alix de Sagazan from the Galion Project, with whom I have written a collection of best practices on values.
