Block 1: How and When to Build your People Team

Welcome to part one of a six-part series on building a high-performing People function.

To kick off the series, we’ll start at the beginning. Who is actually on the people team?

But before we dive into today’s topic, let’s revisit a few fundamentals. Because if you’re jumping into the series now, you might wondering what it’s about and who it’s for (which you can read even more in-depth about here).

This six-part series is designed to give you a tactical guide on how to think through building your people function — from tools and systems to deciding who to hire and when. In other words, this series will dissect what it takes to systematically build your People function — block by block. The “blocks” cover the People team itself, workforce planning, employer branding, compensation and benefits, tools and systems, and finally, data. Although all of these topics are centered around the People function, the series isn’t just for “People people.” It’s also for founders, early-stage People function hires, and of course, TA/HR leadership.

Additionally, each block is put into the context of different growth stages. Because how you invest in each block differs depending on whether you’re navigating a startup, scale-up, or enterprise landscape. Here is a quick recap on the stages of growth, which are based on common inflection point — or pivotal changes that impacts the assumptions on which the business was built.

The most foundational of all the blocks is that of your People Team — because regardless of your size or stage, you should know who is responsible for driving your people function. Without a clear owner of the function itself, talking about other blocks like workforce planning and employer branding doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Broadly speaking, People Teams are responsible for everything related to attracting, supporting, and retaining talent. Whether the People Team is one person or hundreds of people, their time is typically split between a few different areas.

• Talent Acquisition (TA) — recruitment, talent acquisition, whatever you want to call it. This is the hiring muscle of your organization.
• People Operations (People Ops) — sometimes recruitment ops, sometimes just people ops. All in all it’s about having the infrastructure and processes to support the candidate and/or employee lifecycle.
• HR Business Partners (HRBP) — HRBPs partner up with a specific function to handle all things HR, and ensure overall alignment between the people strategy and the business strategy. These are typically found in an enterprise setup, and the ratio of HRBP to department can range significantly.
• Employee Experience — responsible for creating a meaningful workplace. Sometimes this falls under People Operations.

For startups, one person is wearing most — if not all — of these hats. And more often than not, this one person is a member of the founding team. During the scaleup stage, you should have a dedicated person or team that can cover your talent needs (or knows how to use agencies and contractors to fill in the blanks). For enterprise companies, you might have a dedicated lead to each function or even entire teams built around a specific function (i.e., DEI, Learning and Development, and People Analytics, to name a few).

Let’s get into how a People Team can be (efficiently) structured for different growth.

p.s., When referring to the size of the People Team, we will only look at full-time employees, not contractors or agencies. It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of nuances in the People Team’s structure once you get to the enterprise level, so we won’t be able to cover every available setup here.

Stage 1: Building Your People Team at a Startup

Who is responsible

If you have less than 50 employees, it’s unlikely that you will have (or need) a full-time, dedicated talent leader. This is why, as with most things in a startup, your talent function will likely be founder-led with operational support from hiring managers.

What changes

After you hire your founding team, it’s typical to start with referral hiring and then start working with an agency if you have available funding. Even though you might not have a dedicated talent leader, don’t be naive to the fact that you need to set aside time and resources to reach talent milestones. Hiring takes time, and it’s not something you’ll want to rush nor sacrifice quality on in the early days.

Team is everything. A team is the most valuable asset of any startup.

Even if you do opt for an agency or early Talent hire, it’s important that the founding team is heavily involved in every hiring decision. The reason being that the first 20–50 hires will set the foundation for your culture, operating principles, and can be the make or break between company milestones. Being hands-on as a founder ensures that you are actively building a team that will push the company forwards and that your investors believe in — even in the earliest stages of you journey.

How this looks in practice

Set up a referral program, and if funding allows, bring on a Talent Advisor to help you get the basics in place (i.e., onboarding, compensation, values, employee story). You can get far with network hiring at this stage, but if you do opt for a dedicated talent resource, make sure they are operational. Planning and foundations are important, but you don’t always need a talent leader that invests heavily in “white board” exercises at this stage. You need someone who has enough experience to easily spot and compensate what you’re lacking, but whose main priority is to bring people on board.

Non-negotiables

1. Clear Ownership of Talent Functions: Even in the absence of a dedicated full-time talent leader, there must be a clear assignment of talent-related responsibilities among founders or early team members. This includes overseeing talent acquisition, people operations, and employee experience.
2. (Loosely) Defined Talent Acquisition Strategy: Establish a straightforward, actionable strategy for talent acquisition that leverages network hiring, referrals, and, if possible, agency support. This strategy should be flexible yet focused on attracting the right kind of talent that aligns with the startup’s culture and values.
3. Operational Efficiency: Ensure that the talent function, even if lean, operates with high efficiency and is capable of managing the entire candidate lifecycle from attraction to hire, and beyond, effectively. This includes having basic systems and processes in place for candidate tracking, communication, and onboarding.
4. Feedback and Improvement Loop: Implement a simple system for gathering feedback from candidates and new hires to continuously improve the hiring process and overall candidate experience. This is crucial for making adjustments and enhancing your talent acquisition strategy over time.

How you fail

1. Overcomplicating Processes: While it’s important to have systems in place, over-engineering your processes can make your talent function cumbersome and slow, reducing your ability to compete for top talent in a fast-moving market.
2. Ignoring Cultural Add: Focusing solely on skills and experience without considering how a candidate aligns with the company’s culture and values can lead to poor hires that negatively impact team dynamics and productivity. Be aware that if the pendulum can swing too far the other way, you’ll fall into the “like me” bias trap. Building a startup is hard work. You need to get people on board who bring different skill sets to the table and love the journey.
3. Role Ambiguity: Failing to properly define job roles, expectations, and hiring budgets (i.e., salary bands for new hires).

Stage 2: Expanding Your People Team at a Scaleup

Who is responsible

Whether you are at the lower or upper end of the “scaleup” stage, you will need a dedicated People lead who can act as your go-to contact for all things people.

What changes

This stage is where major shifts start to happen, and it’s almost as if there are micro-inflection points within this stage. This is natural given that a lot happens between 50 and 500 is quite the jump.

From a headcount perspective, it’s also the stage where you surpass Dunbar’s number — which means you start to lose track of people and a clear overview of your organization.

This means from a people function perspective, you’re going to want to start fractioning off your team and specializing their responsibilities — either by department or function. Let’s walk through what this looks like in practice as you reach different milestones:

• At 50 employees, it’s time to start looking for a dedicated talent lead. You’ll want this person to be a mid-senior profile who is experienced enough to know how to build a recruitment process and set strategic direction, but junior enough to still actually execute on it.
• At 150–250 employees, you’re People Team headcount should range anywhere from 2–10 employees. The exact number will be dependent on your annual hiring volume, the seniority, and skill set of your initial hire(s), and to what extent you depend on contractors and agencies to fill capacity gaps.
• Between 250–500 employees, you should have a core People Team with a good mix of strategic ownership and execution power. You should also have reliable partners and/or contractors that you lean on to add speed and capacity when hiring demand increases.

How this looks in practice

Regardless of how many people are on your People Team, their focus should be on building a scalable recruitment engine, perfecting onboarding, and overseeing compensation philosophy. It’s common to partner with recruitment suppliers that have an emphasis on volume and repeatability.

Regardless of how many people are on your People Team, their focus should be on building a scalable recruitment engine, perfecting onboarding, and overseeing compensation philosophy

Non-negotiables

1. A Dedicated Talent Lead: By this stage, having a dedicated person leading your talent function is a must. Your first talent hire should be capable of strategizing for your people team while being operational when necessary. They should possess a strong balance of strategic insight and practical execution abilities.
2. T-Shaped Team: As your people team grows, so will the depth and breadth of knowledge within the team. However, you probably won’t have the luxury of having dedicated roles or teams for talent acquisition, people operations, HRBP, employee experience, and so on. Instead, members of your team will need to be” t-shaped,” meaning they are comfortable solving a wide variety of people problems, but can also offer deep expertise and support in one particular area
3. Using Qualitative and Quantitative Data: At this stage, you should have a large enough sample size to start incorporating quantitative data into the mix. This includes tracking key metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, candidate satisfaction, employee turnover rates, and employee satisfaction scores to inform decisions and improve processes.
4. Partnerships and External Resources: Establish reliable partnerships with recruitment agencies or contractors to enhance your hiring capacity when needed. These partnerships should be strategically chosen to fill gaps and provide expertise in areas where your internal team may not have the bandwidth or specialization.

How you fail

1. Underestimating the Importance of Culture: As the company grows, maintaining and nurturing the company culture becomes more challenging. Neglecting to embed cultural values into hiring practices and daily operations can dilute your company’s identity and negatively impact employee engagement.
2. Misalignment of the hiring bar: Without a shared understanding and applied hiring standard, the quality of new hires can vary significantly across departments and teams. This inconsistency can lead to performance disparities, affecting team dynamics and overall productivity. The People Team plays a key role in solidifying and upholding the hiring bar.
3. Inadequate Tools and Technology: Reliance on manual processes or outdated tools can hinder your team’s efficiency and scalability. Investing in the right technology stack for talent acquisition and management is crucial for supporting growth.
4. Lack of Flexibility: Being too rigid in your processes or not being open to feedback and continuous improvement can stall your team’s progress and innovation. Agility and the willingness to adjust strategies based on outcomes are key to success at this stage.
5. Underestimating Resource Needs: Not allocating enough time, people, or financial resources to the talent function can lead to overwhelmed teams, missed opportunities, and a failure to meet critical hiring milestones.

Stage 3: Navigating Complexities at an Enterprise

Who is responsible

By the enterprise stage, it’s likely that your People Team will consist of 10+ with varying seniority levels and specializations.

What changes

As you transition from a scale-up to a full-blown enterprise, your People Team will likely become more distributed and specialized within given domains. This specialization can either happen through a centralized, function-specific model or a more decentralized HR Business Partner Model. Regardless of which model you have, you will likely have people, or even entire teams, dedicated to talent acquisition, since recruitment is one of the most fundamental components of any people team.

Beyond talent acquisition, it’s also likely that the larger you get, the more likely it is that stand-alone department heads or specialists emerge. Even though these areas might not have full functions built around them, an enterprise will likely have dedicated roles across the following areas:

• Talent Acquisition
• DEI
• Learning and Development (L&D)
• Compensation and Benefits (more on that later)
• People Analytics (more on that later)

From a hiring standpoint, the focus might shift away from filling critical, net-new roles, and instead will be directed towards hiring based on turnover.

How this looks in practice

An enterprise team will have a mix of junior and senior profiles working together to hire and solve needs for specific departments. The ideal profiles are those interested in perfecting their domain who can flexibly switch between contexts — in other words, t-shaped profiles are always a good choice. An agency can be used to fill specific domain gaps (i.e., tech or executive hiring) or in times of high-volume hiring, but is not always needed.

This means that your team will spend more time on specific policies and procedures for specific departments and/or locations, honing in on domain expertise, and working with hiring managers to handle workforce planning with a bottom-up approach.

An agency can be used to fill specific domain gaps (i.e., tech or executive hiring) or in times of high-volume hiring, but is not always needed.

As mentioned previously, the exact structure of your team can take on a couple of different forms. We won’t get into every team structure in this article — but you can dive deeper into the different team setups in this article.

However, two structures are worth taking a closer look at, since we see them the most often. There isn’t a right or wrong way to structure your team, and each model has its fair share of strengths and weaknesses — and the setup you have today might be heavily dependent on legacy It’s also possible that you have a combination of these two setups.

• The HR Business Partner Model — In this model, HR Business Partners act as a liaison between department leads and other HR functions. Typically, HR Business Partners are “t-shaped,” meaning that they are HR generalists, but have a deep expertise in one particular area. This means that they are capable of acting as the liaison, advisor, and executor for their department, but can also act as expert support to other HRBPs when needed.
• The Function-Specific Model — In this model, the People Team is sectioned off by functional area or expertise. For example, you may have a dedicated team of recruiters (TA) and a separate team dedicated fully to Compensation and Benefits, and so on. All of these dedicated teams fall under the People Team, but their expertise runs deep in a given area.

Non-negotiables

1. A Healthy Mix of Senior and Junior Profiles: A People Team with a diverse range of experience levels ensures that the team can execute day-to-day functions efficiently while also strategizing for long-term goals. Senior members bring strategic insight and experience, while junior members offer fresh perspectives and operational support.
2. Specialized Roles in Key Areas: As you grow, it will become more and more necessary to have dedicated roles in more specialized areas such as DEI, L&D, Compensation and Benefits, and People Analytics.
3. Effective Use of Technology: Enterprises must leverage advanced HR technology platforms for talent acquisition, employee management, performance tracking, and analytics. These tools enable efficient processes, data-driven decision-making, and scalability.
4. HR Business Partner and Function-specific Models: Implementing an HR structure that best supports the organization’s size, complexity, and strategic needs. Whether it’s a centralized function-specific model or a more decentralized HR Business Partner model, the structure should facilitate effective talent management and strategic HR support.

How you fail

1. Lack of Adaptability: Failing to adapt to changing business needs, workforce dynamics, and external market conditions can render talent strategies ineffective and leave the organization behind in competitive talent markets. This can also include not adapting your people strategy to the overall business strategy.
2. Ineffective Communication and Collaboration: Poor communication and collaboration within the HR team and with other departments can lead to misaligned objectives, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities in talent management.
3. Lack of visibility and accessibility in the organization. Make sure that HR and other support services are easily accessible to all employees. This can be facilitated through dedicated HR portals, help desks, and the presence of HR business partners who are approachable and available to address employee needs and concerns.
4. Underutilizing Data and Analytics: Not leveraging people analytics to inform decision-making and strategy formulation can result in missed insights and suboptimal talent management practices.
5. Inflexible HR Policies: Rigid HR policies that do not accommodate individual or departmental needs can lead to dissatisfaction and hinder the organization’s ability to attract and retain talent.
6. Lack of Executive Representation: Failing to include the head of the People Team in executive-level discussions and decision-making processes can have detrimental effects on an organization’s strategic alignment and operational efficiency. This will lead to strategic misalignment, overlooked talent insights, resistance to change, and risk of high turnover rates.

Tl;dr

If you’ve made it this far, it’s time to zoom out again and sum up how all of this information relates to each other.

If you don’t feel like scrolling back through the article for key points, here’s a quick snapshot of the who, what, and how of the first block.

To summarize, there are three main points to take away from this article.

1. Your company will go through different inflection points as you grow from your founding team to a full-blown enterprise. Even if you aren’t a part of every step of that journey, it’s important to understand the dynamics and the changes that happened before you joined, during your stay, or that will happen after you leave.
2. A key driver of your growth is your People function. However, the owner, strategies, and tactics (i.e., the who, what, and how) behind the function will change as your company grows from 5 to 500 and beyond.
3. Behind your People function is, of course, your People team. Whether your people function is founder-led, or is made up of 50+ specialists, dedicating the time and resources to attracting and retaining top talent will be critical to your success at every growth stage.

But the team isn’t the only component of a high-performing people function. There are five more parts to this series, where I’ll get into the nitty gritty of everything else that goes on into your people function. Next up is workforce planning, so stay tuned.

Now that we’ve covered the People team itself, the next step is to talk about how they hire. But more on that in the next edition. In the meantime, head over to the Amby blog for more TA-related reads, or reach out to me with any questions or input on the series.

Until next time! 👋

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