Foundations for Growth: The Building Blocks of a High-Performing People Function
A lot changes as your company grows from 5 to 50 to 500.
Your customer base grows, your positioning becomes clearer, your team evolves, and complexity increases. And behind all the launches, funding, and new markets are the people making it happen.
And behind all of your people is your People function.
On paper, your People function is responsible for ensuring you can retain the high-performing employees you need to fuel the company’s continued growth — this sounds straightforward enough.
But it’s also responsible for around 60–70% of your company’s operating expenses. And by touching nearly every step of the employee lifecycle, the ripple effect of a high-performing People team is insurmountable.
By hiring and retaining top performers, your People function can be the difference between muddy and precise market positioning. Between securing funding or not. Between launching your product this year or next. Between having an empowered team or one with high turnover. Between hitting your next stage of growth or coming up short.
But what does it take to build a high-performing People function at different points in your growth journey? How do you maximize value at different inflection points without over-engineering or over-complicating things? What are the building blocks of a high-performing people function?
Since founding Amby over a decade ago, we have worked with hundreds of companies, ranging from teams of 1 to 10.000+ across dozens of industries. We’ve had the opportunity to work with founders and talent leaders as they go through hyper-growth phases, hiring freezes, funding rounds, leadership hires, compensation revamps, and everything in between.
Rather than keeping that knowledge within our organization and the clients we work with, we wanted to develop this series that helps break down our learnings into bite-sized, tactical guides. The content here could get in-depth rather quickly, but the goal isn’t to analyze every data point, answer every people-related question, or address every outlier. Most of the “data” here in this series is anecdotal. But in any case, this series can (hopefully) 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.
This series will dissect what it takes to systematically build your People function — block by block.
The series will consist of six articles, each dedicated to one topic or “block.” First, we’ll examine the employees who make up your People function. The remaining articles will cover workforce planning, employer branding, compensation and benefits, tools and systems, and data.
But before we get into the first “block,” we need to set the scene with a few fundamentals.
- Who is this series for?
- How do we define stages of growth?
- Of all the people-related topics we could cover, why these six?
Who is This Series For?
This series is, first and foremost, about the Talent/HR muscle in your organization. But that doesn’t mean it’s first and foremost for “People people.” Instead, the series is intended to provide tactical and actionable advice to three main groups:
- Founders (often, but not always, at startups and early-stage scaleups)
- Early People team hires (often, but not always, at late-stage startups and scaleups)
- HR/TA leaders (often, but not always, at late-stage scaleups and enterprises)
For founders, this series can be thought of as a starter kit for their People function. More often than not, the People function takes a backseat early in a company’s journey. It gets underinvested in because other initiatives like product development and GTM take priority. But also because very few founders come from a People background, knowing where to start can feel overwhelming — even though they know the importance.
For early People team hires, this series should help you cut through the noise and focus on what’s most important, navigate growing pains, find the scale of processes, and prepare to hit your next milestone.
The series can hopefully give HR/TA leaders a nuanced perspective on how other teams think about their team structure, workforce planning, and talent strategy. It can also provide inspiration for efficiencies and innovation within their current setup.
What are the Stages of Growth?
There are several ways to define growth stages — but for the sake of this series, a company goes from one stage of growth to the next when it matures across four key areas:
- Company size
- Funding
- Annual hiring volume
- Product-market fit.
Why these areas? For one, they are quantifiable (for the most part).
They also signal an inflection point — or a pivotal change that impacts the assumptions on which the business was built. Inflection points impact how a company operates and are typically measured by company size. For example, hitting 50 employees is an inflection point, but so is hitting 500. Each stage reflects maturity and specialization of roles, data and insights, more apparent ownership, and standardization of processes.
That said, other measures of inflection points are equally important to consider in hiring. Our experience shows that changes in funding, hiring volume, and product-market fit impact who, how, and when you hire — this is why we use these areas to define the “stages” growth companies will likely go through.
The chart below gives you a quick overview of how companies can be segmented into different growth stages. Below the chart are more in-depth explanations we define the parameters of the growth stages.
Company Size 🏢
The size of your company is the most important and blatant category definer. It’s visible, measurable, and indicative of how complex your systems and processes need to be.
Generally speaking, the more people, the more complex everything tends to be. This is why startups will pull together “scrappy,” simple solutions while enterprise companies have thought-through, long-standing solutions they are bound to. But why did we stop company size 500?
Companies obviously don’t stop growing at 500, but for simplicity, we will categorize anything above 500 as “enterprise.” Part of the reason is that the difference between companies with 5.000 and 20.000 employees often comes down to the size and fractioning of the people team. The first might have a people function of 100 people spread across 10 teams, while the latter might have a team of 300 people spread across 20 teams. However, how large enterprises invest and operate could be an entirely different series, so we won’t go into the separate enterprise subgroups in this series. Another reason that we stop at 500 is because if you don’t have it together by then, you probably have a long road ahead of you. Or as Kim Rohrer, Principal People Partner at Oyster said on Pyn’s LinkedIn poll:
“I chose 150, because if you don’t get your shit together by then, you’re screwed when you get to 800”
Funding 💸
More often than not, startups can’t get a company up and running without capital. Even for early-stage companies, funding plays a significant role in dictating who you hire and when (especially in the early stages of growth). It also can dictate salary and equity bands, employer branding investments, and more.
Exact valuation and round sizes differ year-on-year, industry-by-industry, and market-by-market. This is why we refer to the different series (i.e., Seed, Series A, etc.) rather than cash amounts. The series will (roughly) indicate how much cash a company has available and their expectations from their investors.
Hiring volume 📊
We refer to hiring volume in terms of annual hiring volume since it’s rare for a company to have more than a 12-month outlook on how many people it needs to bring on board. However, looking less than a year out can be too narrow to draw conclusions, especially at larger companies.
Hiring volume sets the stage for how scalable your tools and processes need to be, how you staff your people team, and whether or not you need to engage an external partner for support.
Product-market fit 🤝
Product-market fit is often correlated with company size. Whether or not your company is “exploring,” “growing,” and “maintaining” its position in the consumer market will also impact how you’re positioned in the candidate market. Do people know about your brand already? And if so, do they already have an idea about who you are? Do they believe in your product, and/or are they willing to help build it with you?
PMF can also impact the type of profiles you hire for. For example, you won’t want to hire many commercial roles before you have PMF, and you might need more specialized and senior roles to spark innovation once your product has matured.
What are the Talent Blocks?
Nobody can invest maximum resources into each category, so you have to ask yourself where, why, and when to invest resources. Striking this balance between maturity within each “block” and your growth stage is the secret weapon to successfully building your company without over- or under-investing in any given area.
So, what are these blocks? We’ll refer to them using the names below, but feel free to toggle each one open to see how we define them and why we think they’re important.
Block I: The People Team
- Why it’s important: Whether you have a jack-of-all-trades or a group of specialists, how you organize your team matters. It decides your people strategy, reliance on suppliers, and ability to hire well across departments, markets, and seniorities.
- What it means: Who is responsible for people and talent at your organization — both from a strategic and tactical perspective.
Block II: The Hiring Roadmap
- Why it’s important: Your hiring roadmap should ebb and flow with the company’s strategic planning to align resources and budget. If you plan on launching a new feature, securing funding, or entering a new market, you need to consider who you are hiring today, tomorrow, and next quarter to make sure that happens.
- What it means: This is an overview of which roles you will be recruiting for and when. Think of it as a step-by-step map that outlines how your recruitment team will reach your hiring goals for this month, quarter, and year.
Block III: The Employer Brand
- Why it’s important: A strong employer brand is a cornerstone of attracting and retaining top talent and directly reflects your culture and how you treat your candidates and employees.
- What it means: Your employer brand is your story about what makes you unique as an employer. It could be a combination of the projects you work on, the benefits you offer, your mission and vision, your culture, and everything in between.
Block IV: The Compensation and Benefits
- Why it’s important: Nothing will impact your ability to hire top talent, retain your A players, and keep your team motivated like your compensation philosophy. How you financially compensate your employees is one of the most critical factors for talent attraction, retention, and, of course, your bottom line.
- What it means: In short, how you compensate your employees. This could include benefits (think L&D program, mental health resources, retirement, etc.) and financial compensation.
Block V: The Tools and Templates
- Why it’s important: Having the proper documentation and tools in place can lower admin, standardize processes, aggregate data, and make it easy for the rest of the organization to successfully participate in recruitment.
- What it means: It’s the templates, guides, tools, systems, and training material that support your day-to-day talent tasks. You can think of it as tech stack and internal documentation.
Block VI: The Data
- Why it’s important: Data is foundational for performance, decision-making, and storytelling. It is a critical pillar in any high-performing recruitment team. Without it, it’s difficult to know where your inefficiencies are and communicate your team’s impact on the overall organization.
- What it means: Any “people” related data you collect (i.e., time-to-hire, salary, employee retention rates, employee satisfaction, etc.), where you store it, and how you visualize it. This includes quantitative and qualitative insights.
You could even argue that these blocks are an over-simplification of all that goes in a People function. But it’s important to remember that this series can’t answer out answer every people-related question out there — and that there are a lot of nuances in each of these “blocks.” Nuances that we’ll get into in the remaining articles.
First up in the series, we’ll talk about the first and most fundamental topic: who should be on your people team?
