How to build an HR team from scratch?
When I arrived at Qonto, I was the first employee in Human Resources. I had a blank page in front of me… and a lot of things to write. It was 2017 and we had just raised funds, and had high ambitions. From a legal point of view, the company was approaching the 50 employee mark, a turning point as it implied the establishment of a representative body.
Before Qonto, I had never closed out payroll or poked my nose into a collective agreement. I had done recruiting at the start of my career and then moved to talent management, but I had never worked in a startup, nor had I been so close to the founders of a company. It took a lot of work to ensure that I mastered the different topics in my field and brought a concrete contribution to the table.
Today we’re a team of 50 HR professionals, with more than 600 employees on our roster. Let’s look back at how we got here!
Act 1: It starts with recruitment
Casting time
The first question to ask yourself as a founder, and that I am asked regularly today, is: what’s the first HR profile you should recruit?
Your first option is to recruit a generalist HR manager, i.e. a person who wants to do everything — a budding HR Director (that was me, at the time). Ideally, this person is used to working with a management committee and is able to build a group HR policy and roll it out. They should already know how to coordinate different expertise and HR functions.
If you recruit this type of profile, you have to bet on people with whom you have a great “human” fit — someone who shares your vision for the company. This person should also be able to expand the scope of their skills and easily switch from one task to another. The trap would be to recruit someone who doesn’t want to do this and that, like recruitment or admin: when you are a startup, you need employees who are keen to learn everything.
Your second option is hiring a “recruiter expert” — someone who loves it and wants to spend time doing it. When I started out at Qonto, I spent 80% of my time recruiting! Choose someone who is autonomous and well organized. The problem is that not all recruiters are like that: some enjoy the sales dimension and only want to work on “closing” the candidates. That’s all well and good, but the organizational part will be missing: choosing an ATS, learning about what happens in the market, developing recruitment processes, training managers, taking a step back on the organization you are building…
Finally, your third option is to hire an office & admin manager. This would be a less experienced employee in an operational position who will manage your offices, events, team life, service providers, and even the administrative HR tasks such as contracts. Startups often start using Payfit, which I recommend because it’s a very well-made solution. You can become an HR administrator very early in your career with a tool like this.
Unveiling the culture
An essential element of recruitment is your corporate culture. Defining values and working methods is fundamental to attracting the right candidates and recruiting efficiently. Your values are “sales” arguments — for candidates as well as clients — and the basis of solid long-term standards. As soon as I arrived, I helped our founders define them. They really were the first bricks of the architecture we have today.
Concretely, these values materialized as a meticulous onboarding process, complete with a welcome breakfast, both our founders’ involvement as presenters and a full presentation of our teams and our product. We set up a “class” system that allows newcomers to get to know each other and inspire cross-functionality between the different teams. We also created a handbook (on Notion) to centralize all the rules and essential information about life at Qonto. Ready to play!
Act 2: Supporting managers and employees
An essential subject to address as soon as you lay the foundations for HR is People Development. It covers talent management, performance review, internal mobility, team support, etc. This is all the more important in a People-centered organization like Qonto: unlike many companies, our HR culture requires all these processes to be standardized across the board. The People team is a catalyst in both building the team and unifying HR procedures throughout the company.
Our goal is to share the same vision across all teams and to create fairness in the way people are treated through our processes. If we don’t do it, the managers — who are the first line of defense, like a “local HR” — take on the role of HR by building small processes themselves. This is not bad in and of itself, but on the one hand, it’s not their job, and on the other hand, you ultimately create inequality between the teams. And it becomes hard to go back.
The People Team’s vision, which we call the Qonto Way, is People Development: it’s a strong company culture, which is reflected by the organization of the HR team. In a scale-up, the HR team traditionally represents 5 to 7% of the total workforce. At Qonto we’re well over that mark! This is not only related to our hypergrowth and ambitious recruitment objectives (500 people this year), but it’s also representative of the importance we place on People Development topics.
Act 3: Then enter the experts
Creating new dynamics
As the company grows, more and more silos and complexity are appearing between the different HR functions. This means it’s time to create new dynamics and specializations. I reunited HRBPs and People Administration (our “People Ops”) under the same managers, and assigned the pair to a specific department, making them easily identifiable by the overall team yet closer to their department’s challenges.
I then created the People Expertise team. Initially, Learning, Events, Onboarding, Payroll, Compensation & Benefits, and even Employer Branding were managed by existing members of the HR department. But eventually, it gets to the point when you need real experts to build out a long-term strategy and manage complex projects. This is a characteristic of a department in hypergrowth: each employee has their share of operational work along with their share of project management (which also motivates them).
To bring more maturity to the team, I recommend seeking out expertise from larger and more structured companies. Don’t be afraid to recruit from big corporations! They are way underrated. I come from L’Oréal myself and am very proud of everything I learned about HR there. Plenty of people there want to live the startup adventure, and you can find both experienced and skilled profiles to choose from. They already know what a more mature HR department looks like and can bring you insight as to what your team will look like in another year or 5.
Working in open-source with the Ecosystem
No one is superhuman! It’s important to surround yourself with a great team by recruiting one, but it can also help to turn to the outside world to solicit extra help. In the French Tech ecosystem, companies are all each other’s customers. We inspire one another. HR clearly has an interest in sharing tips with their counterparts and avoiding reinventing the wheel. We talk every day on Slack or other digital channels with a lot of goodwill.
I also rely on experts outside of the field. My best friend when I started out in HR was a lawyer: I spent so much time with him that he was almost my favorite colleague! Plus you can tell him any and everything 😉. The HR trade comes with very technical legal elements which can’t just be improvised: you have to take into account the labor laws and the collective labor agreement.
Act 4: Going international
It’s already happening to us now: with not only our hypergrowth but opening of offices in new markets comes the development of international HR teams.
I chose to start initially building out these teams in Paris, with a coordinator for the different countries and an external service provider; the key is to have an administrative expert to decentralize HR admin. Then, as soon as you exceed 10 local employees (and intend to keep growing), my advice is to start recruiting HR professionals locally. Progressively an HR organizational structure appears for each country, with administrative management and recruitment managed locally and expertise globally.
And as that structure begins to take shape, the process of building out your local office HR teams follows the same trajectory as with your core team! One last thing to keep in mind: the HR team is not just the HR team. At the start of a business, everyone does a bit of HR. Your founder or the finance function can manage all the administrative tasks for example. It all depends on your first employees and their skill sets. If you recruit the “recruiter expert” we mentioned before, this will prevent managers from spending 100% of their time on recruitment. It’s a choice you’ll have to make.
On the other hand, I sometimes found myself managing missions that are not 100% HR-related, such as managing the BSPCEs or the IT team, or many things our Chief of Staff is now in charge of! I did it because I was senior within the company and it was necessary for the business. I was stepping out of my role, but tasks like these were too important to leave to just anyone. I delegated them to other team members once the organization grew.
Over the last 4 years, I really had the impression of going through 10 different jobs: that’s how life goes working for a scale-up. You have to know how to do everything… and let go when the time is right.
3 more tips before you go…
📍 The perfect time to recruit your first HR manager
Once your staff grows beyond 40 people (along with projections of future growth), you should recruit an HR professional. My advice is not to wait too long, because the longer you wait, the less standards you create, and the more the quality of your scalable processes will potentially suffer, which will waste a lot of your time.
For example, when recruiting, I had initially benchmarked a very small ATS, but we quickly took on a larger, more solid solution. It was a bit disproportionately sized at the time, but we were betting on the future. This is a key success factor for scaling: now we have all the history, the standards, and the templates. This saved us so much valuable time.
📍 Streamline your hiring plan
I’ve always used rational arguments to reassure key stakeholders when adding new recruits. We have recruitment productivity which means that we recruit 2.5 people per month, per recruiter. Therefore, if your hiring plan is X, you need X recruiters to get in working order. Simple.
It works the same for People Operations and People Development: when I build out the organization, I ask myself how many employees a People Operations or a People Development manager can handle in their scope. Today at Qonto, the former takes on max of 200 employees, and the latter max 250. It allows me to clarify my needs.
📍 Don’t launch all your projects at the same time
In HR, it’s not a good idea to launch all the projects at the same time. Many standards seem obvious when you come from a big company: a clear career track, training available to everyone, and an internal mobility process… when in fact all of these are not necessarily mandatory from the start.
Even if you map out a complete and ambitious HR strategy, you really have to choose your first battles. At the beginning, my priorities were recruitment (make the team grow at the same rate as the expansion of the company so it doesn’t pose a challenge to business development) and culture, the mandatory admin (contracts, internal regulations, charters…), and the performance review (to provide managers with a framework). I added the rest as we grew.
