People Ops Question: When and how do we hire our first “People Ops” person?

By Sabrina Kelly, Techstars Vice President of People Operations

At Techstars, we define our mission in People Ops as the following: “We are strategic partners in building Techstars business by maximizing the value of our most important asset — our people. We attract, retain, develop, and support Techstars employees globally and aim to uphold our culture and values, in a manner that is inclusive to all.”

As VP of People Ops, I hear a lot of questions from founders. This series aims to answer the most frequent questions.

In my experience, there is a lot that you can get done early on with just a little external help. There are a number of influencing factors — the biggest being how quickly you’re growing — but until a company reaches about 30 employees, typically there isn’t much need for a dedicated People Ops person. Depending on your growth trajectory, I would start thinking about making a dedicated People Ops hire between 25 and 40 FTEs (that’s “full-time employees” in HR-speak). It’s around that point that consistent processes for things like onboarding, performance management, and recruiting become really valuable in order to maintain consistency in the culture of the business as you grow. In addition to getting ahead of some employment laws that kick in around 50 FTEs, it can also become more difficult to keep a pulse on the your employees around that point, as you’ll likely have multiple teams and managers starting to do their own hiring.

When founders ask me what to look for in their first People Ops hire, I typically recommend looking for someone with some experience in recruiting, who might be interested in expanding their role as the company grows. Recruiters are the gatekeepers to your company, and often at a scaling startup, your biggest pain point is hiring great people fast. Having a strong in-house recruiter can take a lot of that burden off of the founding team and also help to ensure that you are hiring the RIGHT people. Plus, it might be an easy trade from a cost perspective to repurpose your agency fees toward training someone awesome in-house.

Starting with a focus on recruiting allows the People Ops hire to naturally create connections with early employees that might make it easier for them to maintain trust and therefore a solid pulse on the company as it grows. Those relationships and insights allow them to serve as an advisor to the founders on key people challenges as their position expands.

Recruiting expertise and background aside, what’s most important for this hire is that you feel strongly that this is a high-integrity person whose judgment you trust. Having a great People Ops person early on can potentially save you from some really bad (and therefore extremely costly) hiring and management decisions.

Their ability to act as a high-integrity sounding board — for both founders and employees — can lead to really valuable counsel that helps steer the company in the right direction.