A guide to building out your People org for companies going from 0 to ~500 employees
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When I originally wrote this, AI was only starting to become a thing.
I need to revise this document to reflect the realities of the People function in an increasingly AI-driven context. At some point, I’ll revise this with an AI perspective.
I take an additive (not replacement) view of AI. With AI tools, what our role as People people looks like will change, as will domain expertise competencies.
HR teams will likely be smaller in the future, but so will the size of companies overall. Proportionally, I expect the People function to remain the same. Though if the People function is able to develop a strong AI enablement mandate, there’s room for HR teams to grow as they embrace new responsibilities.
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Introduction
The goal of this guide is to help growing startups think through how to staff their people function for growth.
While no two companies are the same, there are some general frameworks you can apply. These suggestions are steeped in my experience scaling high-growth organizations (the first from 9-250+ employees and second going from 45 to 500+), advising several startups and people-focused communities.
Although my focus here is on headcount growth, that isn’t always the goal. Rather, at each stage, it’s ensuring the People function builds a strong mandate and positively impacts the business.
You can check out some of my other guides here. And if you’re new to my resources, it may be helpful to read this to understand my perspective. Everyone’s experience is different. And I welcome you to share it to further ensure a variety of perspectives are represented.
Seeing a company take shape is a beautiful thing. It’s a symphony that starts out soft, and builds, and builds. Each stage is beautiful in its own way. (For music people, a lot like Ravel’s Boléro).
Every company grows at a different pace. However, there are fairly distinct phases of development. Some companies reach them early. Some later. (Often, you’ll see ‘serial’ founders empower certain functions earlier after having seen their benefit in prior companies).
In my model of People-team development, there are four (technically five) different phases of growth and maturity. We’ll call these ‘Stages’ hereafter.
No doubt, this ‘model’ could be applied to most any department (Marketing, Finance, IT, etc) with different weighting for the ‘when’ (funding & headcount).
Each stage reflects the maturation in three areas:
Almost always, this is achieved through additional headcount paralleling the overall growth of the business.