How to attract, identify, and hire a talented team for your SaaS startup in 6 steps

Sooner or later, the time will come for you to consider growing your team. You’ll have a lot to think about, especially while you’re busy running your business full-time. 

You need to find time to keep a lean startup and manage your time for hiring and normal work—all while getting top talent on board.

This article gives you 6 steps you need to complete before you post that hiring update on LinkedIn—including why it’s worth taking your time with recruitment efforts, what to consider about employee onboarding, and where to look for top SaaS talent.

Key takeaways

• Before jumping headfirst into recruiting, confirm that existing bottlenecks and limitations cannot be solved with more efficient processes

• When bringing new people on board, hiring for culture fit should be your main priority: look for an applicant’s personality, expertise, and attitude throughout the process

• Try to bring in external experts or advisors when interviewing for a position you're not familiar with

• If you are a mostly technical team, consider bringing marketers on board to help you build an audience

• Ensure your onboarding process is smooth and repeatable

1. Decide whether you actually need to grow the team

If or when you experience scaling problems, you might be tempted to solve them by hiring someone new. Instead of launching into recruitment straight away, take the time to perform a root cause analysis to understand where in the chain things are falling behind, and try to find the right process to remove any bottlenecks first. 

Competition among early-stage companies for top talent is fierce, but the only way to think about startup jobs and hiring is that anything less than the best won’t do. You can see it as a case of ‘hiring for a business problem’ instead of ‘hiring person X before someone else does because they’re great’. 

Before committing to bringing someone else on board, always make sure there are enough hours of ongoing repeatable work for new hires:

2. Figure out the hiring process (and how long it should take)

This might sound counter-intuitive, but if you reached the point where you need someone else because you have run out of time, you need to find…more time to dedicate to startup hiring.

You don’t want to hire fast, bring the wrong person on board, and lose some of your best people as a result. That’s why successful startups that build a great company and cohesive team are intentional with the positions they create and hire for. They want to ensure they establish the right position that matches the needs of the company to the right individual job searching for that role.

You may be a small team without formalized company values, but you should already know what your goals are, what is important to you, and how you want to work together.

Use this knowledge as a guiding principle and take your time hiring for culture fit: find people whose business and life values align with yours, and who can communicate and work well together with the rest of the existing team.

An example of Contentsquare’s commitments to their employees from the careers page

To ensure culture fit in our ever-growing team, we have implemented a structured hiring process with 5 checkpoints:

1. Initial screening: first up, shortlisted applicants are invited to meet one of our talent partners for a quick chat about their experience and the role at hand—and to learn about Contentsquare’s mission, culture, and values 

2. Hiring manager interview: if it looks like they’re a good fit for us and we’re a good fit for them, the candidate meets the hiring manager to talk about the specifics of the job  

3. Technical test: next up, the potential new teammate is asked to demonstrate their expertise with a technical test or interview related to the role they’d be undertaking. This is a useful step for understanding how they would approach their day-to-day duties.

4. Team assessment: successful candidates then meet the team they’d be working with, to see how they’ll slot into the existing dynamic 

5. Final interview: we meet with candidates that make it through all 4 rounds one last time, just to check everyone is confident to move forward with a job offer, and answer any final questions on either side 

We’re going for thorough rather than fast—the whole journey can take around 4-5 weeks. Reviewing a candidate’s work and interactions with the rest of the team also helps us get a really good understanding of whether, and how, they would fit in if they were offered the role.

We always try to provide feedback to candidates as quickly as possible—within 1–2 days after each interview. Applying for roles is a full-time job in itself, so it’s good practice to be respectful of applicants’ time. It may be hard to prioritize communicating hiring decisions with candidates as a small SaaS startup (especially where they’re unsuccessful) but it’s vital to do so. The world of SaaS is surprisingly small—you should protect your reputation as a kind and fair employer.  

3. Find the right people

Recruitment agencies are generally expensive for startups, especially if their fee includes a percentage of the annual salary upfront. Going at it the social way by posting on X or Bluesky may not be very efficient, but it’s worth a try; LinkedIn ads might bring in more targeted candidates, though they could get expensive fast.

As a small team, you’re probably better off trying to find the online spaces where the people you need ‘hang out’. Good examples are Stackoverflow if you’re looking for devs and WeWorkRemotely or Welcome to the Jungle for remote team members. You should always use your network connections and reach out to any relevant contacts you made at conferences or accelerated programs you participated in.

If you can’t afford a full-time salary, you can explore temporary alternatives that don’t involve hiring, such as contracting and working with external partners. You can also look at part-time hiring and job-sharing options: you can allow candidates to apply separately or in tandem, with a joint CV that highlights the pair’s overlapping and complementing skills.

4. Hire product marketers

If you and your co-founders are mostly technical, it’s easy for you to get caught up in the product, especially at an early stage. When you’re ready to go to market, you want to have someone marketing-minded who can help express your value proposition clearly and persuasively, and knows how to network their way around the industry.

Try to bring on board someone who has empathy for your market and has launched projects with little investment.

If this is not possible right now, consider splitting your time between business roles: for example, be the sales or marketing person on Monday and Tuesday, the product person on Wednesday and Thursday, and the finance person on Friday. This kind of separation allows you to focus on the main issues in each department instead of trying to do everything at once.

5. Make employee onboarding easy

Work on your onboarding and make it a repeatable process so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time someone new joins. 

The team at EnhanCV, for example, asks new employees to work through a Trello board that includes tasks to familiarize themselves with company structure, values, and policies. Measure effectiveness and get feedback from each new hire, so you can tweak the process accordingly.

EnhanCV's Onboarding Trello Board

Pro tip: if you’re using Contentsquare (that’s us—an experience intelligence platform) to get closer to your users for marketing and product development reasons, don’t forget you have access to an easy-to-use Survey tool. Use it to set up a feedback survey for new employees who have completed your onboarding. 

The process couldn’t be simpler: type the goals for your survey into our AI Surveys assistant, and it’ll automatically generate a set of effective questions. Then, customize your survey to match your brand, publish it as a link, and send it out to new hires via email or Slack. This way, you’ll receive structured insights into what’s going well in your onboarding process and determine what aspects you need to improve. 

Generate an onboarding feedback survey with Contentsquare’s AI Survey assistant

6. Become an effective leader

You may be an amazing developer, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be an equally amazing manager if and when your team grows 10x in size. In the startup world, the emphasis on ‘getting things done, fast’ doesn’t account for the learning curve you and your team will need to go through as you grow.

As a founder or staff member moving into management positions, you might later need guidance and training on how to build a high-performing team. Know that working a ton of hours won’t result in more customers or revenue, but it will lead straight to burnout: learn to take care of your team’s well-being, check in with them, and keep a good work environment.

Blog Posts

• Hiring for pre-product-market-fit SaaS startups, Sharon Klaver

• The Problem with SaaS Marketing, Georgiana Laudi

• Who Should a Startup Hire First?, Roy Bahat

• A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation, First Round Review

• A Better Way to Hire & Scale Your Team, Brian Casel 

• A Bootstrapper’s Formula For Hiring Your First Employee, Brian Casel

Video & Audio

• The SaaS Founder's Guide to Building the Perfect Team, MicroConf 

• Don't Make These Hiring Mistakes, Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora 

• How Should You Hire Your First Employee in a SaaS Start-up?, TalentBee 

• How to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS Startup, Andrew Davis and Joran Hofman

Books

• StrengthsFinder 2.0, Tom Rath

• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You, Judy Zhou

FAQs about SaaS startup hiring