The Series A Hiring Plan: How to Scale Your Team Post-Funding

Congratulations on your Series A. You've validated product-market fit, convinced investors to back your vision, and secured capital to scale. Now comes the hard part: turning that capital into a team that can execute your ambitious plans.

Most Series A companies plan to double or triple headcount within 12-18 months. That's an enormous operational challenge, and getting it wrong burns runway, destroys culture, and derails your growth trajectory.

Here's how to build a hiring plan that works.

Start With Your 18-Month Plan

Your hiring plan should derive from your business plan, not the reverse. Before thinking about roles, answer:

- What are your key business objectives for the next 18 months? - What milestones will set you up for Series B? - What capabilities are required to hit those milestones? - What's the sequence of dependencies?

Work backwards from outcomes to capabilities to roles.

Prioritize Ruthlessly

You have more roles to fill than you can hire for simultaneously. Quality recruiting takes time and attention—spreading too thin means every hire takes longer and is lower quality.

### Tier 1: Immediate (Months 1-6)

These are roles without which you cannot execute your core plan:

- Leaders who need to be in place before you can hire their teams - Individual contributors blocking critical path initiatives - Roles where the current team is unsustainably stretched

Limit Tier 1 to 5-8 roles. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

### Tier 2: Near-Term (Months 6-12)

Important roles that can wait until Tier 1 is substantially complete:

- Team members reporting to newly hired leaders - Capabilities you'll need as current initiatives mature - Roles that are important but not blocking immediate progress

### Tier 3: Later (Months 12-18)

Roles you'll eventually need but shouldn't distract you now:

- Scaling additional capacity in established functions - New capabilities for future phases - Nice-to-haves that don't drive core metrics

Revisit this prioritization quarterly. What seemed Tier 3 six months ago may become urgent based on how the business evolves.

The Leadership-First Principle

A common mistake: hiring individual contributors before their leaders, intending to backfill management later.

This creates problems:

- ICs make decisions that their future manager might override - You build team culture without the person responsible for culture - Strong ICs may not want to report to a new, external leader - The new leader inherits a team they didn't select

For any function you're building, hire the leader first. Yes, this is slower initially. But it's faster and less painful overall.

Key Roles for Post-Series A

While every company is different, these roles commonly become critical at Series A:

### VP of Engineering

If your CTO is founder-level, they likely need a VP of Engineering to manage growing technical complexity—hiring, process, delivery, and team health—while the CTO focuses on architecture and technical strategy.

### VP of Sales (or first Sales Leader)

To scale revenue, you need someone who's built sales organizations before. This person will establish your sales process, hire your initial sales team, and create the playbook for scaling.

### Head of People / HR

At 20-30 employees, informal people processes start breaking. Benefits administration, compliance, compensation structure, and employee relations need dedicated attention.

### Marketing Leadership

Whether VP or Head of Marketing, you need someone owning demand generation, brand, and potentially product marketing. This role is particularly important if you're scaling sales.

### Finance Leader

A CFO may be premature, but a VP of Finance or Head of Finance can implement financial infrastructure, support fundraising, and provide the data you need to make decisions.

Building Your Recruiting Engine

With multiple simultaneous searches, you can't treat recruiting as an ad-hoc activity.

### Dedicated Recruiting

By Series A, you should have dedicated recruiting capacity:

- In-house recruiter (if you'll hire 20+ people) - Recruiting coordinator (if you'll hire 15+ people) - Agency partnerships for senior/specialized roles

### Structured Process

Document your interview process for each role:

- Who's involved at each stage - What each interviewer evaluates - How you make and communicate decisions - Target timelines for each phase

Consistency improves candidate experience, enables comparison, and prevents things from falling through cracks.

### Employer Branding

At Series A scale, candidates start Googling you before responding to outreach. Invest in:

- A compelling careers page - Content showcasing your culture and work - Glassdoor/LinkedIn presence management - Clear articulation of your mission and values

Compensation Philosophy

Scaling requires a compensation strategy beyond "negotiate each hire individually."

### Develop Salary Bands

Create salary ranges for each role at each level. This ensures internal equity, simplifies negotiation, and makes hiring decisions faster.

### Benchmark Regularly

Compensation markets move quickly. Benchmark against comparable companies quarterly, adjusting bands as needed.

### Equity Framework

Create a systematic approach to equity grants:

- Standard grant sizes by level - Vesting schedules - Refresh grant philosophy - Documentation that candidates understand

### Budget Reality

Be realistic about what you can afford. A common Series A mistake: making too-generous offers early, creating internal equity problems as you scale, or burning runway faster than planned.

Onboarding at Scale

Your current onboarding—"sit with the founders for a week"—won't work at scale.

### Develop Systems

- Written documentation of tools, processes, and norms - Structured first-week schedule - 30/60/90 day expectations - Buddy or mentor assignments - Regular check-ins

### Preserve Culture Intentionally

Culture doesn't scale automatically. What got transmitted implicitly when you were 10 people needs explicit transmission at 50. Document your values and weave them into hiring, onboarding, and ongoing rituals.

Common Series A Hiring Mistakes

### Hiring Too Fast

Pressure to deploy capital drives many companies to hire faster than they can absorb new people. Each hire should have clear work, proper onboarding, and management attention. Hiring faster than you can provide these things degrades quality and culture.

### Hiring Too Senior

"We need experienced people" leads some companies to hire exclusively senior leaders. But senior people need teams to lead. Balance leadership hires with strong ICs who can execute.

### Hiring Too Junior

The opposite mistake: hiring cheap to stretch runway further. Junior people need management and mentorship that you may not have capacity to provide.

### Ignoring Culture Fit

In the rush to fill seats, it's tempting to compromise on culture. Don't. One cultural mismatch at a senior level can poison your organization. Hold your standards even when it slows you down.

### Underinvesting in Recruiting

Recruiting is a leverage point: small improvements in process compound across every hire. Invest in recruiting infrastructure proportional to your hiring ambitions.

A Sample 18-Month Hiring Plan

For a hypothetical B2B SaaS company post-Series A:

**Months 1-4:** - VP Engineering - 2 Senior Engineers - VP Sales - First 2 Account Executives

**Months 4-8:** - 3 Additional Engineers - VP Marketing - 2 Additional AEs - SDR Lead + 2 SDRs - Head of Customer Success

**Months 8-12:** - Engineering Manager - 4 Additional Engineers - Head of People - 2 Additional AEs - Product Manager

**Months 12-18:** - VP Finance - 3 Additional Engineers - Marketing team buildout - Sales team expansion - Customer Success expansion

This is illustrative—your plan should reflect your specific strategy, market, and constraints.

Tracking and Adjusting

Your hiring plan is a living document. Track:

- Pipeline health by role - Time-to-fill by role - Quality of hires (leading and lagging indicators) - Recruiting spend vs. budget - Offer acceptance rates

Review monthly, adjust quarterly. The plan you start with won't be the plan you finish with—and that's fine. The value is in the structured thinking, not the specific predictions.