What Series A founders get wrong about hiring
You just closed your Series A. The wire hit last week, and now you’re staring at a hiring plan that calls for tripling your team in eighteen months. Most founders treat this moment as a signal to start calling recruiters. That instinct, while understandable, often leads to the most expensive mistake of the scaling journey.
Recruitment costs can quietly consume 15-20% of a round before anyone notices. Agency fees of 20-25% per placement add up fast when you’re hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Factor in the lost productivity from extended searches and the compounding cost of bad hires, and the true expense of getting hiring wrong dwarfs what most founders budget.
Mistake one: treating hiring as an event rather than a function
Most early-stage founders approach recruiting transactionally. A role opens, they engage an agency or post on LinkedIn, they fill it, and they move on. This works at seed stage when you’re hiring a handful of people you probably already know. It breaks completely when you need to hire 30 people in a year.
Companies that scale efficiently treat talent acquisition as an infrastructure. They build employer brand assets before they’re desperate. They create interview processes that can be delegated without losing quality. They establish relationships with candidates months before roles open. None of this happens when hiring is treated as a series of isolated emergencies.
According to the Atomico State of European Tech report, early-stage companies experienced a 35% drop in hiring rates in 2025, as founders opted for leaner, more intentional teams. The signal is clear: the best European founders are being more deliberate about every hire, building capability rather than just filling seats.
Mistake two: optimising for speed over repeatability
When your first engineering hire takes three months, the natural response is to throw resources at making the next one faster. Founders bring in multiple agencies, pay premium fees for exclusive searches, and compress interview processes to move quickly. This often works for individual hires while making the overall problem worse.
The issue is that speed through brute force doesn’t compound. Each hire remains just as expensive and uncertain as the last. What compounds are building a recruiting engine: sourcing channels that reliably produce qualified candidates, interview loops that accurately predict performance, and compensation frameworks that close offers without endless negotiation.
Embedded recruiting models have gained traction precisely because they address this gap. Rather than paying agencies per placement, companies bring in dedicated recruiters who work exclusively on their hiring, building institutional knowledge and repeatable processes.
Mistake three: ignoring European talent dynamics
European founders building remote-first companies sometimes assume they can hire anywhere, so regional dynamics don’t matter. This assumption collides with reality when they try to build engineering teams in Berlin, Amsterdam, or Zurich.
The Atomico report found that the proportion of new hires in AI/ML roles grew 88% in 2025 compared to the previous year. Every funded startup building AI capabilities is now competing for the same limited pool of engineers with production experience. Meanwhile, net inflow of senior tech professionals to Europe is edging toward zero as Big Tech continues recruiting experienced engineers with substantial compensation packages.
These market realities shape everything from timelines to offer structures. German candidates expect a three to six months’ notice period before starting. European engineers generally value equity less than their US counterparts, making total compensation packages more complex to structure. Understanding these dynamics before you need to hire is the difference between building a strong team and watching top candidates accept competing offers while you’re still scheduling final interviews.
What the best founders do differently
The founders who navigate Series A hiring successfully share a counterintuitive trait: they start building recruiting capability before they think they need it. They designate someone on the founding team to own talent, even part-time. They invest in employer brand content and candidate pipelines during quieter periods. They establish relationships with recruiting partners who can scale with them rather than engaging agencies ad hoc.
This approach requires spending money and attention on hiring infrastructure before the pain becomes acute. It feels premature in the moment. But the alternative is reaching the steep part of the growth curve and realising you’re trying to build the plane while flying it.
The European startup ecosystem has matured dramatically. The founders raising Series A rounds today face more sophisticated competition for talent than any previous generation. The ones who treat hiring as infrastructure rather than an afterthought will be the ones still scaling two years from now.
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