As competition for skilled people becomes more global, scale-ups are being pushed to think harder about what they can offer potential employees. In a global market, skilled workers can compare local offers with remote roles, corporate packages, and high-paying international employers.
“Trying to match every offer can quickly become more than your business can afford,” says Ryan Osher, co-founder and CEO of Civitas, a curated community for founders and CEOs who are scaling businesses. “So the question for scale-ups is how to create a comprehensive package that will attract the best talent. Scale-ups are often weak at articulating their vision and mission, but top performers are highly selective and actively look for purpose and a mission they can buy into.”
Many strong candidates are looking to learn faster, get closer to decision-making, and work where their contribution is noticed. Smaller businesses can offer that, but only if they know what makes the company worth joining and are serious about how they support people once they do.
“Think about hiring the way you think about customers,” says Osher. “You wouldn’t expect people to buy without a clear reason, yet many companies still post job ads that say very little about why someone should join. A strong employee value proposition (EVP) should explain the upside for them, whether that means more interesting work or the chance to take on real responsibility earlier in their career.”
Build a ‘black book’ pipeline
The best time to look for talent is before you have an open vacancy. “Keep a running list – a ‘black book’ or bench – of potential talent that you meet everywhere, all the time,” says Civitas co-founder Paul Smith.
He points to South African entrepreneur Barney Beukes, who built a R100m+ business using this exact strategy. Impressed by a restaurant manager who turned up at 1:00 AM to sort out an issue, Beukes made a point of getting to know him. This relationship ultimately led to Beukes appointing that manager as MD to establish a new business.
“A scale-up needs to build a marketing strategy behind attracting people,” Smith adds. “Identify 100 great candidates on LinkedIn, post about your culture, and dedicate just one half-day a week for your CEO to have short, 15-minute introductory chats with targeted talent. This turns hiring from a last-minute reactive scramble into an ongoing pipeline.”
Founders can also scale this pipeline through alternative recruitment methods:
· The Onboarding Referral: During a new hire’s onboarding, conduct an interview specifically asking them to list the best people they have ever worked with, and encourage them to get those people to apply.
· The Advisory Board Long-Game: For high-level executives, bring them onto an advisory board first. This gets them organically invested in the business over a two-year period before transitioning to full-time.
· Permalancers: Start talent on a freelance basis and scale them into full-time roles as the business grows.
Give people reasons to stay
Once talent is through the door, scale-ups must make their promises visible in day-to-day work. One software development company in the Civitas network has built a culture so compelling that employees regularly turn down double salary offers from corporate competitors, Smith says. They achieved this by fostering a fun engineering culture, implementing trial weeks to ensure mutual fit, and offering quarterly raises tied strictly to learning KPIs.
Smaller businesses can also leverage perks that corporates cannot match, such as offering an extra long weekend every six weeks or explicitly helping employees achieve their personal dreams.
To build long-term retention, founders should consider:
· Providing mentorship: Give everyone in the business a mentor, paying for top external mentors where it makes sense to accelerate growth.
· Offering sophisticated financial upside: Move beyond basic bonuses to implement sophisticated growth incentives like profit-sharing or phantom share schemes.
· Shorten time-to-value: Top performers want to feel useful quickly and lose momentum if they lack ownership. Scale-ups should measure a new hire’s ‘time-to-value’ and map out exactly where they will contribute real work in their first 30, 60, and 90 days.
· Practice immediate recognition: Don’t wait for annual reviews. Implement a repeatable, ongoing practice of praising useful contributions specifically and right then and there.
Professionalise with the right tools
Managing people as individuals requires the right framework. Osher highlights a founder in the network who had team members build personal ‘user manuals’ detailing where they grew up, their favourite foods, their communication preferences, and what motivates them.
“These manuals are read before onboarding new team members so the team can manage individually rather than using a single style for everyone,” says Osher. “Members are now supplementing these documents with AI, creating a secure GPT repository so managers can reference past context to better support a team member when an issue arises.”
As the first layer of management grows, ensuring they are great bosses who do proper one-on-ones is vital. But keeping standards high also means being disciplined about who stays.
“A core part of a scale-up’s retention strategy is actually exiting weak people super fast,” Osher notes. “Good people notice when standards slip, and top performers lose momentum when poor performance is allowed to drag on.”
To keep standards high without blowing the budget, successful scale-ups use a mix of robust testing tools and strict vetting processes:
· Skills testing software: Use automated assessment tools like Shadowmatch, TestDome, or TestGorilla to verify technical capabilities, and use trial tasks to see how candidates handle real work.
· Outsourced experts: When hiring outside your own expertise – like bringing in a technical lead – hire an outsourced CTO to interview and properly test the candidate’s skills.
· World-class reference checking: Move past basic reference checks by digging for radical honesty. Ask previous managers to rate the candidate out of 10, or ask the candidate directly: “Would you introduce me to your previous manager?”
