The Ultimate Recruitment Playbook — Chapter 1: Building your A-players organization

This post is part of our Serena Recruitment playbook and is followed by :

• chapter 2 on Create a memorable candidate experience
• chapter 3 on Never stop sourcing
• chapter 4 on Employer Branding
• chapter 5 on Tool & KPIs
• chapter 6 on Compensation

Chapter 1 - Building your A-players organization

My name is Emilie. I love action, pace, adrenaline. And for some mysterious reasons, I love human beings. So I spent the last 12 years dealing with them in fast-growing organizations. And when I say fast-growing, it’s a euphemism. The most significant growth I had to deal with was scaling a company from 0 to 1500 people within 4 years… What an adventure :)

When Amélie Faure, who created the Operating Team at Serena hired me, she did it because her experience as a former entrepreneur and as an Operating Partner taught her that hiring is every founder’s greatest challenge. And of course, I was 100% convinced of this fact myself.

My role at Serena is to empower Founders, C levels, and Heads of HR, in their organization and in people challenges, leveraging my own experience and all the situations, concrete examples, best practices (…) that I encounter among the Portfolio companies’ teams. After 1 year at Serena working with them, I’m more convinced than ever of the following premise: businesses don’t create value, people do. And this makes recruitment the #1 priority for many CEOs.

That being said, I made it my point to facilitate recruitment for our portfolio’s founders and HR teams, to make it a breeze. You might be wondering why I don’t just recruit for them with my 12-year experience; well, that’s neither scalable nor valuable in the long term. On the contrary, providing them with best-of-class resources and methodologies to arm them in their recruitment approaches is way more profitable, and aligned with our motto at Serena: “empower, don’t substitute!”

Also, what I know for sure is that pretty much everyone ends up in a recruiter’s shoes at one point, not only founders and HR managers. Yet, recruitment is a job you learn by practicing over and over again and there is no proper training for it. It therefore appeared essential for me to design a proprietary methodology, aiming at setting up a scalable, first-class recruitment experience. (By the way, my friend David Simeoni, founder & CEO of Elinoi, also came to the same conclusion and built a full training program dedicated to recruitment and I had the opportunity to be part of the pilot)

So I created a comprehensive playbook dedicated to recruitment; it’s a synthesis of all of the best practices we heard of, read about, and practiced ourselves. I say “ourselves” because I made it with the precious help of Eleonore Manchon (Headhunter at Taste) and Elsa Lacheret (Intern at Serena) that I would like to warmly thank for this amazing teamwork!

6 major themes emerged from our experience and now shape this guide:

• Building your A-player organization,
• Creating the best Candidate Experience,
• Employer branding,
• Sourcing A-Player candidates,
• Measuring your efficiency with tools & KPIs,
• Paying your Talents the right way.

Building your A-Player Organization

It’s undeniable: recruitment has a strategic role in a business. You don’t hire with the sole goal to alleviate the workload of your staff; you hire to build an efficient organization that will create value and deliver business. That’s why the first chapter of this guide had to be about Building your organization.

This first part explains the different stages of organizations for Marketplace and SaaS companies, depending on their round of investment (seed, series A, B, C). Readers will learn to anticipate and structure your organization according to your next funding round.

It also contains theoretical and ideal org charts for each stage of the company and real examples from Serena’s portfolio: iBanFirst and Wecasa.

The playbook’s access is reserved to the Serena Squad, made of the founders and C-levels of our portfolio companies; but I’m happy to share with you some of the main takeaways.

Key takeaways Chapter 1

For Pre-seed and Seed company :

• While in SaaS companies, you’d better concentrate on your product and you can work on it for several years before finding a sufficiently satisfying version able to meet customer needs, in Marketplaces, your focus will be on reaching consumers. This means hiring people managing user interface, supply/demand matching and cohort analysis from the very beginning.
• If you wonder when staffing the TAM (Talent Acquisition Manager) function, it is seed-stage hiring.
• Even if there is a theoretical ideal pattern, your org chart will largely depend on the co-founders’ profiles and skills

Series A: time to scale

At that point, founders need to stop cumulating roles, invest more in their teams, and trust them. In one word: delegate. Not easy right? ;). This means investing in :

• Talented VPs who gained experience on how to scale, grow and lead large groups and departments in larger organizations.
• An experienced CHRO dedicated to recruitment, talent development, employee retention. The company may experience its first wave of departures (frequent after the first 2 to 3 years and highly time-consuming).
• While until now, the finance matters were totally manageable by a part-time external CFO or a quite young finance manager, it might be time to invest in a CFO with a fundraising experience that will lead you toward the Series B/C rounds and that will manage the growing complexity.

Series B/C: international expansion

When accelerating your international expansion, your organization needs to evolve again. Here’s how things should go at this stage:

• A clear CEO role has been defined. It can be a founder or an external MD. This is the time when founders and MDs must decide who best represents the company.
• A strong CFO that can lead large financing rounds and knows fundraising processes with a specialist of consolidation able to build consistency between the emerging new P&Ls.
• A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) becomes necessary to bring a holistic approach to revenue generation and to manage a new function: the country directors
• An Internal Communication / Culture Manager needs to be hired: when your organization counts more than 150 people and international subsidiaries, you cannot rely any longer on internal informal communication. You need a cultural alignment.

One last tip: each startup has its own path and development pace but what makes the difference is anticipation! You don’t need to have an open position to start meeting talented people. The latter can actually become your C-levels.

A concrete example ? Bertrand Diard, founder and ex CEO of Talend, co-founder of Influans, and former President of Tech in France made “never stop sourcing” his motto. And he made this motto a company culture at Talend: it’s part of the managers’ OKRs to meet 3 new candidates each week. As a result : Talend went IPO in 2016 in the US. You might think that the causality is exaggerated. Well, that’s not Bertrand Diard‘s take: “ One of my biggest key success factors is having succeeded in surrounding myself with the good people. And to do so, I had to meet with talents all the time.”

You know what’s left to do!

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About Serena

Founded in 2008 by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, Serena invests in bold ventures and provides them with an unrivaled level of expertise and operational support.

In just ten years, the firm has already contributed to the emergence of many success stories and has currently 40 handpicked startups in its portfolio such as Dataiku, Evaneos, Malt, iBanFirst, CybelAngel, or Lifen.

Find out more at www.serena.vc.

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