To get the voice over of this study, replay our talk with Albane Bressolle, VP People @ Back Market.

Table of content:

• Key Highlights
• Benchmark of HR Team sizes from XAnge's portfolio
• HR roles key takeaways from our researches & interviews
• General takeaways
• Structuring your HR Team
• Seed | 0 - 30 people
• Serie A | 30 - 75 people
• Serie B | 75 - 150 people
• Serie C | +150
• HRBP (Human Resource Business Partner)
• HRBP Jobdesc & profile
• HR Experts
• HR Admin/Office
• Payroll
• Checklist to choose a tool 🔧
• Office/Happiness management tips
• Talent Acquisition
• Outsourcing: Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and Recruitment agencies
• Resources
• Special thanks 🙏

FTE Learning/Career: dedicated FTEs on learning or career development, to be hired included.

Office Manager: #FTE, to be hired included.

RPO: including past contracts

HR ops: #FTE in charge of admin tasks (payroll, paid leaves...), to be hired included.

HRBP: #FTE with HRBP position, to be hired not included.

"We often neglect our own team needs and recruit when it's already too late." - Noëlla Gavier, Chief People Officer @Welcome to the Jungle

We have found that HR teams are excellent at identifying the need for job creation in other teams, but not their own. Having enough bandwidth for the HR team (i.e. enough FTE dedicated to HR) is key to be able to help the other teams in their HR needs. In short, "put your oxygen mask first to help others".

As strange as it may seem, between the moment you identify the need for a new HR position in the team and the moment you've recruited, onboarded, and trained the new collaborator: so much time has passed that you "almost" need 3 more persons.

• Always having enough Recruiters

Nowadays, recruiting great Talent Acquisition Managers is becoming really hard: a saturated market with high demand and low availability.

To prevent "shortage" from happening, you should always incorporate HR needs in your Hiring Plan. Overall, the size of the HR team must be thought out according to what the company will look like in the next few months. - more information here

• Creating processes that can evolve with you and your company's growth

An honest mistake a lot of teams make is to spend time every year rethinking them. You should rather improve them over time.

When you're tooling up, you should always think of tomorrow's needs to have flexibility. If you are 50 today, choose one that could support you when you'll be 250. → Your HRIS is a great example. - more information here

Seed | 0 - 30 people

Suggested team sizing: 1 to 2 people (including part-time and interns)

Key challenges:

Recruiting A-players and make sure HR basic employee management is done.

Key functions:

• Admin and Basic employee management
• Talent acquisition

Serie A | 30 - 75 people

Suggested team sizing: 2 to 4 people (including part-time and interns)

Key challenges:

Same as Seed + structuring HR policies and processes to support team growth.

Key functions:

Same as Seed +

• Legal and Compliance
• Mid-level management

Serie B | 75 - 150 people

Suggested team sizing: 4 to 8 people (including part-time and interns)

Key challenges:

Same as Series A + implementing actions for higher retention (career paths, compensation & benfits...) and building management layers with more seniority.

Key functions:

Same as Series A +

• Compensation and Benefits
• People partner and ops

Serie C | +150

Suggested team sizing: 8+ people (including part-time and interns)

Key challenges:

Same as Series B + adapting your HR strategy for a global scale when going international.

Key functions:

Same as Series B +

• Learning and Development
• Onboarding/Offboarding
• Relocation and local experts

"In terms of data, my experience tells me that a good ratio is an HRBP for 100+ employees." - Albane Bressolle - Chataigner, Chief People Officer @Back Market

We often see HRBPs multitasking between admin tasks and their core ones, especially in smaller teams.

In a perfect setting, Business Partners would not have to deal with all the noise that comes from admin tasks. It will allow HRBPs to focus only on their main job: inspiring and helping leaders to reach their goals.

The ultimate luxury for startups would be to have a dedicated HRBP per department. Startups are starting to move towards this goal, like Agicap for example, and their current hiring spree for HRBPs.

One thing is clear: the more senior, the better for an HRBP. Why? Simply because they must be able to handle complex subjects like compensation and learning & development before you hire experts. Usually, they have 5+ years of experience in HR before becoming a business partner.

There are different views on whether they should be admin-free or not.

→ For some, it's a key element for HRBPs to be effective in their job.

→ For others, their workload isn't heavy enough to remove admin tasks and doing "the paperwork" helps them know their assigned team.

Their core missions are (but not limited to):

• HR Processes Engineering
• People Development & Coaching
• Ensure good communication with the Executive management’s
• Employer branding and Culture

The earlier you are willing to allocate resources to hire key HR experts, the easier it will be to structure your team for the long run. It also means that you will be able to hire great profiles for a better price because the scale of their scope, being related to the size of your team, will be smaller.

"It’s never too early: get your HR hire as early as possible" - Albane Bressolle - Chataigner, Chief People Officer @Back Market

1. Compensation and Benefits:

Compensation & Benefits experts are a great example of key HR Experts hires that occur when a startup is scaling.

2. Learning and Development:

"Learning and Development" and "Compensation and Benefits" are two pieces working together.

Your compensation plan is closely linked to the skills one should master to grow in their role. Career path and learning and dev are key retention tools.

When your team is made of a lot of juniors, learning and dev will be key to lower your turnover. If you can show to your employees that they can grow with your company and move up, they will stay longer (and happier). In other words, it’s like perks for your employees.

There is a need to work early on those retention strategies to retain your first believers.

L&D managers are doing more than what you think:

1. Knowledge management to centralize data
2. Give support managers in putting career paths in their teams
3. Set up and create training programs

If your team is made of a young demographic, L&D will help compensate for the lack of seniority. For example, Skello has only 6 senior employees/100 FTEs.

HRBP are following the plans made by L&D for their teams.

Because they are so linked (and you won't be able to set them up at the same time) a "chicken or the egg" debate is kind of going on. Some HRs are firm believers that L&D should be set up first because it's more essential for the company. And others think the exact same way about Comp & Ben. There is no right answer, just preference.

HR should lead the admin while working closely with the Finance dept. Having a frictionless experience for employees on the admin part (payroll, paid leaves...) is crucial for a good eNPS.

For teams crossing the bar of 150/200 FTEs, having 1 person for payroll is not enough anymore. Interns and working students can help absorb the payroll workload, for example:

• Welcome to the Jungle: 1 full-time employee and 1 intern
• AB Tasty: 2 full-time employees

Here's 360 Learning job desc for an Employee Experience Manager:

Payroll is a tricky HR function to take care of due to the complexity of labor laws (that are continuously changing).

From all the interviews we conducted, everyone has been clear: externalize your payroll first and then, when you're big enough, hire an expert.

There is no "critical mass" number that works for every company.

A payroll agency will also be able to give a first level of answer on social law. Even if your team doesn't handle the run, your HR Managers need to understand payroll as a whole.

For example, Skello will start to think about managing the payroll internally at 150 FTEs. For Lucie, it's something to start thinking about when your HR Team is well-structured.

There is a wide variety of tools (HRIS, ATS, People Management Platform...) available to help HR Teams do their work.

⇒ Mirakl launched their HRIS when they were 80 FTEs.

Here's a list of questions to ask yourself when benchmarking a tool:

Office/Happiness management tips

Skello has a cool way of engaging with employees: they elect 3 "Happiness Manager" each month. This enables the HR Team to engage the team, which is great for the culture and enjoyable for the employees who are now invested in the life of the company.

In a smaller team, a HR Manager will take care of the recruiting. Know that recruitment is very time-consuming, it's hard to work on something else. Once your hiring plan becomes more ambitious, it's obvious that you'll need someone fully dedicated to this task.

"From experience, a recruiter handles on average 40 positions per year for generalist roles (e.g.non-tech) vs 20–25 positions for tech roles." - Albane Bressolle, Chief People Officer @Back Market

Start with a full time generalist Talent Acquisition Manager/recruiter. When your hiring needs get more specific, you can structure your TA team accordingly:

• TAMs for general recruiting
• Talent Acquisition Specialists for sought after skills (usually tech and product)
• Campus recruiter for interns and apprentice if you have a big need for junior talents

Example of a Talent Acquisition Team organisation:

Usually, RPOs fees are around 20/25% of the employee's annual salary. Therefore, once that threshold is met (at around 8-10 hires/year )it's more cost-conscious to hire a TA for 40/45k (around 75k with charges in France 🇫🇷 ) than 80k of fees. it's more cost-effective to pay a TA 40/45k than 80k of fees.

Another option could be using Talent Acquisition freelancers (driven by success fees) that basically operate as headhunters for your startup.

Some things to be aware of with RPO:

• Pushing mass unqualified resumes can damage the employer branding and be a waste of time
• The end of the process is always handled by the same managers (final interviews): it can create a bottleneck

Always keep in mind that candidate experience is super important!

Articles used

A simple guide for an HR organisation in start-ups/scale-ups

I often get the same question: how many HR people should you have in an organisation? Don't expect this article to give you all the answers you're looking for, but at least some tips I learned from my 10+ years experience at scaling HR organisations in startups & scaleups.

albanebc.medium.com

How Organizational Staff Size Influences HR Metrics:

How to Calculate Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

"How likely are you to recommend this business to a friend?" Companies have relied on that question and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology since 2003 to measure customer satisfaction toward just about anything, from software to burritos. ‍With engaging and retaining top performers top of mind for most companies, Human Resources departments have brought the concept of NPS to the workplace.

lattice.com

Hey HR! Put on your own oxygen mask first!

Most of us have heard this advice from airlines, in the event of an emergency, reminding us to take care of our own health and safety first. In doing so, we become more capable of helping others.

www.linkedin.com

How we're building an inclusive and scalable talent acquisition program | Webflow Blog

As you grow and scale your team, being able to focus on finding potential candidates, drafting a hiring process, and keeping track of everything in between can be difficult to juggle. At Webflow, we felt the same way a year ago. So, we decided to invest in our talent team.

webflow.com

HR slack communities to share best practices with your peers: