The uncomfortable truth about hiring for growth
Here’s something nobody tells you when your business starts moving fast: the people decisions you make between hire number one and hire number fifty will define your culture, your performance, and your profit for years to come.
Not your branding. Not your product. Not your funding round.
Your people.
And yet most fast-growth businesses treat hiring as a race: get bums on seats, hit headcount, keep the wheels turning. The result? A team built for speed that wasn’t built to last.
I’ve worked with transformational, fast-paced companies at every stage of growth. What separates the businesses that scale brilliantly from the ones that scale messily isn’t funding or market timing, it’s the quality of their people decisions, made early, made deliberately, and made with commercial intent.
Here are the seven decisions that matter most.
Decision 1: Hire for where you’re going, not where you are
The most common hiring mistake in fast-growth businesses is recruiting for the job as it exists today.
Your business at £2m revenue looks completely different to your business at £10m. The person who is brilliant for the first is not always the right person for the second and if you hire for now, you will find yourself rehiring for the future sooner than you think.
Before every hire, ask: what does this role need to look like in 18 months? Does this person have the capacity to grow into that version?
This doesn’t mean hiring people who are overqualified and bored. It means being honest about your trajectory and intentional about finding people who can move with it.
The exhilHRate take: Write job descriptions for the role as it will be, not as it is. And if you wouldn’t hire someone into the more senior version of that role in 18 months… Think hard before hiring them now.
Decision 2: Define your values before you hire, not after
Values that exist as laminated posters in the kitchen are not values. They’re wallpaper.
Real values are the behaviours you hire for, develop, recognise, and when necessary, exit people for. They are the golden thread between how you treat your team and how your team treats your clients.
If you haven’t defined what good looks like in your business before you start hiring at scale, you are leaving your culture entirely to chance. You’ll end up with a collection of individuals rather than a high-performing team and culture becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to course-correct the larger your headcount grows.
Before your next hire, be able to answer: what are three behaviours we would never tolerate here, and three we celebrate without fail?
The exhilHRate take: Values are not a branding exercise. They are the framework for every people decision you will ever make. Get them right early and they do the heavy lifting for you as you grow.
Decision 3: Don’t confuse ‘culture fit’ with ‘culture add’
This one is crucial and gets missed more often than you’d think.
Hiring for culture fit, taken too literally, produces teams that think alike, challenge rarely, and innovate slowly. The fastest-growing businesses I work with are the ones that hire people who share their values but bring genuinely different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking.
The question isn’t ‘will this person fit in?’ The question is ‘what will this person bring that we don’t already have?’
Diversity of thought, background, and experience is a commercial advantage. Teams that can approach problems from multiple angles, challenge each other respectfully, and bring in external perspectives consistently outperform homogeneous ones.
The exhilHRate take: Audit your last five hires. Do they all look, sound and think the same? If yes, that’s a flag – not about your intentions, but about your process.
Decision 4: Set the management standard before you need to enforce it
One of the most expensive mistakes a fast-growth business makes is promoting its best individual contributor into a management role with no support, no framework, and no development.
Your best salesperson is not automatically your best sales manager. Your strongest operator is not automatically your strongest team leader. Management is a skill and like every skill, it needs to be learned, practised and developed.
When you’re growing fast, you promote people quickly because you have to. The businesses that do this well invest in those people immediately: clear expectations, regular feedback, practical development, and honest conversations when it’s not landing.
The businesses that do it badly – and I see this regularly – promote people, leave them to wing it, and wonder six months later why team morale has collapsed.
The exhilHRate take: Every time you promote someone into management, treat it like a new hire. Onboard them into the role. Set expectations. Support them. Don’t assume they know what good looks like just because they were brilliant as an individual.
Decision 5: Build your onboarding like you mean it
The research is unambiguous: the experience a new hire has in their first 90 days determines whether they stay, thrive and become advocates for your business or disengage, underperform and leave within a year.
And yet the majority of fast-growth businesses have an onboarding process that amounts to a laptop, a Slack invite, and a ‘you’ll pick it up as you go’ approach.
Great onboarding does four things: it connects people to the purpose of the business, it sets clear expectations from day one, it introduces them to the culture through behaviour rather than words, and it gives them early wins that build confidence and momentum.
With the 2026 employment law changes now in force (read more about my take here) – including expanded day-one rights -your onboarding is also a legal and HR compliance moment. Get it right and you protect yourself as well as your people.
The exhilHRate take: If your onboarding takes less than a week, it isn’t onboarding. Build a 90-day plan for every hire that covers their role, their relationships, and their results. It is one of the highest-return investments in people you will ever make.
Decision 6: Pay people properly before they ask you to
Compensation is a values statement.
What you pay people communicates how much you value their contribution. Businesses that consistently underpay – relying on ‘passion for the mission’ or ‘equity potential’ as a substitute for fair market salary – build resentful teams who leave the moment a better offer arrives.
As you scale, benchmark your salaries regularly against the market. Build transparent pay frameworks that people can understand and develop towards. Link bonuses and incentives clearly to both individual and business performance.
The businesses I work with that get pay right don’t just retain people better, they attract better people, because their reputation as an employer precedes them.
The exhilHRate take: If your team would be surprised by what they could earn elsewhere, that is an urgent conversation to have… Before they have it with a recruiter.
Decision 7: Know when to call in strategic people expertise
Fast-growth businesses often delay investing in proper HR support because it feels like a cost rather than a commercial driver. I’d gently challenge that assumption.
The businesses that scale smoothly, that avoid costly tribunal claims, that retain their best people through periods of rapid change, that build cultures that attract top talent, are the ones that treat people strategy as a commercial function, not an administrative one.
You don’t need a full in-house HR team to access strategic people expertise. Fractional and retained HR support can give you the commercial people thinking you need at the pace your business is moving, without the overhead of a senior hire you’re not yet ready for.
The exhilHRate take: If you’re growing fast and making people decisions without a strategic HR lens, you are taking on more risk than you probably realise. The cost of getting it wrong in tribunal claims, in lost talent, in a culture that becomes harder to fix is always higher than the cost of getting it right!
The bottom line
Your culture isn’t built in an awayday or a values workshop. It’s built in the decisions you make every time you hire someone, promote someone, pay someone and develop someone.
Fast-growth businesses have a window (roughly the first fifty hires) where the culture is still malleable. Where intentional decisions compound quickly. Where the investment in getting it right pays back ten times over as the business scales.
That window is shorter than you think.
3 things to do this week
1. Audit your last three hires. Did you hire for where the business is going, or where it is now? What would you do differently?
2. Write down three non-negotiable behaviours in your business: things you would always call out, always celebrate and always hire for.
3. Map your onboarding. If you can’t describe what a new hire experiences in their first 30 days, it’s time to build it.
Amy Blick is the founder of exhilHRate, a strategic HR consultancy working with fast-growth, transformational businesses across the UK. If you’d like to explore what strategic people support could look like in your business, book a Power Hour for a focused, no-nonsense session to tackle your most pressing people challenge.
