Somewhere between employee 3 and employee 10, hiring stops being something a founder can do from memory. There's rarely budget for a dedicated HR hire at this stage, but the process still needs to hold together — this is the checklist that keeps it from becoming chaos in the meantime.
01Write the role brief before you post it
A short brief — what the role actually does day to day, the three or four must-haves, and what "good" looks like in the first 90 days — before you post anything. Without this, screening becomes a gut-feel exercise that's hard to be consistent about across candidates, and hard to defend later if a hiring decision is ever questioned.
02Screen against criteria, not vibes
Score CVs against the must-haves from the brief before you factor in anything else. It's faster than it sounds once the criteria exist, and it protects you from the two failure modes that hit fastest-growing small teams hardest: hiring the most confident interviewer rather than the best fit, and unconsciously screening out good candidates for reasons that have nothing to do with the job.
03Get the offer letter basics right
Start date, salary, probation period length and terms, notice period, and — depending on your country — statutory minimums around holiday and working hours. These vary by jurisdiction; if you're hiring outside your home country, check local requirements before sending an offer, not after.
04Build one onboarding checklist and reuse it
Accounts, equipment, who they meet in week one, what they're expected to have done by day 30. Write it once, properly, and every new hire gets the same competent first week — instead of a first week that depends on how busy everyone else happens to be that month.
05Know your compliance basics per country
Right-to-work checks, written contract requirements, and probation rules all differ by country — what's standard in the UK isn't necessarily standard in Germany or the UAE. If you're hiring your first employee in a new country, this is worth a specific check rather than an assumption carried over from wherever you hired last.
→Where this starts to break down
All five of these hold up fine by hand up to a handful of hires a quarter. Past that — or once you're hiring across multiple countries at once — the screening and onboarding volume usually outpaces what a founder can keep consistent solo, which is where a dedicated process (automated or a first HR hire) starts to earn its keep.