How Scale-ups Can Build Their Own Hiring System
You're growing fast but don't have a large HR team. Here's how to build a standardized, scalable hiring system.
Door Ingmar van Maurik · Founder & CEO, Making Moves
The scale-up dilemma
You're growing fast. You just closed a funding round, or your revenue is growing organically at 50-100% per year. The ambition is clear: you need to hire 50-100 people this year to hit your growth targets.
But you don't have a large HR team. Maybe 1-2 recruiters, or even no one working dedicated on recruitment. Founders do interviews between meetings, managers screen CVs based on gut feeling, and the entire process lives in a combination of spreadsheets, Slack messages, and random email threads.
The result: hiring becomes the biggest bottleneck for growth. Not the product, not the market, not the funding — but the inability to hire the right people fast enough.
This is the scale-up dilemma: you have the resources to grow, but not the infrastructure to translate that growth into people. And every month a vacancy stays open costs you revenue, productivity, and market position.
The real costs of disorganized hiring
Before we look at the solution, it's important to quantify the impact:
Direct costs
Indirect costs
A scale-up making 80 hires per year with a 20% failure rate loses €800,000-€2,400,000 annually in direct and indirect costs from bad hires alone.
Why standard tools don't scale
The typical scale-up hiring stack evolves organically and usually looks like this:
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This works up to 20-30 hires per year. After that, it's chaos:
The spreadsheet syndrome
The most telling symptom: if your hiring data lives in Google Spreadsheets, you have a problem. Spreadsheets aren't built for:
The solution: your own hiring system in 4 steps
Step 1: standardize your flow
Define one hiring flow that works for 80% of your roles. Specialist roles can have variations, but the base process is always:
1. Job page — optimized for conversion, mobile-first
2. Pre-assessment — validated tests on cognition, personality, and role-specific skills
3. AI screening — automatic analysis and ranking of candidates
4. AI pre-interview — automated first conversation for competency evaluation
5. Human interview — only with the top 15-20%, structured with scoring rubrics
6. Offer and onboarding — streamlined process
The difference from ad-hoc hiring: every candidate goes through the same process, which guarantees comparability, consistency, and fairness.
Step 2: automate the heavy lifting
The biggest time savings come from automating the screening phase:
CV screening
Pre-assessments
Scheduling
Scoring
Savings: the recruiter spends 70-80% less time on screening and administration, and can invest that time in relationship building and strategic work.
Step 3: build for scalability
Your own system grows with your organization — without costs rising proportionally:
Step 4: learn from every hire
This is what makes your own system unique: it gets smarter over time.
After every hire, you collect data:
With continuous validation, your model becomes increasingly accurate. After 50-100 hires, you have a predictive system that significantly outperforms any generic tool.
What it costs vs. what it saves
The investment
A custom hiring system for a scale-up is a one-time investment. The exact costs depend on complexity and features, but the components are:
The savings (annual, at 80 hires/year)
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The ROI is typically 3-6 months — after which the system delivers pure savings.
Practical example: a SaaS scale-up
A Dutch SaaS scale-up (Series B, 120 employees) needed to hire 80 people in 2025. Their situation:
Before their own system:
After implementing their own hiring system:
The impact:
Common mistakes scale-ups make
Starting too late
Most scale-ups only start building a hiring system when the chaos is already unmanageable — at 60-80 employees. Start earlier: at 30-40 employees, you have enough data to start and still enough time to set up the system before volume peaks.
Over-investing in separate tools
Every new tool you add creates a new silo. Instead of buying 5 separate tools, invest in one integrated system that combines everything.
Not collecting data
Start from day 1 collecting hiring data: assessment scores, interview evaluations, and — crucially — performance data of hires. Without this data, you can't train models later.
Unstructured interviews
Even with the best AI screening: if the human interview is unstructured, you lose all objectivity in the final phase. Use scoring rubrics and standardized questions for every interview.
Key takeaways
Scale-ups that wait to build a hiring system pay the price in slow growth, expensive recruitment agencies, and bad hires. The cost of delay is higher than the investment.
The core points:
The scale-ups that grow fastest and best are those that treat hiring as a system, not an ad-hoc activity.
Want to discover what your own hiring system looks like for your scale-up? Schedule a conversation and we'll show you how to transform hiring from bottleneck to growth accelerator.