by Kim Kiyingi, author of “From Campus to Career“
Most founders treat HR the same way. Push it back. There are products to ship, investors to pitch, customers to close. HR feels like something you build once the business is bigger, once there is more time, once there is more money.
That thinking is expensive. And the invoice arrives when you can least afford to pay it.
I have spent over two decades working inside organisations at different stages of growth. The pattern repeats regardless of industry, size, or geography. The businesses that treat people strategy as infrastructure from the start build something durable. The ones that bolt it on later spend years undoing structural damage that did not need to happen.
The numbers that should concern every founder
Gallup’s most recent research puts the cost of disengaged employees at $8.9 trillion annually across the global economy. For a founder running a lean team of 15 or 50 people, the global figure means nothing. But the ground-level version does.
One disengaged employee on a small team is not a rounding error. It is a performance drag that every other team member feels. It slows decisions. It creates friction in customer interactions. It lowers the bar for what the team accepts as normal.
And when that person leaves? Research places the replacement cost at between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. For a startup watching burn rate, that figure is not theoretical. It is a funding problem.
What early-stage HR actually looks like
There is a misconception that building HR culture early means hiring a Head of People and setting up a function. It does not. It means making deliberate decisions about how you treat people from the first hire onward.
Early in my career, I saw what happened when those decisions were not made deliberately. A business that was growing fast started losing its best people faster than it could replace them. Not to competitors offering more money. To competitors offering clarity. Clarity about where the role was going, what good performance looked like, and whether the person mattered beyond their output. The business had built revenue. It had not built culture. The two things are not the same, and you cannot swap one for the other once the gap opens.
The founders who get this right early do three things differently.
They hire for fit before fit becomes a problem to fix. That means knowing what kind of organisation you are building before you bring people into it, not figuring it out after conflict arrives. It means being honest in interviews about what the reality of working there looks like. Retention starts at recruitment.
They build feedback into how the team operates, not just into performance review cycles. People need to feel heard continuously, not once a year. When communication channels are clear and safe, problems surface while they are still solvable. When they are not, problems surface as resignations.
They treat internal growth as a retention tool, not an afterthought. The fastest-growing teams I have seen retain talent not by paying the most but by making the path forward visible. When people can see where they are going, they stay to get there.
AI is already changing the hiring game for founders
Startups competing for talent against well-resourced corporates have always been at a disadvantage in recruitment. That gap is narrowing. AI-assisted hiring tools are now accessible at a price point that makes them viable for early-stage businesses, and the impact on hiring quality is real.
When initial screening is handled by a system built around capability rather than CV patterns, smaller companies surface strong candidates who might otherwise have self-selected out because a big brand name was not attached to the role. The playing field shifts.
The founders paying attention to this are building better teams faster. The ones still relying on gut instinct and word-of-mouth are filling roles rather than building rosters.
The reframe that changes your trajectory
HR is not a compliance necessity you manage around. It is the operating system your business runs on. Every time you hire, you are making a decision that will compound for years. Every time you promote, you are sending a message about what the organisation values. Every time someone leaves, you are learning something about what you built.
The founders who treat those moments casually early on spend enormous energy later trying to rebuild something that should have been built right the first time. The ones who treat people decisions as seriously as product decisions consistently outperform their peers. Not occasionally. Consistently.
A practical starting point for founders
You do not need a large team or a formal HR department to start. You need three things.
A clear answer to the question: what does great performance look like in this organisation? If your team cannot answer that independently, you have a clarity problem that compounds with every new hire.
A honest pulse on engagement. Not a formal survey. A genuine conversation with each person about what is working and what is not. Done regularly, this is the cheapest performance improvement tool available.
An internal mobility mindset. Before you hire externally, ask whether someone already in the business could grow into that role with the right support. The answer will not always be yes. But asking the question signals to your team that growth is possible here.
The founders who build great companies do not do it by accident. They make deliberate decisions about people, early, and they stick to them when scaling gets messy.
That is not an HR philosophy. That is how competitive advantage gets built.
Kim Kiyingi is an HR Career Specialist with over 20 years of experience leading people operations across multi-property environments in the GCC. He is the author of “From Campus to Career” (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2024) and writes at inspireambitions.com.
