You went from six Engineers to eleven in a Quarter, and somehow the team feels slower.
Pull requests sit for two days. Nobody is sure who decides what.
Your best Senior Engineer has stopped writing code and started answering questions. What changed?
Almost always, the hiring went faster than the structure around it. That is fixable, and better still, it is avoidable.
Hire the Person who raises the Bar first
When the team is small, every hire sets the standard for the next one. If your first three additions are mid-level Engineers who need guidance, the guidance has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the two people who were already stretched.
Before you add volume, add one or two Senior Engineers who can work independently and who will happily review other people’s code. They are the ones who make the next hire cheaper.
Know what is stopping you, not just what is missing
“We need more Engineers” is a symptom. The underlying problem might be a Founder who is still the main reviewer, a deployment process that only one person understands, or a roadmap with no clear owner for the platform work.
Write down what is actually slowing delivery.
If the answer is one person’s calendar, a new Engineer will not fix it. A Tech Lead or an Engineering Manager might.
Stage the Hires
Hiring ten Engineers at once looks efficient on a spreadsheet. In practice your onboarding capacity is the limit. Each new Engineer takes real time from someone already on the team for the first few weeks.
A steadier pace, two or three at a time with a gap to let them settle, tends to leave you with a team that has actually absorbed its newest members.
Our average placement velocity is 6 weeks, so there is rarely a reason to rush the sequence just to avoid a slow search.
Decide when the Founder stops being the bar
Early on, the Founder or CTO is the final say on technical quality. That works until it does not. The signal is usually a Founder who spends most of the week in interviews and reviews instead of on the product.
The move is to hand over the technical bar to someone you trust, and be honest about whether that person is a Senior IC, a Tech Lead or a Manager. Those are three different jobs, and hiring the wrong one is a costly mistake.
Watch the Specialist Roles arrive
Somewhere between ten and thirty Engineers, Platform, Data and sometimes ML needs start to matter.
They are usually the hardest roles to fill, and they are usually urgent by the time anyone notices. Plan for them one Quarter earlier than feels necessary.
Build a Hiring Process that scales with you
One Hiring Manager with a good gut feel works for the first few hires. It does not work for fifteen. Agree the interview stages, who sits on each, and what a pass looks like, before you need to run it in parallel.
Candidates notice a messy process.
Our CV-to-hire ratio sits at 8:1 and our offer acceptance at 94%, and a good part of that comes from helping clients tighten the process before we ever go to market.
Questions to answer before you brief anyone
Most scaling plans stall at the brief, not at the search. Before you talk to a Recruiter or open a single role, it helps to have clear answers to a handful of questions.
Which roles genuinely unblock delivery in the next Quarter, and which are nice to have?
Who will onboard each new Engineer, and what else comes off their plate while they do?
What does a strong first ninety days look like for this person, written down in two or three sentences?
If you cannot answer that last one, the role is probably not defined well enough yet.
None of this needs a long document. A page of honest notes is enough, and it will save you weeks of misaligned interviews later.
What a sensible sequence tends to look like
Every Company is different, but the order is often similar. Senior engineers who set the standard come first. A Tech Lead or Engineering Manager follows once the Founder is losing too much time to coordination.
Mid-level Engineers join next, because there is now someone to guide them. The specialist roles come in alongside, planned ahead rather than reacted to.
Where teams get into trouble is reversing that order: a rush of junior and mid-level hires with nobody senior to anchor them. It feels like progress for a quarter and then it feels like a problem.
Choose the right kind of help
If you are hiring one or two clearly defined roles, a contingent search can work well. If you are hiring a team, a retained model gives you dedicated focus. We offer Container, Embedded and RPO for exactly that, and you can read about how we approach it on our scaling engineering teams page.
Back to the slow team
If your eleven Engineers feel slower than your six did, it is worth asking which of these is missing: The senior bar, the structure, the pace, or the process.
Usually it is one of them, and usually it is fixable in a few weeks once you know which.
Choosing the right recruitment agency is about fit, expertise, and trust.
By asking the right questions and digging into their processes, you can find a partner who not only fills roles – but helps you build a Product & Engineering team that fuels long-term SaaS growth.
Invest in a Product & Engineering Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.
Reach out to a member of the team here, or see more about how we can support your growth here.
