Hiring VPs for Scale Up Success: Leaders Who Shape Your Future

In a tech scale‑up, selecting and hiring VPs for the business has a weighty significance to the overall success of the business. Typically, you have reached a point where you are no longer just building (or developing) a product, you’re now building out an organisation that can grow, adapt, and move at pace. Consequently, the leaders that you now bring into the organisation will shape not only your revenue trajectory but, also, your culture, your processes, and your ability to attract future talent.

So, the question is, what can a tech scale up do to the VP hiring piece right?

Is There A Scale Up Track Record?

Not every impressive CV will equate to success in a scale up. Those who are generalists in a scale up may well lack the ability to build structure, this is one of the reasons that I am an advocate of hiring specialists not generalists. On the flip side, those who are steeped in big corporate life can often struggle with the ambiguity of a scale up. The preference would be for someone who has actually navigated through the complexity of scaling as in scaling a team from dozens to hundreds, or revenues from $10m to $100m. They’ve experienced the growing pains and have learned the lessons of balancing agility with process.

Do They Bring Functional Excellence & Strategic Thinking?  

Whichever VP you are hiring, whether it be Engineering, Sales, Marketing or Product – they absolutely must be credible and have a track record of success in their respective discipline, however... they also need to have the ability to write the strategy, build out scalable systems, as well as hiring the team underneath them. Essentially, they have the ability to step back from delivering the function personally but, create systems and structure that leads to successful delivery through others.

Is There Adaptability and Cultural Fit?

Scale ups on a growth trajectory evolve at a very rapid pace which means the operating landscape evolves too. So, the VP who is hired today could well be leading a function which has doubled in size within 12 months. Does your prospective VP hire have the ability to evolve as your scale up expands and, importantly, do they align with your company culture and values. Those prospective hires who are at odds with your culture and values have the potential to cause more damage than do good.

Create A Thorough Hiring Plan…

• Be clear on what success looks like: Bin the standard VP job description off and instead take the time to create a success profile. Essentially, what successes and wins would you want this VP to achieve within the first 12 months in role and from there this will help bring clarity to the skills and experiences that the hire needs to bring to the table.

• Use candidate research and mapping: The best VPs are often passive candidates. As I wrote in a previous article, the top performers are doing the “day job” with heads down, driving growth and innovation in their current roles. Research uncovers them (hint, we can help you with the research piece)

• Interview with structure: Create a set of questions or discussion points that allow you to gather the evidence of previous delivery against the success plan that you created. Create a scorecard which enables you to compare and contrast the candidates objectively.

• Use and leverage network of investors and advisors: Almost certainly, your investors and advisors will have good knowledge of VPs who have delivered above and beyond in previous roles for other scale ups.

• Through reference checking: Not just the formal reference checking but, also go through informal, off the record references with former peers and colleagues.

Traps to avoid…

• Hiring the big corporate profile too early in your journey.

• Being swayed by charm and charisma with thin evidence of execution or delivery.

• Hasty hiring to achieve growth trajectory – selecting the wrong VP will slow your growth down more than taking a little more time to execute a thorough process.

What does this all mean?

When hiring VPs for tech scale ups, it is as much about identifying those leaders who can grow ahead of the curve. There should be a blend of strategic thinking (and/or vision) to see further down the road as well as still having the ability to be hands‑on enough to step into the fray when needed. When this hiring process is delivered well, you’ll be building the foundations of a leadership team to scale your business.

My question is, what’s been your biggest lesson in hiring VPs for your scale ups?