In late 2017, Baltimore-based healthcare startup Protenus was reverberating from a year of growth.
It was coming off of a $4 million Series A funding round. In the past two years, it had doubled its headcount to 31 employees, and revenue outcomes were better than good — they were mind-boggling. The company had grown revenue by 20 times what it had made in the previous year.
But Protenus still didn’t have a cohesive recruiting strategy. In fact, the company hadn’t hired anyone to lead its human resources and recruiting efforts.
That meant that there was no formalized plan in place to fill the roles that were going to support that growth, and no dedicated person to lead those efforts. It could have been disastrous for a company moving as fast as it was.
But that’s not what happened: In late 2018, the company had doubled its headcount to 67 people and was looking toward more growth.
A primary reason that Protenus was able to navigate those challenges was that one of Technical.ly’s newsletter subscribers, Megan Emhoff, had been following news coverage of the rapidly growing company and saw a unique opportunity to help.
Emhoff would soon become the company’s VP of people operations, and in conversations with Technical.ly, she shared with us how she and the company navigated those challenges.
We sat down with Emhoff for a series of interviews to understand more deeply how she set and executed a vision for growing the company’s recruiting strategy, and what she learned from it, and recently published an ebook deep dive on what we learned.
We think there are lessons for any venture-backed or high-growth company, but also tactical ideas on how to grow fast, and differently. We hope you find it useful, too.
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This editorial article is a part of Technical.ly's How to Get Hired month. Join Technical.ly at our NET/WORK tech jobs fair on March 20.
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