%20(2).png)
The Talent Roadmap Investors Expect: Hiring Lessons for Breakfast
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
There's a stat that should stop every founder mid-sip of their coffee - 46% of hires fail within their first 18 months. On a £42k salary, that failure costs the business £130k once you factor in training, time and the laptop finding its way back.
That was the sobering opener at our latest breakfast roundtable, hosted in partnership with 3Search, The Founding Network's Official Recruitment Partner. The topic: The Talent Roadmap Investors Expect, with a sharp focus on building Go-To-Market teams that scale as your business does.
Leading the conversation were Charlie Rawstron, Co-founder of 3Search, who's helped build marketing, sales and commercial teams at over two thousand businesses, and Fred Ursell, Head of Investments at Pembroke Investment Managers, who's seen hiring decisions play out across a £280m portfolio spanning Five Guys to Me+Em.
Around the table sat founders at a variety of stages all wrestling with the same question: Who do we hire next, and how do we make it stick?
Here's what stuck with us.
Your employer brand is doing more work than you think, and it's free
75% of candidates will check you out online before they ever apply.
That means your About Us page needs to actually tell your story - video, values, mission, the lot. Your LinkedIn company page needs to speak to candidates, not just customers. And your Glassdoor page needs to be claimed. Charlie shared the story of a £16m-revenue wellness brand with no About Us page, a LinkedIn profile still listing ‘2–10 employees’ (they had 30), and an unclaimed Glassdoor. However good your roles are, brilliant candidates simply won't apply if the shop window looks abandoned.
It’s a fix that doesn't cost money but requires your attention.
Don't compromise on culture ever
Charlie relayed a line from James Meekins, founder of Funding Circle, that had the room nodding: You're better off having a hole than an arsehole. You can flex on skills. You cannot flex on culture fit, no matter how tempting it is to believe you'll ‘coach them into it’ later. In Charlie's experience, you won't.
Hire fewer people. Pay them more.
This was the thread that ran through the entire morning, from both speakers, independently. Charlie's advice to a founder recently trying to hire a £40k CRM person and a £55k performance marketer separately: combine the roles, hire one founding growth leader, and pay them £70k–£100k. Full-stack growth and marketing operators who are comfortable being hands-on and strategic exist, but only if your offer (and employer brand) is strong enough to attract them.
Fred backed this from the investor's chair, stating that Pembroke increasingly measures revenue per head as a KPI. One portfolio company generating £1m of revenue per employee is the gold standard. He's seen a two-person team with agency support doing £3.5m in revenue. Lean, senior teams aren't a red flag for investors chasing Series A metrics. Quite the opposite.
The psychology trap, as Charlie pointed out, is that founders often begrudge paying a senior marketing hire more than their own salary. Fred sees this constantly too, with founders scrimping over a £10k gap on a £120k budget for a £130k hire, while quietly underpaying themselves. His advice to founders is blunt - that equity is where your upside lives; don't let ego about a base salary number cost you the person who could 10x your growth.
What investors are actually looking for at Series A
Fred was clear about the shift in expectation between early funding rounds. Seed is about unknown unknowns - you're still testing and figuring it out. Series A is about known knowns - investors want a repeatable growth engine, with real metrics behind it. "We just hire salespeople" isn't a strategy. Understanding why a channel works, and being able to measure it, is what separates a fundable GTM motion from a hopeful one.
He also flagged that founders are still doing 80–90% of sales at the point of raising, which is normal. The decision isn't always to extract the founder from sales immediately, but to build a senior layer (a COO, a CRO) around them so the founder's time gets freed for the strategic work only they can do.
The senior hire that changes everything
One of the best case studies of the morning was a Pembroke portfolio company. Heavily invested in customer acquisition, but with no retention strategy. They brought in the former Chair of a renowned high-growth recipe box company, and one simple question - "Have you done anything on CRM?" - reframed the whole business. The company has gone from £3.5m to a forecast £24m in revenue, heavily profitable, with 70% of that growth now coming from existing customers.
The lesson isn't to hire a chair. It's that a senior, experienced perspective coming in from outside your day-to-day can see the strategic gap you're too close to notice.
Can't afford a chair yet? Build an advisory board
For earlier-stage founders, the advice was to look at building your own advisory board, which are underrated and often free. Most senior operators are genuinely flattered to be asked, and a short call every few weeks can shape your strategy long before you can afford to hire that experience full-time. It works both ways too - a credible advisory board signals seriousness to investors, and gives your future investors a reason to trust your judgement on who else to bring in.
Reference. Then reference again.
The biggest red flag for founders hiring senior GTM leaders is not referencing hard enough. Don't just ask the candidate for referees (they'll hand-pick people who'll say nice things). Go on LinkedIn, find people who actually worked alongside them, and ask directly. A bad senior hire in a small business isn't just an expensive mistake, it can send your entire growth strategy in the wrong direction for months before you're able to unwind it.
Charlie's practical process for any important hire is:
A first call for chemistry, a proper competency interview scored against defined criteria, then a task or a ‘pub test.’ Structure removes the guesswork and makes it much easier to make a confident, aligned decision with your co-founders or investors in the room, rather than relying on gut feel alone.
AI is already reshaping the shape of GTM teams
Both Charlie and Fred agreed this has shifted faster in the last 12 months than in the previous 12 years. Fred shared that one Pembroke portfolio CTO now has 80% of code written by Claude, and that the old engineering wisdom of one more developer slowing shipping down has been turned on its head by AI tooling. The implication for GTM teams is the same. Fewer, more senior people, heavily supported by tools, will consistently outperform larger, junior-heavy teams.
Your next steps
If there was one message the whole room left with, it's this: be patient, hire senior, and don't go to market until you're completely clear on the problem you're solving. The right growth hire, fractional advisor, or chair helps build the right strategy for your business. The teams you’re building at this stage should be contributing far beyond execution.
Thank you to Charlie Rawstron and 3Search for co-hosting, and to Fred Ursell for such candid insight into how investors really think about talent.
If you'd like support building out your GTM team, 3Search has created a robust 40-page hiring manual and are here to support our network. Reach out to our team for an intro.