Latest news with #hiring
Forbes
16 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
10 Startup Jobs That Are Crucial But Rarely Hired Early Enough
Hiring is a game of leverage. Growth stage startups that think beyond the obvious roles can set ... More themselves up for faster execution and less firefighting. In this article we explore the undervalued roles in a startup team. After the very early stages, once an enterprise starts growing (organically or through funding), founders often focus on hiring exclusively developers and salespeople. While those roles are essential, many equally important functions are either delayed or handled ad hoc, leading to inefficiencies, burnout, or missed opportunities. This article explores roles that are often underestimated or under-prioritized in the early days but can dramatically improve startup execution, speed, and resilience. 1. Generalist Operations Lead Every startup needs someone who can connect the dots across tools, people, and workflows. Yet early operations hires are often postponed until 'things are chaotic,' which is precisely when it becomes hardest to onboard one. Early-stage ops leads don't just 'keep the lights on'; they handle finance, vendor setup, customer support, legal paperwork, internal tooling, and logistics. Hiring someone who thrives in ambiguity can free up the founders to focus on growth or product, which is extremely important if the founder or founders are technical specialists. 2. Technical Program Manager Even startups with a solid engineering team often delay hiring a TPM, thinking it's only needed at scale. But the earlier you have someone who can manage cross-functional planning, organize releases, and flag bottlenecks, the faster your product can evolve. This role becomes critical when product, engineering, and design start pulling in different directions. At companies like Stripe and Airbnb, early TPMs were instrumental in translating vision into execution. 3. Customer Success Support is reactive. Success is proactive. Early-stage startups often overlook customer success until churn becomes a problem, but by then, valuable insight has already been lost. Hiring someone who can onboard customers, collect feedback, and monitor usage helps prevent silent churn and can increase retention early. Startups like Notion and Figma invested early in community-style customer engagement, which gave them feedback loops before they scaled. 4. Recruiter Оr Talent Lead Founders often do all hiring themselves early on, which makes sense, up to a point. But once you're hiring for more than one role at a time or scaling beyond referrals, a dedicated recruiter or talent lead can save enormous time. This role pays off quickly: crafting job descriptions, managing funnels, and keeping momentum in candidate conversations is a full-time job. Startups that delay this hire often miss great candidates due to slow or inconsistent processes. 5. Finance And Accounting Lead Most startups wait until their first funding round is closed or until taxes are due to think about finance. But early financial hygiene - managing burn, forecasting runway, and tracking invoices, often prevents costly mistakes down the line. An experienced part-time finance operator or early controller can help founders make better decisions without relying only on gut feeling. 6. Product Marketing Marketing isn't just for after product-market fit. A product marketer can help shape how the product is positioned from day one, run early customer interviews, and test narratives. In startups like Slack and Superhuman, early PMMs played a crucial role in crafting language that resonated. Without this role, products often struggle to articulate value, which slows down both user acquisition and fundraising. 7. Internal Tools Engineer / No-Code Ops As teams grow, inefficiencies compound. Startups that invest early in internal tooling via software engineers or no-code automation specialists scale faster and with fewer headaches. This hire helps automate onboarding, reporting, internal dashboards, and repetitive tasks. It's a multiplier role — especially in lean teams. 8. Design Systems Or UX Ops Founders often hire designers to work on user interfaces, but few think about UX infrastructure. A systems thinker in design can help enforce consistency, build component libraries, and reduce the design-to-dev gap. For startups shipping fast and often, this role helps avoid messy product interfaces that become expensive to clean up later. It also keeps cross-functional teams aligned. 9. Compliance/Legal Advisor This is especially critical in regulated sectors like fintech, healthtech, or anything involving user data. Waiting too long to get legal and compliance advice can result in technical rework, regulatory delays, or worse — penalties. This doesn't need to be a full-time hire early on. But having someone on retainer who understands your space can de-risk future launches and investor due diligence. 10. Content/Documentation Specialist Content is often seen as a growth function, but early documentation - onboarding guides, internal SOPs, product notes, and public help docs - sets the tone for scalability. Startups with strong documentation reduce onboarding time (for employees and users), get fewer support tickets, and enable async collaboration. This role can start part-time or as a hybrid content/marketing hire.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Nearly all hiring managers say the process takes longer than 2 years ago
This story was originally published on HR Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily HR Dive newsletter. The hiring process is becoming more time-consuming and costly, and 93% of hiring managers say it takes longer in 2025 than just two years ago, according to a June 18 report from Robert Half, a talent solutions and business consulting firm. Hiring managers responding to a survey said the time has lengthened to evaluate candidates' applications, check references, conduct background checks and schedule and conduct interviews. 'In today's environment, companies need to strategically evaluate and streamline their hiring process — especially when staffing multiple roles,' said Dawn Fay, operational president of Robert Half. 'With more applications coming in for time-sensitive positions, hiring can feel overwhelming.' In the survey of nearly 2,200 U.S. hiring managers, 92% said it's challenging to find skilled talent. Hiring plans have slowed slightly in 2025, with 57% planning to expand their teams during the second half of the year, dropping from 63% six months ago. In addition, 30% of hiring managers said they've made a hiring mistake in the past two years, which 57% said contributed to additional turnover. The most common mistakes included not properly assessing technical skills and not evaluating a candidate's cultural fit. 'In a market where there's less margin for error, hiring mistakes can be detrimental to team morale and growth,' Fay said. 'When existing team members need to compensate for lost productivity, it can lead to burnout, disengagement and employee turnover.' To streamline hiring and avoid errors, employers can set clear timelines and deadlines before posting a job and communicate with team members throughout the process, the report recommended. Tracking different hiring performance metrics can provide insight as well, HR experts told HR Dive. Since 'time to fill' measures the days it takes to fill an open position, companies can understand the efficiency of their recruitment process and whether long gaps could affect team productivity and morale. Employers can also revamp their hiring process by looking at where their talent acquisition efforts fail, according to a Society for Human Resource Management workshop; Rethinking metrics, such as recruiting capacity, applicant quality, hiring sources and costs of hiring sources, can help. The most important part of the hiring process may be the interview, according to a Gallup report. Employers can make improvements by approaching interviews with structure, treating candidates with respect and highlighting their culture and value to employees, Gallup said. Recommended Reading CHROs, CIOs disagree on the strategic value of talent acquisition
Entrepreneur
2 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
The Job Interview Mistake That Causes Hiring Managers to Ghost
"Any questions for me?" Your answer could make or break an offer. These days, it takes an average of six months for job applicants to get hired for a new role, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Given that timeline — and the fact that some job-seekers might put in hundreds of applications before they receive an offer letter — it can pay, literally, to be strategic during the interview process. Many hiring managers will ask interviewees if they have any questions for them at the end of an interview. It's an opportunity for candidates to further express their interest in and qualifications for the role. Related: The Ultimate Guide on How to Prepare for a Job Interview There are a lot of great questions to ask in an interview — and some that might be best avoided, depending on your career goals. A new study from found that although pay transparency is the No. 1 most important thing gig workers look for in job listings, hiring managers will ghost one in 10 candidates who ask about pay during an interview. The lack of transparency around compensation can not only throw a wrench in an applicant's job search but also make it more difficult for employers to find the right talent. Related: 7 Mistakes to Avoid Making During a Job Interview, According to a Business Etiquette Expert One in four gig workers would never apply to jobs without listed pay, and 68% don't trust companies that hide pay information because they believe it means the job pays poorly (74%), has a high turnover rate (49%) or fosters a toxic culture (35%), according to the report. What's more, 20% of workers say that pay transparency in their industry has gotten worse, per SideHustles. Related: Why Do You Want to Work Here? Here's How You Can Ace the Question Every Time Hannah Williams, the Gen Z content creator behind the account Salary Transparent Street, told Entrepreneur that young professionals who want to make sure their salaries are fair should always be prepared to negotiate once they receive an offer — and wait 24 hours before accepting any new role. "Even if you're satisfied with the rate, tell them you need 24 hours to review the offer," Williams said. "This has not only helped me get more money in the final offer if the company is pressured to fill the role, but has also brought me peace of mind in thinking through and making my final decision."
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Exclusive: Uber and Palantir alums raise $35M to disrupt corporate recruitment with AI
Metaview, an AI startup aiming to modernize recruitment, has raised $35 million in a Series B round led by Google Ventures. The company, founded by former Uber and Palantir executives, offers AI tools that streamline interview note-taking, generate job descriptions, and optimize hiring workflows. With clients like Sony and Deliveroo, Metaview plans to expand its platform and team. AI hiring company Metaview has announced a $35 million Series B round led by Google Ventures. Founded in 2018 by Uber and Palantir alums, CEO Siadhal Magos and CTO Shahriar Tajbakhsh, Metaview aims to revolutionize the corporate hiring process with the help of AI—something the pair has long viewed as ripe for a tech revolution. During his time at Uber, Magos spent much of his time on hiring and saw firsthand the way the process can become subjective and fragmented due to a lack of clear data, even at high-growth Fortune 500 companies. 'To us, hiring at that time meant interviewing. It meant spending time with other human beings to sort of understand who they are. And there was this particular hiring loop that I was a part of where, when we turned up at the debrief…you just saw this massive delta between the folks that really knew how to run these and what to look for in great candidates and the people that didn't,' he told Fortune. 'Some people were just so data-driven in the facets they were sharing about the candidate, and other people were just completely going by gut,' he said. 'It made me realize that even these amazing companies are still fundamentally relying on shards of memories that people have of these human-to-human interactions and if you're ever going to significantly up-level hiring—you're going to have to harness this conversational data.' This is what led to the inspiration for the company's flagship product, an AI-notetaker that records and structures interview notes so hiring managers don't have to. Now, the company is planning to build a full suite of AI tools aimed at the recruiting and hiring process. The pair's history with and knowledge of corporate recruiting workflows drew in Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures. He sees this as an area 'where digitalization skipped a step.' Recruiting, which is heavy on admin, is ripe for disruption when it comes to developing AI tools. 'Pre AI, it was quite basic what you could do in and around hiring. It was sort of like software 1.0…you weren't able to go anywhere near as deep as you can go as you can now with LLMs, but to be able to do that, you need to spend a lot of time in and around hiring workflows,' Shanmugarajah told Fortune. 'They've been building for hiring and in recruitment,' Shanmugarajah said of Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh. 'You need to spend a lot of time in and around hiring workflows, which they've done in their prior roles at Uber and Palantir, and you also need to be able to build with a real understanding of who the users are and how their hiring workflows have been developed over time.' Metaview's latest round also includes continued backing from existing investors, including Plural, Vertex Ventures, Seedcamp, Coelius Capital, True Equity, as well as Victor Riparbelli and Barney Hussey-Yeo, and builds off its previous $7 million Series A in March last year. The company plans to use the funds to build out its full suite of AI tools, hire more staff at its London headquarters, and expand its presence in San Francisco. 'The focus for us now is to really build out the rest of the platform,' Magos said. 'So our big thesis for the company, since the obviously AI is going to change how we work.' Metaview's full suite of AI tools aims to streamline and enhance every stage of the hiring process. The company's flagship product is an AI note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that records, analyzes, and summarizes job interviews, but it's also working on: AI Reports, a customizable reporting engine for optimizing the hiring funnel; AI Answers, an always-on assistant that delivers instant information about any candidate, job, or hiring detail; and AI Job Posts, which generates and maintains job descriptions so teams can launch new searches in seconds rather than days. Metaview says its customers, which include Sony, Brex, ElevenLabs, and Deliveroo, save 30 minutes after every interview and up to two hours per job post. While other companies offer similar note-taking services, Magos sees Metaview as protected from threats from general-purpose tools like Microsoft Copilot through its specialization in recruitment workflows. Metaview integrates directly with recruiting tools such as applicant tracking systems and is designed to understand the specific context of recruiting conversations. Magos says specialized data and domain-specific post-training, allowing Metaview's AI tools to generate far more accurate and relevant summaries. There are concerns about how much AI should be used in the recruiting process, especially if decisions are being influenced or made by AI agents. Under the EU AI Act, HR-related applications of artificial intelligence—including recruitment—are classified as 'high risk', due to concerns around transparency, fairness, and ethical implications in their use. Magos says the company is not trying to automate the hiring decisions, but rather the admin that comes with writing a job post, searching for candidates, and making interview notes. He says Metaview's software never offers advice about who to actually hire: 'Where we draw the line at the moment is that we leave the human-to-human interaction to humans. But some of the work associated with spending a ton of time sort of scrolling through LinkedIn to find these candidates is something we're working on.' Magos also told Fortune the tech has the potential to take some of the subjectivity out of hiring and encourage more data-backed decisions. However, AI tools often bring their own bias to the table, something that has worried HR professionals. For example, three-quarters of employers in a recent ISE Student Recruitment Survey said they worried about the potential for bias and preferred a more human-centric approach to recruitment. In response to some of these concerns, Magos argues that speech-to-text systems provided by LLMs are better than most human attempts at it. When it comes to bias, Metaview's biggest mitigation is ensuring that its AI assistants don't become 'a judgment tool' or 'make recommendations about who to hire.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CTV News
2 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
Fewer Americans sought unemployment benefits last week as layoffs remain low
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell last week, the U.S. Labour Department said Thursday, a sign that companies aren't cutting many jobs. Jobless claims for the week ended June 21 dropped 10,000 to 236,000, a historically-low level. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out weekly volatility, dipped 750 to 245,000. Applications for unemployment aid are a proxy for layoffs, and so the decline is evidence that businesses are mostly holding onto their employees. Yet separate data suggests hiring also remains cool, in what economists are referring to as a 'no hire, no fire' job market. The unemployment rate remains low, though there are signs that the economy is slowing. So far this year, employers have added a solid but unspectacular 124,000 jobs a month, down from an average 168,000 last year. Most of the hiring has been concentrated in a few industries, specifically health care, restaurants and hotels, and government. Layoffs have mostly remained low, but hiring has also been weak. Yet for many job-seekers, the sluggish creation of new jobs has been a challenge. Recent college graduates are facing the toughest job market in more than a decade. The unemployment rate for grads aged 22 to 27 is now higher than the overall jobless rate, and the gap between the two is the widest it has been in more than 30 years. The difficulty many of the unemployed are having in finding work can be seen in the number of people continuing to claim unemployment aid, which rose 37,000 to 1.97 million for the week ending June 14. That is the most since November 2021. Separately, the economy shrank 0.5 per cent at an annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday, a worse showing than its previous estimate of a 0.2 per cent decline. A flood of imports swamped the economy as companies rushed to bring in foreign goods before the Trump administration's tariffs took effect. A category within the GDP data that measures the economy's underlying strength rose at a 1.9 per cent annual rate from January through March, down from 2.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024. This category includes consumer spending and private investment but excludes volatile items like exports, inventories and government spending. --- Christopher Rugaber, The Associated Press
