<aside> What’s this about? An ops hire can be an important early addition to your team, especially if you don’t have outsourced ops support.

What do I need to do? Decide when to make your first ops hire, what level of seniority they should have, and what their initial priorities should be.

Contents

</aside>

When to hire

There’s a tenet that you should first hire people that are good at the things you’re not good at, then hire people that can do the things you are good at.

So your first hires are likely going to be plugging skill gaps from the founding team.

Avoid the temptation of hiring too soon:

• Make sure you have a really good understanding of what you are trying to accomplish, before building the team — otherwise it’ll be hard to get everyone to row in the same direction. Hiring is also time-consuming (and it’s crucial to do it right) so it’s difficult to “80/20 it” without external support.
• Look for signals that it’s time to hire. Usually, this is when demand for what you’re doing is growing to the point where you can’t keep up.

But also: avoid waiting too long:

• Hiring takes a lot of time and brain space, especially if you want to get it right (which you should because stakes are high). It's hard to do a good job at hiring if you're also responsible for a million other things.
• The advantage of hiring an ops person early is that it's easier to set up good and streamlined systems from the start rather than having to go in 1-2 years later and revamp the whole system.

Ideally, try and come up with a hiring plan for the year (which is hard because things change). Keep in mind that you can always run a hiring round and then not hire anyone in the end if funding is low or you don't need the added capacity yet.

Who to hire

Understand who the first hire(s) should be; this really depends on your project, and can differ drastically case by case.

Generally speaking, it’s useful if the first hire can help you test your theory of change or get more evidence that it’s viable. So, likely someone who can contribute directly to the initiative you’re working on.

If the intervention isn’t ops-heavy, you can likely get by with outsourced support until you have 10+ people on the team. But if the intervention is ops-heavy, the requirement for a dedicated ops hire will likely come sooner.

We’d typically recommend hiring a more junior ops person to begin with, even if they’re granted the title of “Ops Lead” or similar. The founders should have a good grip on the high-level operational needs, like compliance and fundraising, but will likely need support executing and administering these functions. A business operations (“Biz Ops”) type hire — someone to own high-level finance responsibilities, like your budget, runway, and dashboards — is really useful once you get to about ~10-15 FTE.

In time, a more senior ops hire — like an Operations Manager, Head of Operations, Director of Operations, or COO — will be important for tracking risks across the organization as it scales. It will also be important for one or more senior ops hires to lead on all operations matters when the founders lose interest in this side of their work, which often happens. This is in line with the adage of hiring generalists first, and specialists later.

• Junior ops staff
• Project manager or chief of staff
• Senior ops staff

Where to find people

As with all hiring rounds, you should conduct outreach actively — and expect the majority of positive results to come from personal connections, referrals, and networks.

For ops-specific hires, consider reaching out to:

• Organizations similar to yours, who may have run ops hiring rounds recently (and may be willing to share top candidates they didn’t hire)
• Impressive senior ops people at other organizations — it's likely that they've had a lot of conversations with more junior people looking to get a similar role
• People you respect professionally, who may have recommendations (can work especially well for Executive Assistants)
• High Impact Professionals, where you can filter a talent database by function
• Impact Ops, which has experience recruiting ops staff
• Consultants for Impact

For more advice on recruiting, see Run a hiring round.

Initial priorities for an ops hire

Make sure you understand initial priorities for your first ops hire.

Once you make your first ops hire, they should develop some understanding of the risk landscape that your organization faces and let that guide their priorities. This will be set by the founders initially for more junior hires, but should be a proactive focus of more senior ops hires down the line.

Ops people should be tracking risks and working to mitigate them. If the founders/directors aren’t already tracking it, then understanding the financial health and the runway of the organization are also key priorities.

Other priorities will be directed by the intervention of the project on a case-by-case basis, but will often include:

• Setting up and administering productivity tools (e.g. Google Workspace)
• Organizing team retreats
• Running hiring rounds
• Writing and/or coordinating quarterly reports
• HR administration including contracts and onboarding
• OKR tracking and performance reviews.

Ops people often do a lot of ah-hoc and time-sensitive tasks that founders lack the time for!

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