Most teams between three and thirty people are past hiring on instinct, and a long way from justifying a full HR function. Distk Talent Ops covers that gap. We define the role, source candidates and run the initial scrutiny. You make the final call, and documentation, payroll and statutory compliance stay on your side.
● Scope stated upfront / You keep the decision / No placement-volume targets
Not because founders are bad at it. Because what worked at three stops working at ten, and nothing has replaced it yet.
At five hundred people, a familiar company name on a CV is useful shorthand. At eight people it can mislead. Someone excellent inside a structure may struggle where there is no structure to lean on, and that difference does not show up on paper.
Founders interview between customer calls. Screens get shortened, notes never get written, follow-up slips by a week. The strongest candidates take another offer while a decision is still pending, and nobody records why.
A hire who does not work out is a setback at two hundred people. At eight it is an eighth of the company, several months of runway, and the workload lands straight back on the founder who was trying to buy time.
Founders ask about this in the first call, so here it is before you have to. The line sits where it should: judgement and legal responsibility stay with you.
This is the part that experience actually teaches. An early-stage role is not a defined job on a defined ladder, so the traits that predict success are not the ones a conventional hiring process is built to detect.
| Signal founders over-weight | What it can hide | What we test instead |
|---|---|---|
| Years of experience | Years spent inside a structure that does not exist at your company | Whether they have built something from nothing before, at any scale, including outside work |
| A familiar company name | Support functions that quietly did half the job | What this person owned personally, separated from what their team owned |
| Exact role fit | A narrow operator in a role that will change within six months | Range, and how they respond when the brief moves under them |
| Polished interview answers | Rehearsal | A short practical task on a real problem from your business |
| Immediate availability | Nothing at all | Nothing. It is a neutral fact, and it is treated as a signal far more often than it deserves |
Coachability is the trait that compounds. A capable person who takes feedback well becomes the person you needed within six months. A brilliant person who does not will be the same person in two years, and by then they are senior enough that nobody tells them.
The point of the scrutiny is not to filter hard. It is to make sure that when you do spend an hour with someone, the hour is worth spending.
We turn the role into a scorecard: what this person must have delivered by day ninety, and what good looks like, in writing. Most role confusion surfaces here rather than in month four.
Before sourcingTargeted outreach against that scorecard rather than a job-board flood. Fewer candidates, matched more closely, so the screening stage stays humane for everyone involved.
OngoingA structured conversation. Same questions, same order, notes written the same day. That makes candidates comparable to each other instead of comparable to whoever you spoke to most recently.
Per candidateA short real task drawn from your business, paid where it takes meaningful time. What someone produces in ninety minutes tells you more than what they say about work they did three years ago.
Shortlist stageTwo to four people, each with written reasoning including the case against them. You interview, you decide, and you have something on paper to disagree with.
Your call from hereSomeone joining a five-person company does not walk into an induction programme, a manager with spare bandwidth, or a training budget. They walk straight into the work. Without any structure around that, capable people stall, quietly conclude they are not learning anything, and leave inside a year. The company then reads this as a hiring mistake when it was an onboarding one.
So we design what a larger organisation would provide by default: a ninety-day plan with defined milestones, a weekly check-in cadence built to survive a busy quarter, and a written record of what this person is expected to learn and by when. None of it is elaborate. It just has to exist before day one rather than get invented in week three.
The exchange here runs both ways, and it is worth naming honestly rather than dressing up. A person joining an early team gets responsibility and range they would wait years for in a larger company. The company gets someone who learns the business from the inside and grows into a role that a more senior candidate would have declined at that stage. That trade is genuinely good for both sides, but only while the training half is real. Where it is not, it is simply an underpaid job with a growth story attached.
There is no fixed rate card on this page, because one senior role and a five-person build-out are not the same work and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What determines the number is role count, seniority, and how defined the role already is when we start. We will give you a figure in the first conversation.
For one specific hire you cannot afford to get wrong, usually a first hire into a function that does not exist yet.
For a team going from a handful of people to a functioning organisation over a quarter or two.
For founders who want hiring to be a standing process rather than a recurring emergency.
We do not handle documentation, payroll or statutory filing, and we will not imply otherwise. What we will do is tell you what is coming, because these thresholds arrive quietly during a growth phase and a founder counting only full-time staff can cross one without noticing.
| Headcount threshold | What it triggers in India | Window |
|---|---|---|
| 10 or more employees | ESIC registration becomes applicable, with an employee wage ceiling that is revised from time to time | 15 days from crossing |
| 10 or more employees | An Internal Committee under the POSH Act 2013. The count includes everyone: permanent staff, contract workers, interns and consultants. Failure to constitute one carries a penalty of up to Rs 50,000 under Section 26 | On crossing |
| 20 or more employees | EPFO registration for provident fund | 30 days from crossing |
Thresholds, wage ceilings and state-level rules change, and several of these interact with your Shops and Establishments registration. Confirm current requirements with your chartered accountant or employment counsel before acting on any of it. Our contribution is narrower and more practical: when a hire is about to move you across one of these lines, we flag it early enough that you can plan for it rather than discover it.
No, and it is worth being direct about that. We run role definition, sourcing, initial scrutiny and onboarding design. Employment contracts, payroll, statutory registrations and workplace policies stay with you and your advisors. Most early teams handle that side with a chartered accountant and a reviewed template set, which is usually the right call at this stage and considerably cheaper than the alternative.
Recruiters are measured on placements. That is a real service and often exactly the right one, particularly for a well-defined role you need to fill at speed. Our scope sits differently: more of the work happens before sourcing begins, in defining what the role actually is, and after the person joins, in the first ninety days. That is where early-stage hires most often come apart, and it is not what a placement fee is designed to cover.
Roles where the brief will change within six months, which at early stage is most of them. Generalist operations, marketing, sales, and first hires into a function that does not exist yet. Highly specialised senior technical searches are usually better served by a specialist recruiter with a deep network in that field, and we will tell you when we think that is the case rather than take the work.
No. Anyone offering that guarantee is selling you something. What we do instead is make the reasoning visible. You get written arguments for and against each shortlisted person, so the decision rests on documented evidence you can interrogate rather than a gut read after two pleasant conversations. If it goes wrong, you can see where the reasoning failed and correct it next time.
It depends on seniority and how defined the role is when we start. The step that most often extends a search is role definition, and it is the step founders most want to skip. A week spent getting the scorecard right routinely saves a month of interviewing people who were never going to fit.
Yes. The ninety-day structure and check-in cadence work just as well for someone who joined six months ago without either. This is a common situation in fast-growing teams, and it is usually far cheaper to fix than to re-hire around a person who is stalling for structural reasons rather than personal ones.
We will come back with an honest read on whether this is a fit, including when we think you would be better served by a specialist recruiter or by waiting a quarter.
Clear scope, no placement-volume targets • connect@distk.in
