By James Wright, Head of Talent at Seedcamp

Over the past 18 months, I’ve worked at Seedcamp, advising our portfolio on Talent and People topics. These companies range from their inception stage through to fully established startups with international workforces.

Advisory functions within a VC isn’t a new concept, driven by a growing demand from founders seeking value outside of the capital VCs provide. Talent Advisory is one element that adds immediate and tangible value to a business at all stages, making it an obvious choice for VCs that look to develop that value creation offering. It is also a space where founders really struggle to source sound advice that is aligned to their success. 

Our team recently shared an article titled The (un)trusted advisor which talks to this broader subject of advice delivery. I believe that verifying advice in the People and Talent domain is especially acute, with bad advice having a shocking impact on the chance of a venture’s success, especially in the early days. As a result, I wanted to share my thoughts around how founders should approach sourcing People and Talent advice, and why your investor is a great place to start.

VCs see plenty of companies rise and fall. Mistakes made, big wins, and the occasional bit of luck thrown in too. This historical insight, pattern recognition and network places their platform in a position to offer learnings and advice based on similar scenarios you’re facing. Most importantly, your interests are directly aligned, with zero monetary costs to the founder and with the VC directly invested in your success. Outside of VC, this is incredibly hard to replicate, with most People and Talent advisors looking for something in return for their recommendations or insights. 

To mitigate the risk of receiving and acting on poor advice I suggest you assess prospective advisors thoroughly, regardless of what route they have made their way to you:

1. What is the background of the individual that puts them in a supposed position of authority on the topic?
2. In what context are they offering this advice? Is the outcome of their advice going to impact their incentives?
3. Can they go deeper on a topic? It’s far too easy to generalise and maintain a high level commentary on People and Talent, so see if they can get into the weeds of the subject. 
4. Cross reference. Regardless of who you obtain advice from, in a space that rarely has absolutes, make sure to get opinions from more than one source.

As I have done throughout this article, you’ll frequently find People and Talent bucketed into one domain. Ironically they are quite clearly different remits and they continue to grow apart as you scale. I liken it to Sales and Customer Success-  whilst they work closely together, the skills needed to perform at the highest levels in these functions are considerably different. So when seeking advice in the People or Talent space, the first thing you need to identify is which bucket would you place this problem in.

I typically see that between Seed to Series A, the advice founders require has a bias towards Talent, with minimal complexity around the People function. But as a startup reaches Series A+ the growing organisation requires far greater attention towards People and it’s quite likely you’ll need someone else to offer guidance at this point. All this is to say, identifying the type of advisor and their specific expertise is very important, but before doing this, evaluating where you are as a company should also inform who you speak with. 

Here are a few examples of problems, and where I would generally bucket them:

On the market, you’ll find a whole host of potential advisors willing to share an opinion, and it can be very hard to distinguish who you should source support from. Additionally, as a time-poor founder, evaluating if you need a traditional advisor, or someone more hands-on who can deliver on the recommendations, can be hard.

My recommendation would be to really spend time defining your problem yourself. It can be all too easy to generalise your issue. For example, a classic Talent related issue I hear is “we can’t find any candidates”. As a founder, you need to go deeper than that, really trying to break down the problem into all the elements that might be the cause:

– Are you advertising the role? 

– Have you explained more about your business?

– Are you selling the role well? 

– What are the barriers to entry within the process? 

If your VC investors have a Talent Advisor in the fund, make sure to spend time with them, they can help with this process and potentially diagnose some quick fixes but also recommend specific experts you can meet. If you don’t go deeper into the problem, you may risk receiving inaccurate advice from someone who knows far less about your business than you. 

The next phase is establishing if you only need someone’s wisdom or their execution capabilities as well – this will fully depend on the complexity of your challenge and as an early stage founder, usually wisdom is the need, with you acting on that directly.

If you do require execution support, there are plenty of options available to you, depending on the need – I’ll be sharing more thoughts on this in a separate post breaking down what scenarios warrant different offerings.