One Secret to Scaling Faster? Slower Hiring, Says this VP of People

You’re growing. That’s great news! Now you have to get the talent to support scaling your operation right? Slow down. 

That’s the advice of Erika Westphal, VP of People at WorkSpan. The advice somewhat flies in the face of what most HR leaders and talent acquisition professionals would think, but it comes with a clear message.

“One counterintuitive but effective strategy has been slowing down hiring to scale faster,” Westphal said. “Instead of rushing to fill roles during hyper-growth, we focus on intentional hiring—ensuring that every new hire fits strategically into the business’s long-term needs.”

Scaling Pains

If you’ve gone through a scale at a startup as an HR leader, you’re probably familiar with this story. It’s a common one.

Open positions double, sometimes triple overnight, and HR is expected to fill roles faster than ever. The talent acquisition team scrambles to find qualified candidates, but the sheer volume of hiring leads to breaking your process. 

Vetting candidates properly becomes a challenge, and hiring managers begin pushing for quick hires rather than the right hires. Cultural fit, once a sacred requirement, becomes a luxury HR can't afford to prioritize.

Hiring too fast and battling turnover is not an uncommon problem. An analysis from Carta looked at average turnover rates by year for startups. They concluded that there is about a 19% chance an employee is no longer employed with a startup after one year, with 14% of that group leaving voluntarily. By the time 36 months passes, there’s a 50% chance of an employee remaining. 

The Chaos That Follows

When you bring people in through chaos, what then follows tends to be chaos. Onboarding tends to be frantic and the dissolution of culture around your once tight knit team tends to be a common issue.

The answer is building a scalable HR infrastructure, but once again, counter to what you might think, that doesn’t mean adding significant HR headcount either.

“We’ve embraced self-service HR and AI-driven processes to reduce dependency on a large HR team,” Westphal said. “This has allowed us to scale efficiently without adding unnecessary complexity, keeping operations lean while still supporting employee needs.”

The biggest impact, however, is on your people and the quality of your employee experience. 

With so many new hires and aggressive business goals, workload distribution can become skewed. Long-standing employees may find themselves overburdened with training responsibilities on top of their own roles. 

As you can imagine, HR itself isn't immune when this happens as recruiters pull 14-hour days, employee relations specialists drown in complaints, and payroll struggles to keep up with salary adjustments and benefits enrollments. The result? Burnout, resignations, and a rapidly declining employer reputation.

This fate is not inevitable, however. Westphal has seen the burnout challenge play out at WorkSpan and has taken some clear steps to combat it.

“One of the biggest challenges has been maintaining work-life balance and employee engagement as we scale,” she said. “Rapid growth often leads to burnout risks, especially in high-performance environments like SaaS.”

WorkSpan has addressed this by:

• Redefining Work Expectations – Encouraging leaders to model balance, set realistic expectations, and provide flexibility. Being clear on prioritization and goal delivery is key.
• Strategic Hiring & Role Alignment – Not just hiring for immediate needs but building sustainable teams for long-term success. “We also ensure that the existing team is getting the support they need and the tools they need to be able to function at the highest level in their individual roles,” Westphal said.
• Creating Scalable Processes – Streamlining performance management, onboarding, and internal mobility so growth doesn’t come at the cost of culture.
• Open Dialogue with Employees – Actively listening to employee concerns through surveys, 1:1s, and leadership Q&A sessions to course-correct early. “We also created an HR Committee to ensure that we have culture champions and that everyone feels heard,” she said.

Growing Smart, Not Fast

Hyper-growth isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and HR is the pacemaker. Scaling doesn’t mean hiring at breakneck speed or throwing people into chaos—it means hiring intentionally, fostering culture, and ensuring infrastructure can support the weight of expansion.

The companies that scale the most efficiently aren’t the ones that hire the most quickly—they’re the ones that build with purpose. So, before you race to onboard the next batch of hires, take a breath. A well-placed hire today prevents a crisis tomorrow.