From Pre-Seed Funding to First Hires: Building Reson8's Engineering Team

Making your first few hires is very different from hiring into an established team.

At this stage, you're often not starting with a perfectly defined role, salary benchmark and hiring process. You know the type of person you need and what you're trying to build but translating that into a profile that actually exists in the market can be much harder.

We started working with Reson8 shortly after they had raised €5m in pre-seed funding. Based in Amsterdam and with a team of only around 6 people at the time, they were preparing to grow their engineering team and wanted to make two critical early hires.

They didn't just need us to find candidates. We worked closely with the founders to understand what they were building, define what they actually needed from these first engineers and then translate that into the market.

That meant understanding what good looked like, what was realistically available in Amsterdam, what they should expect to pay and where they could afford to be flexible, before building and running the search through to offer.

Defining what you actually need

The initial profile was relatively broad, with a focus on senior backend engineers and strong Java experience, but as we spent more time with the founders it became clear that the role was much more nuanced than that.

The engineers weren't going to be training the AI models themselves. A large part of the role was about building the production systems around those models, alongside infrastructure, Kubernetes, DevOps and other technical challenges as the product moved towards launch.

Java was still preferred, but we established that the right engineer didn't necessarily need to have spent their whole career working in Java if they had the underlying technical depth and experience the team needed. This opened up the market considerably and meant we could focus less on matching a specific list of technologies and more on finding engineers who could build from scratch, work with a high level of ownership and operate successfully as part of a very early stage team.

This is one of the most important parts of an early stage search. Before you start approaching hundreds of people, you need to understand what good actually looks like for that particular company.

Using the market to calibrate the search

The first version of a hiring brief is rarely the final one, particularly when you're making a hire the company hasn't made before.

Once we started speaking to candidates, we could give the founders much more useful information about what was actually available in Amsterdam, where the constraints were and whether the expectations behind the original brief were realistic.

For Reson8, one of those constraints quickly became work authorisation. There were plenty of technically strong candidates in the market, but the ability to hire them in the Netherlands narrowed the pool significantly, so we worked through sponsorship and visa options alongside the search.

We were also able to use the conversations we were having in the market to calibrate compensation and help the founders understand where they might need some flexibility to secure the right person.

This is a really important part of how we approach search. The market isn't only there to find candidates, it should also help you understand whether the profile you've created is realistic and where you may need to adjust it as the search progresses.

Building the search around the benchmark

Once we had a clearer picture of the profile, we could build the search criteria around it and start mapping the market properly.

The focus wasn't simply on finding someone with a particular job title. We were looking for engineers with strong production and architecture experience, evidence that they could build rather than just maintain, the ability to work across different technical areas and an appetite for the level of ownership that comes with joining such a small team.

We built a targeted market map of more than 100 potential candidates, approaching and screening people before introducing them to the founders. This meant that by the time someone entered the formal interview process, there was already a clear understanding of why we thought they could be a good fit.

As the search progressed, the conversations we were having with candidates and the feedback from the founders helped us continue to refine what good looked like for the role. We could use what we were learning from the market to challenge or adjust parts of the original brief where needed, while making sure candidates were still being assessed consistently against an agreed benchmark rather than against each other.

With founding and early hires, the question isn't always just “Does this person meet the job description?” It's also “Is this person genuinely going to raise the bar for the team we're trying to build?”

Designing the hiring process around the role

Alongside running the search, we helped Reson8 structure the hiring process so candidates were being assessed consistently. This included agreeing the different stages, defining who was responsible for what and creating the interview kits and scorecards needed to make better hiring decisions.

For the technical assessment, candidates completed a two to three hour technical exercise followed by a longer onsite discussion and presentation with the team. This gave the founders a much better opportunity to understand how candidates thought and worked, rather than relying on a series of unstructured conversations.

For an early stage company, getting this part right is particularly important. Founders are often interviewing while also trying to build the company, launch the product and speak to customers, so having a clear structure creates consistency without adding unnecessary process.

The search doesn't stop when someone says yes

We also stayed closely involved through the final stages and offer process.

With early stage hires, there are usually more moving parts than salary alone. We supported discussions around compensation, equity, notice periods and the practicalities of hiring in the Netherlands, while keeping communication moving between the candidates and founders.

Ultimately, we successfully hired two engineers into the team, including one candidate who was able to negotiate a shorter notice period so they could join Reson8 sooner.

Getting someone to accept an offer is obviously the outcome everyone wants, but the candidate experience during those final conversations matters too. Our role is to make sure both sides have the information they need, concerns are addressed early and there aren't unnecessary gaps in communication at the point where a hire can still easily fall over.

Your first hires need more than candidate sourcing

This is why we see early stage search as much more than finding people and sending CVs.

If you're making your first few hires, you may need help answering questions like:

What does good actually look like for this role?

Is the person we're imagining actually available in our market?

What should we expect to pay?

Which parts of the brief are genuinely essential and where can we be flexible?

How should we assess candidates consistently?

What does a realistic hiring process look like for our stage?

Those questions need answering before and during the search, not after you've spent three months speaking to the wrong people.

For us, a successful search means helping a company understand what it needs, translating that into the market and then managing the process through to a hire that works for both sides.

Making your first critical hires?
We work with early-stage technology companies to define the role, understand the market and run the search from initial brief through to offer. Get in touch.