You Don't Need A-Players in Every Role

A first Head of People at a PE-backed SaaS company tends to inherit a version of the same situation. The founders built the early team out of their own network, hired people they liked and trusted, and crossed product-market fit on the strength of that group. Then an operating partner asks for more revenue per employee without gutting the team. Two director seats sit open. And the leadership crew that got the company this far is starting to strain at the next stage of scale.

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Melissa Duncan has walked into that situation more times than she can count. She runs a fractional HR practice advising PE-backed SaaS companies, after 15-plus years inside tech companies in startup mode, usually somewhere between 50 and 200 people. On this episode of Pulse, she gives the inflection points a shape and offers a defensible method for hiring senior people, talking about culture in language a board respects, and tying it all back to the metric sitting at the top of every dashboard.

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What follows is not a pep talk about people being your greatest asset. It is an operator's account of where companies break, who you actually need in which seat, and how small, repeated moves move the numbers a board reads.

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The founding crew plateau and the 50-person mark

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Duncan sees the same pattern across founders: they hire their friends, or people from their network, or someone they have known for a while. Networks are fine, she says. That is what they are for. The trouble shows up a couple of years in. "There's a product that never got launched, there's revenue that's not getting made, something is happening," and the leadership team usually has to be overhauled around the two-to-three-year mark. The reason comes down to fit for stage. As she puts it, "maybe they got you where you are, but it's tough for them to get you to the next level."

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A few founders do manage to scale with their original nucleus, often people they worked with at a previous company, where compatibility is already proven. Hiring someone the founder merely likes is, in Duncan's words, "more of a wild card experience."

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There is a headcount threshold where the cracks become impossible to paper over. "I've been brought in as the first HR hire at almost all of the companies I've worked with," Duncan says, "and they're usually around 50 people. For some reason, that's the magic number of when things start to come up." An employee complaint, a harassment issue, something the founder or the office manager running people processes by default is not equipped to handle. The revenue ladder runs alongside it: $10M ARR as the product-market-fit benchmark, then the gray zone from 10 to 20, then 20 to 50, then 50 to 100. Each rung is hard to clear.

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Top grading and the competent jerk

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For director-level hires and above, Duncan uses top grading: a two-to-four-hour interview that walks a candidate's entire career rather than fixating on the most recent role. She first encountered it as a subject, when she was top graded for a job and could not figure out how to prepare. That is the point. The method looks for behaviors and patterns, not rehearsed answers. The thesis behind it is blunt: "the biggest driver of your business results is the quality of the people in the seats."

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She was skeptical at first. The format felt heavy for the roles she was filling. Once she moved into hiring directors and above, her view hardened the other way: "I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending someone for a director or people leader role or even a C suite role that has not been top graded."

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The whole-career approach surfaces what a resume hides. Duncan was trained to read for integrity, likability, the ability to inspire others, and assertiveness. That last one matters in management seats, because there is a version of high assertiveness that curdles into ego and aggression. "Those are the people that top grading teaches us are competent jerks," she says. "And people don't want to work with those folks anymore." Weeding them out is one of the main things she is doing across these long conversations. And she does not need all of those hours to spot the signal. "These interviews are a couple hours long, but I can usually tell in the first 15 minutes how the conversation's going to go," she says, based largely on whether the candidate is willing to be open and talk through their history.

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Chemistry first, and why you don't need an A-player everywhere

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Before any of that happens, the candidate meets the CEO and leadership team for a gut check. The order is deliberate. "If their judgment says I cannot work with this person, then a three hour interview doesn't matter," Duncan says. A strong dossier and an A-player behavior style do not override a leader's instinct that the fit is wrong. The aim is higher than a good hire: "we don't just have a brilliant hire, we have a brilliant dynamic on the team."

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Fit is also about scheme and business model. An A-player can win in one environment and struggle in another for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. On one recent search, Duncan asked the CEO what he wanted that was not on the job description. His answer: "I need someone that's so innovative that they think about things differently." Several candidates matched on paper. One stood apart by describing, unprompted, a system he had built into hotels for hearing-impaired guests that wakes them in an emergency using lights throughout the room. Duncan called it a 10-star example of empathy paired with thinking outside the box, the kind of trait that separates one finalist from three equally qualified ones.

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Then comes the take that gets people's attention. "You do not need an A player in every single role," Duncan says. "My take on it is it's unaffordable. If you had an A player in every role, how are you gonna afford that? It's unrealistic." Highly scripted roles, a call center seat or a support role, do not require A-players to do the work well. High-profile roles and people leaders do. So Duncan draws a line: she will not take on anything below director for A-player fit. For more junior roles she runs a 30-minute version of her top grading screening questions, picking up the signals that matter without asking an entry-level candidate to narrate two hours of career history they may not yet have.

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Culture as a business lever: the pizza party playbook, donut chats, and the board meeting

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Culture gets dismissed as soft, especially under pressure to grow. Duncan's framing puts it back on the operating table: "disengaged, confused, frustrated people will not execute on your strategy, no matter how good it is." Early-stage founders tell her they do not care about culture yet, that it will build itself, that they want compliance and nothing more. Then they call her anyway, once morale tanks and a manager loses an entire team. They see it in the numbers.

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Her method is patient. You cannot kitchen-sink culture by dropping in a prewritten playbook. You do one thing at a time, you mean it, and you show people you care. The clearest signal of whether it will take hold: are the people leaders and the CEO actually showing up to the events. And the founders who ignore culture entirely are still building one, just not on purpose.

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Duncan separates real culture from "the pizza party playbook of forced fun." Feeling good at work is not the test. Some companies are a grind with a payout coming, a two-to-three-year stint where everyone is bought in. That model works for some teams and not others. The honest question, she says, is whether "do people wanna come into work on Monday? Do they want to do the work that they're doing?" On startups and work-life balance, she is candid: it is possible, but it is not probable.

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The moves that shift the numbers tend to be small. Her teams run donut chats, a 15-minute monthly meeting with a random teammate. One client sits near 99 percent participation. People can opt out; almost nobody does. Over time the chats produced more shout-outs, more conversation, and a rising eNPS. "Consistent small touches over time," Duncan says. "They make such a huge difference." (No actual donuts. A donut emoji shows up a lot.)

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Boards have noticed. Asked at a board meeting how things were going, Duncan started talking about culture, results, and performance. A board member cut in: "You should be here at every board meeting telling me exactly what's going on with the people from now until whenever." They care because people outcomes are tied to results. So she brings a dashboard of eNPS, morale, and shout-outs, ties low voluntary turnover back to all the small things, and notes how every metric spikes right after an employee offsite.

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Revenue per employee and the "human first, AI enhanced" lever

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The metric Duncan hears about constantly now used to live with finance. "It's at the top of the dashboard," she says. She was once brought in to flip a team that was large and low on revenue. The assessment turned up duplicate roles and a team where nobody really understood how the work got done. She redesigned the org smaller on headcount but higher on revenue per employee, with more qualified people in better-fit seats. "Smaller team sometimes means every hour matters more and you've got better output per person."

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AI is changing how she screens. She looks for candidates who are AI-forward and asks how they use the tools in their daily work, screening out the ones who refuse to touch it. The easy lever for revenue per employee is layoffs. The harder, more creative one is producing more revenue with the same headcount. One CEO she works with embodies the alternative, what she calls a "human first, AI enhanced mindset": keep the smart, talented people you have and use AI to boost what they already do, rather than swapping people out for tools.

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She is honest about how early it all is. Even people building frontier models get surprised by what the systems do, she notes, so nobody outside the labs knows exactly what is coming. When Claude released an HR plugin, her HR networking groups were, in her words, popping off about what it meant. But no CHRO is vibe-coding an applicant tracking system from scratch for a thousand-person company. The tools are real and the moment is genuinely uncertain.

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Sometimes old school works

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Asked what else mattered, Duncan pointed back to where the conversation began. For anyone building foundational teams, she said, do some research and look into the top grading methodology. "Those folks really set the standard. They set the culture, they set the tone of the work." Her closing line lands the whole thread: "Sometimes old school works."

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The through-line connecting inflection points, hiring rigor, culture, and revenue per employee is the quality and fit of the people at the top. Get the wrong leaders in early and culture sours, execution stalls, and a new HR hire spends six months cleaning up instead of building. Get the right ones in, with proven chemistry and a method behind the decision, and the small consistent touches have something solid to compound on. As Logan put it, leaders and the executive team set the stage for everything, and that is the one thing you cannot outsource or hire in.