
Recruitment and Beyond
We discuss all elements relating to finding the very best talent and retaining your fantastic teams to grow your business.
Recruitment and Beyond
HR For Startups | Season 2, Episode 7 | Recruitment and Beyond Podcast
🎙️ Episode Overview
In this episode, Ewan is joined by Angela Rieu-Clarke, founder of Buzzqube, an HR consultancy supporting early-stage businesses. Angela shares her expertise on why startups should prioritise HR, when to introduce it, and how to build a strong, scalable people strategy. Whether you’re a founder, hiring manager, or simply interested in HR best practices, this conversation is packed with practical advice.
🔹 Key Discussion Points:
âś… When should startups start thinking about HR?
âś… The biggest HR challenges for early-stage businesses
âś… How to build a strong company culture without overcomplicating it
âś… Why employment law compliance is crucial for growing teams
âś… Hiring the right people for a startup environment
âś… The role of HR in employer branding and talent attraction
âś… How HR helps businesses prepare for investment rounds
âś… Managing performance, career development, and redundancies
🔹 Top HR Tips for Startups:
📌 Start small – a consultant may be the best first step
đź“Ś Be proactive in setting up essential policies & contracts
đź“Ś Build an inclusive and transparent culture to attract top talent
đź’ˇ Listen in for expert insights that will help you build a thriving, people-focused business!
đź“© Connect with Angela Rieu-Clarke
đź”— LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-rieu-clarke-chartered-fcipd-80032a115/
📧 Email: angela@buzzqube.com
📢 Enjoying the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review – your support helps us bring you more valuable insights!
#RecruitmentAndBeyond #HRForStartups #TalentAttraction #Leadership #ScalingBusinesses #EmployerBranding #StartupCulture
Follow our social channels where we continue these conversations!
Eden Scott LinkedIn
Beyond HR LinkedIn
Ewan (00:06):
Hi, and welcome to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. My name's Ewan Anderson. I'm the marketing director here at Eden Scott. This is your essential guide to navigating the ever-changing world of human resources and recruitment. We chat with industry leading figures to give you the inside track on growing and developing the very best teams.
(00:32):
Today we had a chat with Angela Reu Clark, the founder of Buzz Cube, an HR consultancy set up to help early stage businesses to navigate the challenging world of hr.
(00:47):
Hi, welcome back to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. I am joined today by Angela EU Clark, who's the founder of Buzz Cube. Angela, great to have you here. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and what Buzz Cube does?
Angela (01:01):
Well done on saying my name correctly, I start with you. That's brilliant. Sure. Yeah. We're an HR consultancy set up just over a year and a half ago now. We tend to deal with startups and scale ups businesses that are just beginning to need HR services. They're just beginning to hire. They're just thinking about talent attraction. They're just thinking about employment law and policy and exciting stuff like that, but don't really know what they need.
Ewan (01:26):
Yeah, good. So how did you end up setting up? Where did that come from and why is this your background? Is they always worked in hr?
Angela (01:36):
So I've worked in HR for about 10 years now. Prior to that, I was a teacher and coach, and I've always worked in mentoring people essentially. So HR kind of fell within that. I found myself after having children and looking after them for quite an extended period in a little office job that kind of grew into a chief people officer role over a long period of time in a software company, and I felt the need to kind of get some more variety after that. So it was really, really great to set up on my own. And the last year and a half, it's been really interesting. Lots of access to businesses I would never have had access to before. So I've been in a law firm, I've been in several charities, excuse me, I've been in a biotechnology engineering firm. I've been in a LIDAR firm, which most people haven't got a clue what that is.
Ewan (02:27):
So
Angela (02:27):
Lots of science-based stuff, which I absolutely love.
Ewan (02:31):
Brilliant. So obviously you're a startup yourself, but you're working with a lot of startups in the early stage businesses, so the HR part of it is always one of those. It's something that you need to do, you need to be aware of. But how critical is it for a startup to really, and when should they start to think about hr?
Angela (02:48):
I think it probably becomes important when you're wanting to make your first hire, but it's not definitely important. You don't need to suddenly pile on absolutely every policy and think about career paths and things straight away. You just want to make sure that you're able to actually organize the business in such a way that you're going to be able to look after that staff member and then following staff member. So you want to build an environment around the person, the first person where people can thrive, and having someone maybe on the people side, whether there're permanently or maybe just coming in and out as a consultant, ensures that you're thinking about scaling culture, you're scaling engagement, and you're thinking about the wellbeing of your team as well as putting in that employment law stuff and the important stuff you need when you take someone on. It should help solve anything before it happens. Actually, any costly mistakes that might occur should be cut off because you've actually put the right things in place.
Ewan (03:44):
Yeah, I suppose it's that, isn't it? It's getting those things in place early and thinking about them, but not necessarily having to have, as you say, screeds and screeds of policies. This is actually just about getting into the mindset of people management, the people side of things are the people, they're critical to your business. Aren, there no business grows without great people, does it? So I suppose it's just being mindful of that. So what are the biggest headaches for early stage businesses when they start to look at this?
Angela (04:13):
I think they just don't really want to prioritize people if they're honest to begin with, because they're not thinking about that. They're thinking about strategy and product marketing and development and all the exciting stuff and fundraising. They're absolutely thinking, where's the money coming from? And it may be having that sort of HR that people service that isn't something that they really, really want to think about. But one big challenge is managing your compliance around employment law. You don't start a business to become an expert in employment law. You don't want to have to do that. So that's really one of the biggest headaches, something that you need to get, especially when you're thinking about right to work checks and that type of thing. You need to make sure you're getting it right, or you could be faced with a hefty fine. Another thing might be handling performance issues.
(04:54):
When you're in a small close-knit team, everyone else's buddy, they don't necessarily want to be able telling people off. It might be quite a flat structure. It might be the case that someone hasn't actually quite got to grips with what the job is because they're not used to a startup environment. So having a little bit of a wraparound around people with HR is probably the best way to think about getting started and finding the right people as well. HR can help you do that. We can really think about talent attraction and actually getting people focused into a job who know what they're doing and want to be in a startup or a scale up because lots of people are actually not used to that environment. And if someone's not able to work autonomously, the chances are high that they're not actually going to be fit for that job in the first place. So HR can really help you find those types of people, the right kind of people for a startup.
Ewan (05:49):
Yeah, I think that early stage, just as you touched on there, I guess it's not to over complicate it, but I think you almost need a foundation of why do we exist, what is our purpose? And then trying to attract those types of people because first of all, you've got an SDS business, as you say, you need people who can probably turn the hand to a few things and are not necessarily aligned to job descriptions as a strict job description, but also that people need to align with the purpose of your business, whatever that might be. Now could be a startup in, like you say, life sciences and a startup in tech. Now they're going to be quite different or a startup in food and drink, whatever it might be. So they're going to be quite different. They, and I think you just need to really focus on perhaps take that one step back and really understand what it is, the purpose of your business to really help you bring in the right people. Would that be right?
Angela (06:42):
Definitely. Yeah. I talk about impact quite a lot. So if you can actually identify, rather than having to write down every value of your business and getting everything on paper, if you can identify the impact that your business is making, then you're going to be able to actually attract in people. People want to help make an impact, especially when you're talking about Gen Z and millennials. They want to work in businesses that are doing good for the environment, doing good for society, doing amazing stuff, innovative stuff in tech. So if you can attract those types of people by talking about the impact that you're going to make, then you're going to actually, that's kind of tick. You're going to attract the right kind of people in if they're attracted to the impact that they're going to make.
Ewan (07:23):
Yeah, and I suppose one of the questions was around culture, and that comes, I suppose, from your purpose. It comes from that whole bringing the right people or the people not necessarily who are all the same mindset. You don't want that. You don't want everybody thinking the same and doing the same things, but you almost want to set something around a purpose to make sure that the people that come in kind of fit into that culture that you've got in the organization and mold into that and actually perhaps start to mold that culture as well. Would that be right?
Angela (07:54):
I think that is right. I think you have to, although I'm saying you don't have to write down a set of values. The chances are high that you've got a set of values yourself as a founder, you've got a way you want to work, and if you can actually live that and model it, then people start to go, oh, okay, the founder's acting like that, or the CEO's acting like that. That's the way I'm going to act. Or I can see where they're trying to take this company. So a little bit of transparency around what's going well in the business. Whenever you've got wins, talk about them openly. When you've got challenges, talk about them openly, really celebrate milestones and encourage lots of collaboration and please listen to your team's ideas. That really, really helps with culture. It makes such a difference when it's not just written down on your website, this is who we are, this is what we do. Actually modeling it, actually doing it makes a huge difference. I'm not one for, I think I've said this, I've saying this twice. I don't feel the need to write every value down. It's about really preaching from the top about what you want to be, and people will actually follow, they'll follow great leaders if they understand where they're trying to get to.
Ewan (09:00):
Yeah, yeah. I suppose it comes from leadership. It is that the leader has to believe, but actually I act on what they're doing. And people, as you say, will follow that. And I know we always have this battle off between marketing and HR and should your values be written down and so on. And I suppose I totally agree, it's not about writing 'em down, it's about believing them and living them and actually making sure that those in a leadership role in early stage business absolutely embody that. And actually, you touched on something earlier on there just about openness and communication. Again, there are four people in a room in code base or wherever it might be. Do we need open communication? Do we need an internal communications process? No, no, you don't. But that openness to discuss all facets of the business. Don't get me wrong. There are some things that there'll be HR that are private and confidential, but in general as a business, that open communication really allows itself or it opens the business up to be inclusive and innovative. Is that right?
Angela (10:06):
Yeah, 100%. I think if you can sit in a room together, that's wonderful, but a lot of businesses are actually remote still, especially technology based businesses and bringing people together into a room, even if you are remote, it just makes such a difference because you are, you're able to chat with each other about what you're actually doing. You're able to tackle challenges together, throw stuff up on a whiteboard together. I think it's just incredibly important for building that culture. Obviously openness and transparency as far as possible. As you've said, you're not going to talk about people's health issues in front of other people, for example. And that's maybe when you start to need a little bit of HR if there are things going on in the background. But yeah, no, I'm just a great believer in tackling things as a team, setting challenges as a team. So although the CEO ultimately is going to be, or the founder is going to be the person who's going to make the hard decisions, they should be backed up by their team, they should have thought them through because you bring people on the journey with you, you're just going to make such a difference to culture and a business.
Ewan (11:11):
And so just thinking about the different stages as we're going through here in an early stage business or a startup, if you like, how do they go about thinking of hiring an HR person? Who do they look to and how do they go about that?
Angela (11:25):
So I think early stage businesses, probably having an HR consultant, someone like me to come along and actually just guide you a little bit is a great way to go. You probably want to do that up until you're about 40 people-ish. Anything over 40, the chances are high that you're going to need an HR person within your business and you're actually going to have to think about hiring. And again, you can get help to do that. It's quite nice. I've actually done this with quite a large business. In fact, I've helped them define what their people and culture department actually looks like. They've called it people and culture rather than hr, which is absolutely fine. And then brought in a leader for them because they weren't a hundred percent sure based on some organizational changes that had gone on what they needed. So you can get to a stage definitely where you know need someone, but you're not quite sure how.
(12:14):
So when you start to think about, well, how am I going to develop the organization? Do I need someone who's maybe sector specific because I'm in something really specific, like drinks for example. You mentioned drinks and food before. I wouldn't dive into a drinks and food HR position because I don't have that background. I don't have a lot of background. For example, leading trade union work and things like that. So my specific background is around tech and scaling tech businesses with a little bit of third sector thrown in for fun. So I love trade sector. I think it's great. I love working with charities. But yeah, making sure that you're hiring the right person and actually getting support to do that is incredibly important. So that's a waffly way of saying HR consultant. So about 40 people. Beyond that, I think you probably need someone.
Ewan (13:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as part of that process, again, I always think about it's fine for four people in a room or we eight people in a room or whatever, but is there kind of a stepping stone in terms of how much or how you set that up to almost futureproof your business? I guess I am just trying to think of if we're quite early on in the process. I know we don't need all singing and dance in HR department, but are the things that can put in place the right policies, the right job descriptions that do these things all help and then aligning them with your values? Does it almost give you a template, your values and what you stand for your purpose to map out those in your job descriptions and that's the structural things that you need as a business?
Angela (13:51):
Yeah, definitely. I quite often find myself helping people who've maybe got to the size, there's sort of eight to 10 people and suddenly they're needing to hire more people and people have quite a clear idea of what they're doing in the business day to day, but new people coming in, you're just getting to that stage where you've maybe got managers in the business and you've got staff coming in and who don't really understand what they're doing. You're maybe bringing in less qualified staff. You've maybe started with a bunch of absolute rock stars who are brilliant at their jobs, but you need to think about the business sustainably. So you need to bring in people who are going to learn with the business and think about actual job specs. If you've got a job spec, it makes such a difference. The fact that you've got something written down in front of you, okay, this is what's expected of me. And it doesn't have to be all singing, all dancing masses of KPIs and things. All you need are a couple of goals to talk about on a weekly basis. Preferably I'm not a great one for annual reviews. I don't particularly like them. I prefer a career conversation that's kind of ongoing.
(14:51):
So if you've got job specs, you've got contracts, you've got basic policies that cover employment law. A staff handbook does not need to be more than 50 to 60 pages. And even that seems like a lot. But to be honest, with the employment laws that we've got now, it will be 50 to 60 pages. I've seen staff handbooks 300, 400 pages. I think, what is this?
(15:14):
It's not needed. So being really pragmatic about what you actually need to apply is important. And as I mentioned before, when you're bringing people into the business, these things like write to work checks and having a really good onboarding process at the stage at which you're beginning to really scale is so, so important. If you don't get that right, you lose people quickly because they've not been onboarded properly. They don't understand what their job is, they don't understand who to go to for help. But also you could face fines and things. If you've onboarded someone who potentially shouldn't actually be working for you, then maybe not on the right type of visa or there's things around that.
Ewan (15:51):
I think that's it. Things happen so quickly if you're pitching for investment and you get it, we've worked with a couple of companies and they got their investment and next thing you knew they needed 10 people, now you want to make sure you're almost set up for that because the last thing you want to think about once you've got that investment, because things start to move quickly, there's increased demands, things all change.
(16:12):
The last thing you want to think about is, oh, have I got my policies in the right place? Have I got my job descriptions? So it's not giving it too much, it's not going over the top, but it's just preparing yourself for that scale and actually maybe making that part of your plan. You're obviously plan to raise, you plan to get investment, you plan to do marketing campaigns, to build the profile of your brand. You need to plan your hr, you need to plan what you're going to need. You need to plan the people side of things, don't you?
Angela (16:41):
Yeah, no, definitely. I think HR is really actually crucial for making a company investor ready. I've been through a couple of rounds of investment and it's a really, really interesting process. If you've got solid employment contracts in place, appropriate policies, again, let's be pragmatic about it in place. And if you know your data, so you want to know your makeup of skills and the diverse team that you've got, you want to be able to talk about that to your investors. They're interested. If you've got evidence of good hiring practices, you look like you're ready to scale. That's what investors are looking for. They're looking for your readiness to scale. If you've got all of these things in place, it's a tick, tick, tick. It's a bit of a tick box exercise to be honest, doing that kind of audit. But it's so nice getting it all in place and knowing I just have to pull that information off my system or I can report this easily to my investors. It just makes me all warm inside is great. Absolutely. Oh, I'm so sad. Not
Ewan (17:36):
At all. But I know that I like things to be in order. And if you've got everything in order and you say, here we go. That's the information you need. You think, ah, that's a nice feeling. And that's it. I suppose thinking about that transition from startup to scale up and you mentioned it there and just understanding the difference of what you require is quite interesting just to have a look at it and to understand as people go on that journey, what else do they need? How do they need to set up differently, their HR function?
Angela (18:05):
So again, it'll depend on the type of business. It'll depend on whether you're maybe hiring people in other countries or if you're just hiring people in the uk, it'll depend on lots of different things. But again, pragmatically your basic startup, you need employment contracts, you need a few policies, probably a staff handbook. You need some nice onboarding when you're getting to that scale up stage, you definitely need your job specs. You really need them at startups stage as well. But a lot of companies don't have them. You need your job specs. You need to start thinking about how to have career conversations. You need a plan for scaling. You need to be able to think about what could this workforce look like in a year's time? Where am I going here and how am I going to hire these people in? And one of the most important things, and one of the really great fun things that's touching on what we talked about before is how am I going to attract talent into the business now that I do need to scale so quickly?
(18:57):
And that can be a really huge part of hr. And actually it's a great place for HR marketing to work together. You've got a really good bond between HR and marketing within your business. That's fantastic because quite often marketing are focused very much on sales, sales, sales and HR are focused on people, people, people. But coming together and being able to say, I don't know one post a week about this is why we're a really great employer. You start to bring people into the business. You start people talking about the business, it makes you look investor ready and if marketing are willing to do that alongside you, the two things start to tie together really, really nicely.
Ewan (19:30):
Yeah, because we talk about this quite a bit, your employer brand, just your brand, it's just a different target market essentially. So what you talk about in through your channels should be relevant, whether you're trying to attract someone to come and work for you or you're trying to attract the customer and there's different messages and perhaps different channels and so on, but essentially is your brand. And that's it. It just touching on that, you touched on this slightly talking about investment rounds and preparing the company for that and preparing your HR for that. What sort of thing do investors look for?
Angela (20:10):
I think we sort of touched on it a little bit before, but ultimately are looking for good compliance essentially. So your basics in place across contracts and across what you've agreed with people. I've been through an investment round before where we weren't able really to talk about, or the business wasn't able really to talk about how we had put bonuses in place. For example, for the sales team. That kind of thing is vital and investors are not going to want to invest if they don't know how much they're supposed to be paying someone. So these types of things are incredibly important to investors. But again, just kind of touching on that data and just knowing each one of your people, knowing what skills they've got, and then thinking ahead. The investors really want to think ahead. They want to think, right, how is that workforce going to grow?
(20:58):
What's going to go really well within this company? Say it as a technology company and you're looking as if you're going to be building more mobile apps. We might need more Android and iOS developers in the future. Do we have them within the business? Are they career ready to make a jump that we've got lots of juniors thinking about that kind of thing is really, really important for the investors as well. Or are we going to need to pay out to bring people in who are going to be able to go and run with whatever the problem is, whatever the project is. So lots of things to think about for investors.
Ewan (21:34):
Yeah, and sorry, just to jump back a wee bit, you touched on this before about bringing people in and being prepared for them, and a lot of the research we've had is that people really want to, particularly in tech businesses, but every business I guess, is to know that there's some kind of career progression as well as performance training and development side of things as well. Do you think, how early do you start thinking about that? How early do you need to think about that? It is quite critical for a lot of people. They obviously want a good salary, there's no doubt about that. That's fine. But actually in terms of the job, the purpose of the company is important, but career development and progression through training and development, it's not always easy. I mean, everybody's got a trained development budget when there's four people in the room. But is that something you need to think about as you go through that and then again, as I say, looking at investment, are they looking for information on that as well?
Angela (22:25):
Yeah, so it's a really, really good question. Not an easy one to answer when it comes to, I've got a little life example at the moment, a company that I'm dealing with. So we've brought somebody into the team, the team's only about 10 people, and this person is absolutely brilliant at working autonomously. So we've interviewed really, really well. We've done some really great stuff to bring this really technical person in. But at their three month review, immediately they're starting to think, okay, what about my future within the company and what about do I get equity? And all of these types of things. They're asking great questions because they're a really, really clever person and that puts you on the spot. And how about when am I going to become a manager? So there are ways to start to think about this quite early on, and I would think about it quite early on, probably around that sort of 10 people mark, where you think about as I'm bringing these people in, as I'm bringing these new staff members and these new team members, are they going to be able to potentially help in the business? Are they going to maybe be able to mentor other people? Should I be involving them maybe in stages of interview rounds and trying to give them more responsibility that way? So it's a question first of all about showing them trust and giving them a bit more responsibility. All
(23:45):
Also that transparency thing. Be transparent. We don't have a learning and development budget yet. However, you can learn and develop to some extent as you're doing your job. And this person that I was specifically talking about, that's exactly what they're doing. They're doing kind of on the job training. They're learning as they go because they've got a fantastic COO working above 'em. But also because they're that kind of autonomous person able to work in a startup environment, they're sort of searching for things and asking for things themselves, which is great. We also have to identify as much free training as possible. There's actually loads and loads of free training out there. And when you're a startup, if you've got someone who's an HR specialist who's maybe worked in tech businesses before and put my hand up here, I'll be able to actually come in and identify, okay, that person might need this type of training and I've seen that for free somewhere before. So let's see what we can do here. So taking as many opportunities as possible to give people options is great. In an ideal world, you could send them out to conferences at some point. There's plenty of free conferences or very cheap ones about, particularly in the tech environment in Scotland.
(24:50):
So there's things that you can do that are low budget to begin with, but you will get to a stage where you need to start thinking career path, and you tend to have two career paths. If we are thinking about software developers, for example, I wrote a really nice career framework for a business a few weeks ago where the software developers either wanted to be managers or they just wanted to be really, really good at their jobs.
(25:12):
So we start thinking about, okay, well what does a junior person make? And you bring these very senior software developers in to start talking about what does a junior person look like? What does maybe a medium sort of person look like? What do I look like as a senior person? You start to develop that career pathway and framework with people actually in the business. And because you're developing it with people in the business, you bring the values through as well. The culture starts to come through as well. You're not just hiring something or buying something off the shelf rather, which lots of people do and it's absolutely fine, and really big businesses do that. They're buying things off the shelf. But I think sort of a scale up business, you've got huge opportunities to actually make what you actually want, you want to see in your business happen, and you can do that by speaking to your staff and thinking around what the career opportunities they want are and how they see their own careers progressing.
Ewan (26:05):
Yeah, no, no, that's a good point. And I suppose on the other side, when someone's perhaps not performing as well in a small team, how do you handle that? How do you go about managing that sort of stuff?
Angela (26:20):
I think you've already said it. That's where a job spec does come in. You need to understand the expectation and the goals of your role. If you don't understand that, how can you be expected to do a good job? You're going to excel if you know what you're meant to be doing, don't let performance issues fester. Please try to address them early, speaking to the person, be a bit transparent and really clear about the expectations and any support that you can actually offer. I saw an article the other day about someone saying, pip, performance improvement plans are just nonsense. All it is is a way to actually fire people. They absolutely don't have to be. I don't agree with that. I've used a PIP previously to actually support someone to get better at their job. And if you're able to actually support a manager to actually support the person to get better at their job, the person who's having the problems, you're going to make a far happier business because you've actually worked together to improve something.
(27:16):
Quite
(27:17):
Often it could be the business's fault in the first place that the person's not doing well, get me wrong. Sometimes that's not the case, and if you've got a real problem, bring someone in to help you out with it. Bring in your HR team or bring in an external HR consultant. But yeah, be honest, be compassionate, have that first conversation with the person and then think about what you need to prioritize in terms of what's best for the business and what's best for their team if there is a problem.
Ewan (27:43):
Yeah, no, I think you make that point right at the start there is actually don't let it fester. Deal with it as quickly as you can. I think that's some advice we've heard from others as well as if you let these things go, then they actually, they start to impact on the morale of the whole company. I suppose that was one of the other questions was just around if you have to and things happen in startups and scale up, so investment rounds don't happen or whatever, how do you manage those redundancies or restructuring without really ruining the morale of the business?
Angela (28:14):
It's incredibly difficult. You're never going to get this 100% right for everybody, but you can absolutely get it as right as possible. You have to be honest and empathetic to begin with. You have to think about communicating the reasons behind the decision and being transparent about it as far as possible. Obviously, you're not necessarily going to lay out your accounts for people, but you need to be able to speak to them and say, listen, we've not done as well. Quite often people know it's coming or they know that there's problems within the business because they've been talking about it. And actually, what you don't want is people talking in groups and making things worse. You need to be open and transparent about things. Just say, look, things are not going very well. People do appreciate transparency. Even when the news is tough, please hire an experienced HR consultant to actually guide you through any process if you're going through a redundancy consultation process.
(29:03):
Although consultations only have to happen when it's 20 plus people. I'm of the opinion that consult with your employees early, quickly and do it even when it's a smaller business because it will help them understand what's going on. You want to support people who are going to be impacted with hopefully CV help. Potentially. You can actually do that with an HR consultant coming into the business, maybe training help and just keep acknowledging the emotional toll it's actually taking on everybody. If you say to everybody, look, we understand this is really, really tough and reassure the people are actually going to be staying. You want to reassure them regularly after that's happened, during the process as well about the company's future, and really commit to supporting the people who you've got left going forward. Otherwise, you will find yourself suddenly without a business because people will be dropping out of it.
Ewan (29:57):
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Listen, that's been great. I wonder, we quite often finish with top three tips. So top three tips. First, for an early stage business looking to get some HR support, what sort of things would you tell 'em?
Angela (30:12):
You put me on the spot. Yeah, sorry. No, it's okay. I would probably say get yourself, have a conversation with someone like me to begin with and actually talk about, discover what you need. So yeah, have a conversation, think about what you might need and then get some help. But don't necessarily just go out there and hire yourself a permanent HR person in, it might not actually be a worthwhile exercise. It could end up being a costly exercise, so start small maybe with just a few hours of support per month.
Ewan (30:50):
Perfect. Angela, thank you very much for your time today. It's been great, a great journey through HR and early stage businesses, and if anybody wants to get in touch with you, where's the best place to find
Angela (31:01):
On LinkedIn or angela@buzzcube.com.
Ewan (31:04):
Perfect. Thank you very much. And yeah, look forward to catching up soon.
Angela (31:08):
Cheers.
Ewan (31:14):
Thank for listening to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. Hopefully there was plenty of insight for you to take back to your teams, so don't forget to subscribe and never miss an episode. And if
(31:24):
You can leave us a review, we really appreciate all the feedback and support we get. It makes a massive difference.