leadership hires Archives

When something isn’t working in your people or talent function, it’s tempting to jump straight to a fix. Hire a recruiter. Buy another tool. Add another process. But if you haven’t worked out what’s broken, you’re paying to fix the wrong thing.

“We’ve had the deck. We’ve had the recruiter. Nothing’s actually changed.”

It happens repeatedly in scaling companies. Hiring takes too long, so you add recruitment resource. Attrition rises, so retention becomes the priority. Managers are struggling, so leadership training gets commissioned. AI gets introduced because everyone else is using it.

Each response makes sense on its own. None of it is a people plan. It’s a series of reactions dressed up as one.

That’s the thinking behind amity, TRG’s new people and talent advisory service for scaling companies. Led by Lauren Vint-McGee, amity starts with the problem rather than the solution.

“Most people who get in touch won’t know exactly what they need when something in their people or talent function isn’t working, and they shouldn’t have to.”

In short: amity is TRG’s people and talent advisory service for scaling companies. Led by Lauren Vint-McGee, it helps businesses work out what they actually need, then provides the right level of people and talent expertise to address it.

Scaling exposes the gaps in your people function

Early-stage businesses make people decisions however they need to. The founder handles hiring. A COO picks up HR. Managers create their own processes. Someone introduces a new tool because the old spreadsheet has finally stopped cutting it.

At ten people, that flexibility can be useful. At 50, 100 or 200, the same decisions start colliding.

You hear: “No one owns this.”

Senior leadership pays attention to the people function when someone leaves, a hire goes wrong, or the team is visibly struggling. By then, the problem is already affecting the business.

Responsibility has grown, but ownership, expertise and infrastructure haven’t necessarily grown with it.

The obvious answer may be to hire a senior People or Talent leader. Sometimes that’s exactly right. Often what the business needs is narrower: senior leadership two days a week rather than five, a rebuilt hiring strategy, or an experienced outsider to challenge the decisions already being made.

Before adding headcount, you need to know what problem you’re trying to solve.

Diagnose first, then decide what you need

Lauren puts it like this:

“If your car starts making a funny noise, you take it to a mechanic, obvious problem or not. You want someone who can actually diagnose and fix the issue, not just tell you what parts they have in stock, or paint it a nice colour.”

You expect them to find the problem first. People and talent shouldn’t be any different.

If the answer isn’t clear, amity runs a diagnostic before anyone spends money solving the wrong problem. What follows depends on what it finds.

ROOTS Diagnostic. A structured look at what’s happening across your people and talent function, and a clear plan off the back of it.
Fractional People & Talent Leadership. Senior expertise for the days you need it, not the days you don’t.
Embedded Talent. Experienced recruiters and talent specialists working inside your team, without adding permanent headcount.
Talent Strategy & Advisory. Building the strategy and infrastructure behind hiring, retention and growth, or fixing what’s already there.
Executive Coaching. One-to-one support built for the pressure of people and talent decisions, not generic leadership advice.

The service changes because the problem changes.

Technology speeds up the process. It doesn’t replace the thinking.

The tools have made hiring faster, but they haven’t made the decisions behind it any better. Lauren is an advocate for using AI where it makes work faster and better, but not where it replaces independent thinking.

At amity, technology supports the process. Human judgement stays behind the people and hiring decisions that matter.

“In the people and talent industry, only human interaction can create real trust…Build the infrastructure with AI all you like, but the actions should still be entirely human.”

Meet Lauren Vint-McGee, founder of amity

Lauren sits on the board and leads the strategy behind its Talent Solutions offering. After 20 years in delivery, operations, commercial, strategy, and implementation, she’s now bringing that experience to amity.

For Lauren, amity is about giving businesses access to the right level of expertise at the right point in their growth, and giving new talent leaders the support to grow into increasingly complex roles.

Not every people problem needs another hire

TRG has spent 15 years helping businesses across London’s technology ecosystem build their teams. Amity expands what that support can look like.

Sometimes the right next step isn’t another hire. It’s understanding what your business actually needs before you make one.

If you’ve moved beyond ad hoc and aren’t sure what comes next, get in touch.

Speak to Lauren Vint-McGee
Email: lvint@trg-uk.com

Most founders expect hiring to get easier after the first few years. In reality, the opposite often happens.

The hardest hiring stage is not building the first team. It’s building the next one.

Founders know the business inside out, interview every candidate themselves, and make decisions quickly.

As the company grows, that changes.

Hiring decisions become distributed across managers. New functions emerge. Leadership teams need different capabilities. Headcount grows faster than the systems supporting it.

This is the scale-up moment.

The scale-up moment is when hiring complexity increases faster than capability.

Why scale-up hiring becomes more complex

Hiring challenges are not unique to scale-ups.

Recent hiring data found that 58% of employers are struggling to fill roles, while 25% report losing talent to stronger offers.

Scale-ups face an additional layer of complexity because they’re not just filling vacancies. They’re building teams, leadership structures, and functions at the same time.

The hiring approach that worked at 20 employees rarely works at 100. Processes drift as the team grows. Different managers assess candidates differently. Hiring priorities compete for attention. Internal teams are stretched between immediate needs and longer-term planning.

Growth creates more hiring activity.
Scale creates more hiring complexity.

58% struggling to fill roles | 25% losing talent

58% of employers are struggling to fill roles. 25% report losing talent to better offers.

Source: Totaljobs Hiring Trends Update

From Series B hiring to building functions

Early-stage hiring is largely about finding great people. Scale-up hiring is creating the conditions to hire great people consistently.

The challenge shifts from hiring individuals to building functions.

Founders start asking different questions.

How should teams be structured over the next 12 to 24 months?
What leadership capability is needed to support growth?
Which hires create the greatest impact across the wider business?
How can hiring standards remain consistent as more people become involved in the process?

Poor hiring structure slows growth long before hiring stops altogether.

Without clear ownership, aligned processes, and a realistic hiring roadmap, growth starts to expose weaknesses.

Hiring becomes reactive. Decision-making slows down. Quality becomes harder to maintain.

Why hiring infrastructure matters as teams scale

Hiring infrastructure rarely gets the same attention as revenue growth, product development, or expansion plans.

Yet it often determines whether those plans can be delivered.

As headcount grows, more people become involved in hiring decisions; more functions compete for talent and more processes emerge.

Without structure, hiring quality becomes inconsistent.

The strongest scale-ups create clarity around how hiring decisions are made, who owns them, and what good looks like across the business.

That allows them to scale headcount without creating friction, confusion, or avoidable hiring mistakes.

Why embedded hiring partners outperform at scale

Filling a vacancy doesn’t require understanding the business. Building a function does.

Hiring decisions don’t exist in isolation at scale.

A leadership hire reshapes team structure.
An engineering hire affects delivery capacity.
A commercial hire influences growth plans.

The further a company scales, the more connected those decisions become.

That is why many scale-ups move away from transactional recruitment relationships. They need partners who understand where the business is heading, not just what it needs today.

Embedded partnerships create value through context, consistency, and a long-term understanding of the business. Not through volume of placements, but through depth of relationship.

Building hiring capability for the next stage of growth with TRG

The shift from hiring individuals to building functions is one of the defining moments in every growth company.

From what we’re seeing in the market, the businesses that scale successfully invest in structure early. They keep hiring decisions aligned to business goals. They make sure the way they hire at 50 employees still works at 150.

If hiring is starting to feel more complex than your organisation is prepared for, you’ve reached the scale-up moment.

Speak to TRG