Getting HR right without getting ahead of yourself

HR for startups in life sciences is a peculiar challenge. You are trying to move fast, stay compliant, attract serious scientific talent, and not spend your runway on things you do not yet need. The temptation is either to ignore people infrastructure entirely until something goes wrong, or to copy what a 500-person pharma company does and drown in process.

Neither works. What does work is building the right foundations at the right stage, in roughly the right order.

Here is how to think about it.

Stage one: your first hire to around five people

At this stage, HR is mostly about legal basics and setting a tone. You do not need an HR system. You do not need a competency framework. You do need:

  • Proper employment contracts (not templates pulled from the internet)
  • A clear offer letter process, including any IP assignment clauses relevant to your science
  • Basic policies: grievance, disciplinary, and sickness absence at minimum
  • An understanding of right-to-work checks and how to run them correctly

The tone piece matters more than most founders expect. How you treat your first three or four people sets the culture for everyone who follows. Are you transparent about the company's financial position? Do you give people genuine feedback? Do you follow through on what you say? These habits are easier to build at five people than to retrofit at fifty.

One practical tip: get your employment contracts reviewed by someone who understands life sciences specifically. Intellectual property, confidentiality, and publication rights all carry more weight here than in most other sectors, and a generic contract will often leave gaps.

Stage two: five to around fifteen people

This is where informal starts to fray. You have probably hired across a few different functions, perhaps lab, regulatory, and commercial. People have different expectations, different working patterns, and different ideas about what fair looks like.

What you need at this stage:

  • A simple, written onboarding process (not elaborate, just consistent)
  • A salary and equity framework, even a rough one, so that decisions are not made entirely on the fly
  • A clear probation process that is actually used
  • A way for people to raise concerns, even if that is just a named person and a clear door

You also need to start thinking about management. If you have promoted a scientist into a people management role, they almost certainly need some support. Most technical experts are not given the tools to manage, and assuming they will figure it out is one of the most common and costly mistakes at this stage.

A light-touch performance conversation rhythm, perhaps quarterly check-ins rather than annual reviews, helps people feel seen and gives you early warning of problems before they escalate.

Stage three: fifteen to around thirty people

By now, you likely need someone with dedicated HR responsibility. That might be a fractional HR professional, an experienced HR business partner a few days a week, or your first in-house hire if the budget allows. The key is that HR cannot remain a founder side-project at this scale.

Priorities at this stage include:

  • A more structured hiring process, with consistent interview approaches and documented decisions (this matters for fairness and for defending decisions if challenged)
  • A pay review process, even an annual one, so that salaries do not drift into chaos
  • Line manager capability, because your people managers are now your biggest lever on retention and engagement
  • An HR information system, something simple to hold records, track leave, and keep you compliant with data obligations under UK GDPR

You will also start to encounter more complex situations: a performance issue that needs careful handling, a potential redundancy, a grievance, a flexible working request. Having someone who knows employment law and can think clearly under pressure is worth far more than any policy document.

Stage four: thirty to fifty people

At this scale, culture becomes something you have to actively tend rather than something that just happens. You are probably too large for every person to know every other person well. New joiners are forming their impressions of you based on their manager and their immediate team, not on the founders.

This is the stage to think about:

  • A clear set of values or working principles that are actually used, not just written on a wall
  • A more deliberate approach to internal communication, so that people understand where the company is going
  • Succession and development conversations, particularly for people in critical roles
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion as a genuine practice, not a statement. At this stage you still have real influence over who you hire and how you build teams

You should also review your benefits and total reward package. In life sciences, you are competing for talent against well-funded competitors. You do not always need to match them on salary, but you do need a compelling and coherent offer.

Build for where you are, not where you hope to be

The most useful mindset for HR in a growing life sciences startup is pragmatism. Build what you need now. Keep it simple enough that people actually use it. Revisit it as you grow.

Over-engineered HR slows you down and frustrates scientists who came to your company precisely because it was not a large corporation. Under-engineered HR creates legal risk, damages trust, and makes it harder to hold on to the people who matter most.

Getting the balance right is genuinely difficult, especially when you are also trying to run a clinical trial or close a funding round.

That is exactly the kind of challenge Sajawo was built for. If you are navigating any of these stages and want a conversation about what good looks like for your specific situation, we are happy to talk.