5 Startup Hiring Pitfalls to Avoid: Save Time, Money, and Talent

Startups experiencing rapid growth on a limited budget often encounter hiring challenges. Unstructured hiring strategies and compliance issues can lead to costly mistakes, including inefficient recruitment processes, disorganized onboarding, and stretched budgets, all of which can hinder progress and drain resources.

With a proven track record of assisting over 15,000 global clients in hiring talent worldwide, Deel enables startups to avoid common hiring pitfalls and streamline their global recruitment.

This article outlines the top five common hiring mistakes startups make and offers strategic solutions for efficient talent acquisition. By partnering with Deel, you can refine your hiring processes, ensure compliance, and minimize inefficiencies, setting the stage for sustainable growth.

1. Hiring without a strategy

Hiring talent without a clear understanding of how a particular role will contribute to the overall business growth and strategy can easily lead to overlapping roles and unclear expectations of team members, causing duplicate work and employee dissatisfaction.

Many early-stage startups face one of these common scenarios when hiring:

Rapid and untimely growth

Scaling startup operations before the company has reached consistent profitability and without having an angel investor to back you up during this period.

A glut of workers

Excessively hiring more people in hopes of increasing revenue instead of trying to do more with your existing resources.

After the initial hype wears off, startups face high employee turnover, which has direct and indirect costs for the company. Alternatively, the company must conduct mass layoffs, which can harm the employer brand.

Increased recruitment costs

Hiring becomes more expensive because you need to replace the employees who left, meaning a new round of sourcing, interviews, assessments, and training.

Decreased income and profits

The new employee needs several months to reach full productivity, during which period you lose on overall team output.

Solutions

Deel helps companies hire global talent compliantly and streamline their processes across locations to ensure consistent, error-free operations. We help your HR team turn repetitive, manual tasks into automated workflows so they can focus on more strategic tasks, like headcount planning.

See also: Strategic Workforce Planning: The Complete Guide for Future-Proofing Your Talent Strategy

Centralized system

Deel allows you to manage your direct employees, international employees hired through its employer of record (EOR), and independent contractors in one place. This way, you can have an accurate overview of your entire workforce without duplicate or outdated data. You’ll know exactly how many people you have on each team, where they’re located, and how they’re performing in one easy-to-use dashboard.

Discover how Outreach centralizes HR and payroll across 5+ countries with Deel.

Reporting

Deel’s reporting features allow you to monitor the onboarding, offboarding, retention, and growth of your global workforce to predict and analyze trends more accurately. You can also use global cost analytics to understand and anticipate future costs across your workforce and get global payroll reports in real time, whether you pay your workers through Deel or not.

2. Clunky hiring process

52% of job seeker participants in a CareerPlug survey indicated they had turned down job offers because of poor candidate experience. This statistic demonstrates that a lengthy and complicated recruitment process, disorganized interviews, and a lack of communication can hurt your business in several ways:

Employer reputation

The CareerArc survey found that 72% of job seekers were likely to share their negative candidate experiences with others, both online and verbally. So, not only will you miss out on hiring the right candidates, but your employer brand could also suffer.

Higher recruitment costs

Because of the extended time you need to fill a vacancy, you’ll need to spend more money on job boards, talent sourcing, and other recruitment activities.

Solution

Deel ATS

For fast-growing teams, hiring bottlenecks can slow down momentum and cause you to lose top talent. Deel ATS streamlines the process with global applicant tracking, AI-powered automation, and compliance-first hiring—so you can move from job posting to offer letter faster than ever.

Key benefits:

• Simplify applicant tracking with AI – Pre-screen candidates in seconds and manage your pipeline effortlessly
• Make data-driven talent decisions – Automatically summarize feedback and create structured interview plans
• Scale hiring compliantly – Built-in GDPR approvals and a global HRIS help ensure smooth expansion
• Reduce costs – Replace manual processes and avoid the need for external recruiters or third-party talent associates

3. Chaotic and complicated onboarding

Onboarding new talent without a clear plan, sufficient support, and enough product or service training can result in high employee turnover rates and reduced team productivity, negatively affecting overall business profitability.

Even after a candidate has accepted your offer, they may leave the company if they don’t feel like you’ve set them up for success. Some of the main issues that can hurt your future relationship with an employee entail the following:

• Lack of responsiveness from the team
• Unclear expectations and role responsibilities
• Lack of information about company policies and processes

Onboarding is the critical period that can make or break a great employee, so it’s vital to provide your new hire with well-structured training and enough support during this process while regularly asking for feedback.

Solution

Deel HR lets you manage your entire global workforce in one place, regardless of location or worker type. You can reduce onboarding to just a few minutes, compliantly offboard people, streamline time-off tracking, and more.

See also: Global HRIS: Why It’s the Best HR Solution for Global Teams

Automated onboarding tasks

Deel’s Workflow builder allows you to create customized, automated workflows to remove admin work from onboarding and synchronize processes across departments.

Select a trigger (for example, a new hire joins) and add filters and conditions based on the worker type, location, department, etc.

Create an action to be completed immediately or with delay—an email or Slack message to send or a task to be created within the Deel platform. This way, you can send welcome emails, remind new employees to complete compliance training, and more.

See also: How to Onboard Remote Employees: Checklist and Tips for Managers

Streamlined communication through Slack

Deel Engage plugins for Slack help your team streamline communication and stay productive without switching tools to complete tasks. Onboarding by Deel lets you reduce manual workload by auto-assigning tasks and providing a high-level overview of the onboarding pipeline for all new hires.

See also: How to Use AI in Employee Onboarding: 7 Key Use Cases to Drive Success

4. Letting your cost per hire skyrocket

Startups that limit themselves to a restricted talent pool drag out their hiring process and increase hiring costs. They miss opportunities to close skill gaps faster and recruit more affordable talent globally.

Hiring talent globally is more advantageous for your company since you can benefit from greater time zone and language coverage for your customers, a more diverse workforce, and easier global expansion.

Most importantly, recruiting international talent can help you reduce cost per hire because you source potential candidates:

• From lower-cost-of-living countries, so you can offer competitive salaries while still staying within budget
• From a broader talent pool, meaning you’re likely to reduce your time to hire

Deel’s data confirms that global hiring sustained its momentum throughout 2024: Of all contracts made through our platform, almost 90% were for remote workers.

Solution

Deel helps companies hire compliantly in over 150 countries, with Deel-owned entities in over 100 of them.

Employer of Record

Thanks to our EOR services, you don’t need to register your own local entity to hire full-time employees in another country. We help you expand your talent pool, handle all legal liabilities, and help run international payroll hassle-free.

See also: Pros and Cons of Hiring with an Employer of Record (EOR)

5. Neglecting compliance

Compliance is a critical but often overlooked aspect of hiring that can result in court cases, fines, loss of talent, and reputation damage for your startup.

The most common compliance mistakes startups make when hiring remote and globally dispersed teams include the following:

Violating labor laws

Failing to meet requirements for minimum wage, payment schedules, overtime pay, paid leave, work hours, rest breaks, pre-hire background checks, mandatory employee benefits, equipment supply, and terminations.

Misclassification

Illegally categorizing (misclassifying) workers as independent contractors when they should be classified as employees or failing to maintain legally compliant contractor agreements that outline the terms of the relationship.

Undocumented workers

Failing to collect and retain the necessary compliance documentation to prove that a worker is eligible to work in a particular country.

Vulnerable data and intellectual property

Failing to request new hires sign non-disclosure and data processing agreements to protect the startup’s sensitive information.

Solutions

Deel’s global hiring platform weaves compliance into the hiring process, making it impossible to get it wrong. You’ll benefit from the following:

Intuitive contract workflows

When creating a work agreement through Deel, you are guided through each aspect of the contract with directions and insights into country-specific labor laws and requirements. Every contract you create is vetted by local legal experts and updated quarterly so you remain compliant.

See also: How to Streamline Your Contract Review Process: Guide for Startups

Deel generates localized contractor agreements to hire independent contractors. You also have the option to upgrade to Deel Contractor of Record, where legal experts classify and hire contractors in 150 countries on your behalf, eliminating the risk and liability of misclassification.

Compliance documentation collection

During the contract creation stage, Deel prompts you to invite employees and contractors to upload the necessary compliance documents via their self-serve dashboard.

If the employee requires visa and immigration support, the platform prompts you to request this here. The immigration team will get to work procuring the correct visa, providing sponsorship, and running the necessary screenings in line with country requirements to streamline the hiring process.

See also: How to Get the Best Global Talent for Your Startup With EOR Visa Sponsorship

Built-in data protection and processing agreements (DPAs)

During contract creation, the platform also enables you to request the signing of DPAs to prevent your new hires from sharing your startup’s confidential information.

See also: Data Privacy Compliance: Best Practices for Global Teams

Streamline startup hiring with Deel

Get rid of clunky processes, non-compliance risks, and limited talent acquisition options with Deel’s global HR platform. Deel exists to help startups like yours streamline global hiring and team management.

Find out why 15,000+ customers trust Deel to help them build and manage their global workforce.

Book a 30-minute platform demo and learn how Deel works today.