Hiring Velocity: The Most Underrated Investment Signal

Of all the signals that predict startup growth, hiring velocity is the most reliable and the most overlooked. Companies do not hire because they feel like it. They hire because they need capacity to capture demand they can already see.

Why Hiring Predicts Growth

The logic is straightforward. A startup that just doubled its engineering team is building something. A startup that just hired its first VP of Sales is getting ready to sell. A startup that posted 15 new roles in a quarter is scaling. These are expensive, high-commitment decisions that management teams do not make lightly.

Hiring is a leading indicator because it precedes revenue. A company hires an enterprise sales team before it closes enterprise deals. It hires engineers before it ships the next product. The hiring signal fires 3-6 months before the growth shows up in revenue numbers.

What to Track

Not all hiring is equal. The specific roles matter:

Engineering hires signal product investment. A company adding 5 engineers is building. A company adding 20 engineers is scaling aggressively.

Sales hires signal go-to-market readiness. The first VP of Sales hire is particularly significant — it means the company has enough product-market fit to invest in systematic selling.

Leadership hires signal maturation. When a startup hires a CFO, they are getting ready for institutional capital. When they hire a VP of People, they are scaling the organization.

Customer success hires signal retention and expansion. Companies hire CS teams when they have enough customers to warrant systematic retention efforts.

Hiring Velocity vs. Absolute Headcount

Absolute headcount matters less than the rate of change. A 500-person company adding 10 employees is maintaining. A 20-person company adding 10 employees is doubling. The signal is in the velocity, not the size.

Track headcount growth as a percentage. A company that grew from 15 to 40 employees in six months (167% growth) is sending a fundamentally different signal than one that grew from 200 to 215 (7.5% growth).

Where to Find Hiring Data

• LinkedIn: Headcount changes, new employee announcements, job postings
• Job boards: Indeed, Glassdoor, Lever, Greenhouse career pages
• Company websites: Careers pages often show the full scope of open roles
• Press releases: Senior hire announcements

The challenge is monitoring all of these at scale. No human can track hiring signals across 10,000 companies. This is exactly the kind of systematic monitoring that AI agents like Ted are built for.

Case in Point

Consider a hypothetical healthtech company: in January they had 12 employees. By April they had 35. They posted roles for VP Engineering, three senior backend engineers, and two enterprise account executives. Their Glassdoor reviews spiked from 8 to 47 in three months.

That pattern — engineering scaling, first sales leadership hire, employer brand building — is a textbook signal of a company about to enter a growth phase. The fund that noticed this signal in February had a 4-month head start on the fund that heard about the company through a warm intro in June.

The Ted Approach

Ted monitors hiring signals across every company in your thesis universe. When hiring velocity accelerates, Ted scores the signal, combines it with other data points, and surfaces the company in your daily email. You see the signal the day it fires, not months later when the company is already in-market for capital.