PeoplePartner

PeoplePartner — for founders post-funding in DACH

Your first key hire — signed, started, and performing.
Or you pay no placement fee.

For founders in DACH who just closed a round and now need a Co-Founder, C-level or Head-of hire. I take the role from org chart to the month-4 performance gate — and leave behind the People system that runs the next ten hires without me.

Founder — built Covomo to >90% market coverage · Interim COO at a >€5M ARR B2B SaaS company · ICF/DBVC-certified executive coach, 500+ sessions · 100+ founding teams coached at the WHU Incubator · Adjunct lecturer, WHU

Book a 30-minute call Or email me directly

The companies being founded now are the first generation that will never build an HR department.

Administrative HR — sourcing, contracts, payroll, absence, reporting — is collapsing into software. It isn't coming back.

What's left is everything early-stage HR was rarely good at anyway: designing the organisation, defining roles by outcomes, judging fit beyond skill, navigating German labour law, coaching leaders and holding them accountable.

That work doesn't need a department. It needs one senior operator with judgment — and a system underneath that runs the repetitive ninety percent.

So I don't sell you an HR function. I build the first one you'll ever need, around the hires that create it.

After the round, you quietly became Head of People. You didn't sign up for that.

• Five to ten hours a week disappear into hiring — at the exact moment you have to prove product-market fit and show you can scale.
• No first-time founder has taken a People function from first hire to a hundred employees. So the quality of your most consequential hires comes down to luck, and slow processes burn runway you raised for something else.
• Roughly 40% of senior executives are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months (Heidrick & Struggles, internal review of 20,000 searches). The fee is the cheapest part of that outcome.
• A Head of People at 15 people is the wrong answer. Unaffordable, largely unavailable at this stage, and the profiles you can get are either too corporate for a young company or too junior to fix anything.
• And then there's German reality: senior notice periods of three to six months mean a signature in month three is a start date in month six to nine. Almost no hiring process has a plan for that gap. Mine is built around it.

One system. From org chart to a hire who performs.

Three acts over roughly ten months. Each module ends in something you can check — not a status update.

Act I — From clarity to hiring acceleration

I act as your Org Architect & Hiring Process Designer.

Module 1 — Org Design & Hiring Clarity

Who to hire, in what order, and why — before cash goes into the wrong role.

• Target org chart in three snapshots: today, +6, +12 months
• Financial feasibility check mapping the chart to your financial plan at fully loaded cost
• Benchmarked salary band logic for the target role
• VSOP/ESOP requirements memo, ready for your lawyer and board
• Hiring sequencing memo — one page, a decision document, not a slide

Done when: you can justify this role to your lead investor in sixty seconds.

Module 2 — Defining the “perfect match” and building the system

The role is defined by outcomes, and the funnel exists before the first candidate is contacted.

• A scorecard on two levels: the three to four outcomes the role must produce in 12 months, and the leading indicators — the observable build-up signals the month-4 gate actually measures. A Head of Sales with six-month cycles is judged on pipeline quality and first team hires, not on closings that cannot exist yet.
• “Beyond skill” matching criteria: the attitude and culture profile that fits this company at this stage
• Funnel design — stages, owners, pass criteria, candidate experience — plus structured interview guides with scoring rubrics
• Sourcing strategy: talent pools, tool stack, assessment instruments, outreach narrative. Outreach runs under your brand, never an intermediary's. “The founder of X is looking for you” opens doors that agencies don't.
• A candidate pitch memo that says why you — honestly

Done when: we score three sample profiles independently and every difference between us is resolved on paper.

Act II — Search · Close · Empower

I act as your Founding Recruiter and Performance Enabler.

Modules 3 to 5 are one engagement. Not because I like bundles, but because the guarantee below is only honest if I control the whole path from sourcing to the probation gate. A signature is a milestone, not the outcome — and I only guarantee outcomes I'm allowed to manage.

Module 3 — Search & Close

A signature from a candidate who was measured against the scorecard.

• AI sourcing stack live: longlist → shortlist → finals, run by me
• Weekly funnel readout: metrics, learnings, decisions — you always know where the search stands
• Structured reference checks against the scorecard, not vibes
• An offer narrative that ties the role's outcomes to your equity story, built on the band logic from Module 1
• Your structured time: about two hours a week at three defined points — shortlist review, final interviews, offer design
• The closing moments are deliberately uncapped: the second dinner, the call when they wobble, the conversation when the counteroffer lands. Senior candidates say yes to founders, not to processes. I plan those moments, prepare you for them, and ask you to show up.

Done when: the contract is signed, the scorecard assessment is documented, and you approved the offer narrative.

This is where a headhunter stops.

Module 4 — Pre-Boarding

The person who signed is the person who starts.

The three to six months between signature and day one are counteroffer season. It is the most dangerous stretch of the whole process — and the one every search firm ignores, because their fee is already banked.

• A pre-boarding rhythm: structured touchpoints every two to three weeks, you and I alternating
• Involvement in selected decisions and team moments before day one
• A counteroffer playbook, prepared with the candidate before the counteroffer arrives
• A start-ready checklist complete two weeks before day one — equipment, access, payroll, week-one schedule

Done when: they walk in on day one, onboarding-ready and still excited.

Module 5 — Onboarding-to-Performance

“Perfectly onboarded” is not a feeling. It's a passed gate.

In Germany, probation is the performance lever. After it, every correction is slow and expensive. So the decision gets made early, on evidence, inside the window.

• A 30/60/90 plan derived directly from the scorecard's leading indicators — same document, third use
• Three one-to-one onboarding coaching sessions for your new hire
• The founder–hire operating rhythm installed: 1:1 structure, explicit decision rights, who decides what without asking
• Structured, documented check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days, scored against the leading indicators
• A go/no-go memo before month five, while you still have room to act
• If it's a no-go: clean exit handling, separation coaching for you, and the replacement search runs on the funnel that already exists
• Legal exit blueprints per contract type — employee probation, managing-director service contract, and co-founder with vesting are three different games

Done when: the gate decision is documented and your People time for this hire is under an hour a week.

Act III — Bonus: HR as an intelligence starter kit

I act as your People Agent Builder & Orchestrator.

Module 6 — Agentic HR Readiness

Everything built in Modules 1 to 5 becomes a system you own, not a folder of PDFs.

• A people audit across contracts, payroll, performance, tools and compliance, with a prioritised gap list that has owners and dates
• The workflows from Modules 1 to 5 programmed into your agent stack, with feedback loops defined per workflow
• An agentic People roadmap that follows your org-chart sequence
• Where it fits: your own HR Agent Builder — an agent that helps you build the next workflows yourself

Done when: the workflows run demonstrably without me.

One clock. Two cases. Binary conditions.

If the candidate never starts. The replacement search runs at no new placement fee, and everything you already paid is credited in full against the replacement hire. You end up with a hire, not a refund and an empty desk.

If the hire doesn't pass the month-4 gate. The performance portion is never invoiced, and the signature portion goes back to you. You end up paying no placement fee at all.

The condition — stated plainly, because it's the whole point. The guarantee applies when the protocolled process points actually took place: the calibration session, the shortlist review, the final interviews, the offer sign-off, the pre-boarding touchpoints, and the check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days. The only evidence is calendar entries and signed memos: it happened, or it didn't. There is no retroactive debate about whether anyone tried hard enough — in either direction. The moment a guarantee triggers is the worst possible moment to negotiate what “proper collaboration” meant, so we don't.

What this guarantee is — and what it isn't. A failed key hire costs you months of momentum and a sum with more zeros than any fee. No refund insures that, and I won't pretend otherwise. The guarantee isn't insurance. It's proof that I'm bound to my own system: I design the gate, I administer it, and I pay if it breaks. What actually lowers your risk is everything that comes before it — a scorecard before sourcing, calibration before decisions, and a verdict in month four instead of a realisation in month fourteen.

Book a 30-minute call Or email me directly

Compare it to the alternatives. Not on price — on what's left afterwards.

I won't win a price-per-signature comparison, and I'm not trying to. I'm not selling signatures. Measured per performing hire with a People system attached, retained search costs about the same and stops at the contract — and the AI recruiter is only cheaper if everything after the signature is worth nothing to you.

A founder who hires for founders — with a coach's eye and an operator's system.

• Founder. I co-founded Covomo and built it into the German market leader with over 90% market coverage, doubling revenue four years running. Across ventures I've raised more than €8M in venture capital. I've made these hires with my own money on the line.
• Operator. Interim COO at a B2B SaaS company north of €5M ARR. My job description for the last seven years has been closing execution gaps — which is exactly what a key hire either does or doesn't do.
• Coach. ICF and DBVC-certified executive coach with more than 500 sessions with founders, young leaders and management teams. I don't hand over a candidate and leave. I coach them and you through the first 120 days, which is where hires actually succeed or fail.
• Ecosystem. General Manager of the WHU Incubator for four years: 100+ founding teams coached, five seed rounds supported. Adjunct lecturer at WHU on leadership and personal development. My network of founders, angels and investors is where searches start.
• AI-native delivery. Sourcing, screening and scheduling run on an automated stack, so my judgment goes to the three things that can't be automated: defining what “good” means, assessing fit beyond skill, and closing.

More on how I coach founders →

What I don't do.

• No CTO or engineering-leadership searches. I don't have the assessment depth to judge those candidates properly, and I'd rather say so than take the mandate. I'll refer you to people who do.
• No volume hiring. This is built for the roles where getting it wrong costs you a year.
• Not before a round. The model assumes funded runway and a real hiring budget.
• A maximum of four mandates in parallel. The month-4 gate needs me personally, and there are only so many of me. That's arithmetic, not a sales tactic.

For VCs and angels: an instrumented People layer across your portfolio.

Post-investment, the first leadership hires are the single biggest execution risk in the portfolio — and the spend on getting them right is often investor-triggered anyway. Here's what the fund gets.

Per portfolio company

• Funnel transparency instead of anecdotes. Every mandate reports the same eight metrics — time-to-offer, offer-accept rate, funnel conversion, probation pass rate and four more. Hiring risk becomes visible, comparable and discussable at board level.
• De-risked key hires. A performance gate at month four with my fee at risk on every mandate — an instrumented control on the riskiest decision made after your money lands.
• Founder time back into traction. People hours drop from five to ten a week to under two. Those hours go back into product and PMF, which is what you funded.
• Org design insight ahead of the numbers. Target org charts, sequencing memos and comp logic give you early sight of scaling readiness — and of problems — before they surface in reporting.
• Candidate perception as brand equity. Every candidate, hired or rejected, goes through a fast, structured, pay-transparent process under the company's own brand. In a market degrading under AI application spam, that compounds.

Across the portfolio (from the third mandate onward)

• A consent-based, GDPR-clean shared talent pool. Strong runners-up from one search get re-matched to open roles in sister companies instead of being lost.
• One standardised People stack. The same scorecard logic, funnel design, comp architecture and compliance calendar in every company — portfolio-wide comparability, and faster setup with every next mandate.
• Pattern recognition no single company can generate. Aggregated, anonymised delivery data across mandates: which profiles pass gates, where funnels break, what actually closes senior candidates in DACH.

Built for DACH, not translated into it

GDPR Article 22, the EU AI Act's high-risk classification of recruiting AI, works-council co-determination under BetrVG, and EU pay transparency are designed into the process — not bolted on after a US playbook meets German reality.

Where to start

Two instrumented pilot mandates with full data flow-back to the fund. A hard, data-based answer on whether this belongs in the rest of your portfolio — before you lend it your name.

Talk about a portfolio pilot Or email me directly

Questions founders ask

What exactly happens on the call?
Thirty minutes on your next one or two hires, the gaps in your org, and whether this is a fit. No deck, no pitch. If it isn't a fit, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.

How much of my time does this take?
About two hours a week of structured process time until signature — shortlist review, final interviews, offer design. Then roughly an hour a week through onboarding and probation. The exception is closing: when a senior candidate needs their future founder, that time is uncapped and I will ask you for it.

What if my notice-period candidate gets a counteroffer?
Expect it. It's the single most common way a senior hire disappears in Germany. That's why pre-boarding is its own module and why we prepare the candidate for the counteroffer before it lands, not after.

Can I just buy the org design and do the hiring myself?
Yes, the first two modules stand on their own. The guarantee doesn't — it only applies when I control the whole path through the probation gate.

Do you replace an internal Head of People?
For a while, yes. The point is to reach the moment where you can decide with data whether to hire internally or keep the function external. When you hire internally, the artifacts go to your new Head of People and give them a running start.

Which tools do you use?
An automated sourcing and screening stack, and agent tooling — currently Claude Skills and n8n — for the workflows in Module 6. The tools will change. The judgment layer is the part that doesn't.

One call. Thirty minutes. No deck.

Bring the role you're about to open. We'll look at whether it's the right one, what “good” would have to mean, and what the first ninety days would need to prove. You'll leave with a sharper view of the hire either way.

Book a 30-minute call Or email me directly