In the early stages, most startups hire reactively. A founder identifies a need, writes a job description, advertises the role, interviews candidates based on instinct, and makes an offer. It's a perfectly understandable approach when the team is small. However, as the business grows to 30 employees or more, the lack of a structured hiring strategy begins to create bottlenecks, inconsistent hiring decisions and slower growth. The problem is not that founders are bad at hirin

The conversation about remote work in the space industry tends to go one of two ways. Either "we build hardware, everyone needs to be on site" or "it is 2026, why would anyone need to be in an office?" Both positions miss the reality, and getting it wrong in either direction is costing space startups the candidates they need most. In this article Why Remote Work in the Space Industry Is Different from Software How Distributed Teams in Aerospace Actually Work in 2026 The Secur

If you are receiving hundreds of applications and none of them are right, the problem is not the talent pool. It is your job description. This is something I see constantly when working with space and deep tech startups. The founder or hiring manager writes a job description by listing every skill, tool, and qualification they can think of, publishes it on LinkedIn, and then wonders why the only people who apply are either wildly underqualified or completely wrong for the rol

You are not Google. You are not SpaceX. The candidates you want are accepting offers at companies whose names they recognised before the interview even started. In a market where top engineers research employers as carefully as employers research them, being unknown is a real disadvantage. But fixing it does not require a big budget or a dedicated team. It requires intentionality. The founders who consistently attract strong candidates to companies nobody has heard of are doi

Every founder has a story about the hire that did not work out. The engineer who looked perfect on paper but could not operate without constant direction. The commercial lead who talked a great game in the interview but could not close. The programme manager who had the CV but not the judgment to make decisions under pressure. What most founders underestimate is how much that single wrong hire actually cost them. Not just the salary they paid for three or six months before th

Setting compensation at a space or satellite startup is one of the hardest decisions founders and HR leaders face. Pay too low and you lose candidates to defence primes and big tech. Pay too high and you burn through runway that should be funding product development. Get it wrong repeatedly and you end up with a team that is either underqualified or unsustainably expensive. The challenge is that reliable salary data for the commercial space sector is surprisingly difficult to

At 10 employees, hiring is personal. The founder knows every candidate by name, runs every interview, and makes every offer. It works because the stakes are high and the volume is low. At 30 employees, cracks appear. Different interviewers evaluate candidates differently. Decisions take longer because nobody is sure whose call it is. Roles stay open for weeks because the founder is too busy building the business to run a proper search. At 60 employees, it breaks. The same ad

SpaceX just announced another wave of hiring. Amazon Leo (formally known as project kuiper) is scaling up. Defence primes are offering retention packages that look more like ransom payments. And you are sitting in a 40-person space startup trying to hire a systems engineer who has actually seen a full spacecraft programme from requirements through to operations. Welcome to deep tech recruitment in 2026. I have worked in this space for over 25 years, helping companies across s

If you have been hiring for any length of time, you have probably come across the term talent advisor. Maybe an investor mentioned it. Maybe a founder in your network told you they were working with one. Maybe you searched for help with hiring and the term kept appearing alongside recruiters, RPOs, and headhunters. The problem is that nobody seems to explain what it actually means in plain language. So let me fix that. I have spent over 25 years working as a talent advisor to

Most founders walk into fundraising conversations ready to talk about product, market size, and revenue projections. Very few walk in ready to talk about how they plan to build the team that will deliver on all of it. That is a mistake. And it is one I have seen cost founders term sheets, valuation leverage, and in some cases entire rounds. Over 25 years of working with tech and space companies from pre-revenue through to valuations north of $6 billion, I have watched the inv