Hiring at a startup is its own beast.

Suma is a founder-first executive search firm backed by real-world experience and a deep network forged inside the UK's consumer startup scene.

• Founder-led expertise: Built by a consumer founder who deeply understands what it takes to run a startup - and the traits a candidate needs to succeed in one.
• Scrupulous vetting: We interview candidates thoroughly, assessing their strategic capability and readiness for the realities of early-stage scale.
• Consumer-native network: We're already plugged into the talent and visionaries who built the UK's top consumer brands.

How we value talent

The leaders you bring in need to move the product or the revenue forward with minimal support. In a large company, a poor hire can be absorbed but in a ten-person startup, it eats runway, slows momentum, and can even drag the rest of the team down with it.

So, what does the right person look like? We score every candidate on the same five traits, the Suma Five:

• Comfort with ambiguity: Priorities shift, plans change, and the protocols are TBC. We look for people who find that energising rather than paralysing.
• Stage fit and speed to impact: Startups rarely offer the luxury of a corporate ramp-up period. We look for leaders who can add value from week one, because they've executed this exact stage before.
• Ownership beyond their function: At an early stage when the team is small, they need to be able to learn whilst doing and adapt. Executives who solve problems outside their immediate lane, and bring the people around them along, are invaluable.
• Judgement under constraints: How will they handle working with less budget, less data and less time than they're used to? We look for people whose good decisions weren't a function of resources they won't have here.
• Product and customer judgement: Enthusiasm is easy to show in an interview, but if they've used the product, understood the customer and formed a view on what needs improving then that's worth listening to.

It's the same scorecard we use on every search. Download it free, with an editable Google Sheet and a two-page PDF.

Most CVs now arrive polished by AI, and that's fine - we'd probably do the same. But it means a good CV tells you a lot less than it used to, so we spend our time checking what someone has actually done.

• The first call: Simon speaks to every candidate before you hear their name, usually for around half an hour. He's interviewed thousands of candidates over his career, and he'll keep asking for the numbers behind a CV until it's clear which results were theirs and which belonged to the team around them.
• The scorecard: Before we approach anyone, we agree the role's first-year outcomes with you. Every candidate is then scored on the Suma Five, and a score only counts if there's a specific example behind it - so you're comparing evidence, not interview performance.
• References: Once you've made a conditional offer, we take references by phone, ideally two, to get a rounded picture. We check the specific claims the candidate made to us, only speak to people they've agreed to, and never go near a current employer without their say-so.

We use AI for research and admin, but the judgement calls stay with people.

If you'd rather do this part yourself, here's how we check a senior candidate.