You've made it past the scrappy early days. You have 20, maybe 30 people. Things feel like they're working. Revenue is growing. The team is energized.
And then something breaks.
A key hire walks out six weeks after joining. Two senior team members are in a quiet war that nobody's managing. You realize your employment contracts might not hold up to scrutiny. You spend a weekend trying to figure out why three people left in the same month.
This is not bad luck. It's the predictable consequence of scaling past your HR foundation — which for most startups, is made of good intentions and a folder of PDFs downloaded from the internet.
Here are the three patterns we see most often — and what to do instead.
Pitfall 1: Hiring Fast Without a Hiring Standard
Speed is a virtue in early-stage companies. But hiring fast without a structured process creates two problems that compound over time.
First, you hire people who look good in an unstructured conversation but struggle in the actual role. Second — and this one is sneakier — you end up with a wildly inconsistent team. Because every manager is running their own mental model of what "good" looks like, you get five different hiring philosophies operating in parallel.
The fix is not complicated. You need a role scorecard before every hire: four to six specific, measurable outcomes that define what great performance looks like in the first 90 days. You need a consistent interview structure — the same core questions asked of every candidate for the same role. And you need at least one "calibration" hire early on, where two interviewers compare notes directly before the process solidifies.
This sounds like overhead. It saves you from the far heavier overhead of a bad hire.
Pitfall 2: Treating Employment Contracts as a Formality
Thai labor law has teeth. The Labor Protection Act sets clear standards for termination, severance, working hours, probationary periods, and employee rights — and "we didn't know" is not a valid defense.
The most common mistake we see is using a template contract downloaded online, signing it quickly during onboarding, and never revisiting it. The problem surfaces when you need to part ways with someone. You discover the contract doesn't reflect how the person was actually employed. Or worse, it has clauses that aren't enforceable under Thai law.
A second common mistake is misclassifying employees as contractors. This is tempting when you want flexibility, but Thai law looks at the substance of the relationship — not the label you put on a document.
Get your contracts right before you're at 20 people. It costs a fraction of the legal exposure you carry by waiting.
Pitfall 3: Waiting Too Long to Build a Performance Culture
This one is the most expensive because the cost is invisible until it's not.
When a company is small, performance is self-evident. You see everyone every day. You know who's contributing and who isn't. Problems get corrected in real time because the feedback loop is tight.
As you grow, that feedback loop breaks. Managers stop having time for real 1:1s. Underperformance quietly accumulates. High performers — who can see clearly what's happening — start to disengage.
The fix is not an annual review form. It's a shared vocabulary for what good looks like, regular manager-led conversations that don't wait for a formal calendar event, and a culture where feedback travels in both directions without waiting for a crisis.
You don't need a sophisticated system. You need a consistent one.
The common thread across all three pitfalls is the same: they're all problems that feel manageable when you're small, and genuinely costly by the time they become visible.
The companies that scale well have usually had at least one person who understood HR enough to build proactively — before the problems arrived. Whether that's an internal HR lead, a fractional HR partner, or a very well-structured founder, the pattern holds.
If any of these feel familiar, it's worth having a conversation. Most of them are fixable — but earlier is always cheaper.
Fractional HRBP and HR strategist with 10+ years experience in Thailand. Founder of VIATAL.
