You’re growing fast but still running lean. Maybe your ecommerce brand has a handful of employees and an outsourced fulfilment team. You’re not ready for a full HR department but you’re definitely ready to bring on real talent.
That’s where many ecommerce founders get stuck: how do you scale when you don’t have HR infrastructure yet?
The truth is, you don’t need a big internal hiring team to build a world-class ecommerce operation. You just need the right hiring systems and a clear understanding of where to find the best people.
Below, we’ll walk through how to hire and structure your ecommerce team without the overhead of a full HR department, covering who to hire first, how to manage recruitment, and what makes scaling easier long-term.
Before thinking about culture decks or HR policies, focus on the hires that directly impact growth. In ecommerce, that usually means marketing and operations.
An Ecommerce Manager is often the first big addition. They bridge creative, performance, and logistics turning scattered ideas into structured growth. If you haven’t already, check out our guide to ecommerce recruitment for what skills and experience to look for.
Next, consider performance roles like a Paid Media Buyer or Lifecycle Marketing Manager. These positions deliver measurable ROI and can often be hired through contractors or part-time specialists before going full-time.
Once you have revenue-generating functions solid, you can layer in creative, operations, and analytics support. Building sequentially gives you data on what’s working before expanding the team.
Without an HR department, it’s tempting to hire “multi-hyphenates” who do a bit of everything. But in ecommerce, that approach usually limits scalability.
Instead, use specialist roles on flexible contracts, like hiring a dedicated Creative Strategist for campaigns, or a fractional Head of Growth to guide overall marketing performance. Specialists work faster, plug into your systems easily, and often bring cross-brand experience that raises the bar for everyone else.
Working with a recruitment partner that understands ecommerce roles, whether that’s creative, technical, or operational, means you don’t waste time explaining what you do. You get candidates who already speak the language of ROAS, AOV, and retention.
This step gets skipped by almost every small brand until it hurts. Without HR, your documentation is your infrastructure.
Start small. Create a simple hiring playbook that outlines:
Good documentation means you can replicate hiring success over and over. It also makes it easier for new managers to jump in without rebuilding processes from scratch.
Full HR departments are expensive, but you don’t need one to attract quality talent.
An external recruiter or specialist agency like Constant Hire fills the gap between doing everything yourself and hiring an internal team. They already know where to find ecommerce specialists, how to evaluate their portfolios, and what salary benchmarks look like across regions.
You get a shortlist of vetted candidates and can scale hiring up or down depending on your growth stage. That flexibility helps smaller teams move faster without fixed costs.
If you’re also hiring marketing roles, see our post on working with a digital marketing recruitment agency. It’s often the quickest route to get experienced talent on board.
Ecommerce runs on automation. Your hiring process should too.
Use simple tools to save time:
This lightweight system works especially well if your hires are remote or global. It’s also scalable: when you do eventually hire an HR lead, they’ll inherit a functional, efficient process instead of a mess of spreadsheets.
One challenge of hiring without HR is keeping transparency and accountability intact. When your team is small, feedback loops can blur and performance reviews can feel personal.
Set the tone early. Make job expectations measurable. Encourage regular one-to-one check-ins and anonymous feedback channels. Even simple systems, like quarterly reviews or Slack suggestion forms, can prevent issues from brewing.
Think of this as building culture through clarity. A small, well-structured ecommerce team with open communication will outperform a large team with unclear leadership any day.
If you’re just getting started, build lean but smart:
You don’t need a full HR team to hire well, you just need structure, focus, and the right help when you need it.
Constant Hire partners with ecommerce brands to recruit high-performing marketing and operations talent worldwide. Whether you need a specialist or a full team, we can help you scale without the overhead.
Top talent on your calendar in under 5 days.
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