In a market where around 28% of professionals say they want to change jobs within a year, having a solid HR strategy is a clear competitive advantage that allows startups and scaleups to grow faster and retain the talent their competitors are losing.

‍

Madrid, November 17, 2025.

‍

Minery Report is a technology company specialized in cybersecurity and digital transformation that, with only seven years of existence, has already been recognized as one of the Best Workplaces Spain 2025 in the category of 29 to 49 employees.

This scaleup competes head-to-head with large corporations thanks to an organizational model based on horizontal, flexible structures that enable work–life balance. In other words, thanks to a strategy that places people management at the center.

“From what we can see, this company has designed its structure, culture, development, purpose, and autonomy as growth levers that undoubtedly give it a significant competitive advantage,” says Emmanuel Djengue, CEO of Kaatch.co, the leading HR-as-a-Service platform.“ They clearly understand that people management can be one of the best ways to compete with the big players,” he adds.

Strong HR management “can serve as a driver of strategic alignment, as a competitive advantage in the talent market, as an enabler of scalable organization and company culture, as a booster of productivity and performance, as a designer of tactical compensation, as an organizational radar, and as the CEO’s partner in change management,” Djengue explains.

Moreover, according to studies such as CB Insights, “not having the right team is considered one of the main causes of business failure,” the Kaatch CEO notes. “And the latest Gallup reports also show clearly that how you manage people directly affects sales, productivity, and profitability.”

“We also can’t ignore studies such as PwC’s Hopes and Fears 2024, which shows that 28% of employees plan to change jobs within the next 12 months, or McKinsey’s HR Monitor, which reveals that in Europe only 46% of candidates who accept a job offer are still with the same company after six months, and nearly 20% of employees are dissatisfied with their employer,” adds Álvaro Jiménez, COO of Kaatch.co.

“If we cross these figures with other equally alarming ones, such as those reported in ManpowerGroup’s Talent Mismatch 2025 study, which states that 75% of companies in Spain say they struggle to find the profiles they need, we can conclude that attracting and retaining talent is essential for the survival of any business, especially startups,” Jiménez reflects. “People Risk equals Business Risk,” Djengue emphasizes.

‍

The Strategic Weight of HR

There are very few business decisions in which 5% to 20% of the operating system is being changed at once, except hiring. “Purely from a numbers perspective, if a newly created company has fewer than five employees, each additional professional represents 20% of the company,” explains Kaatch.co’s CEO. “

And in terms of cost, a bad hire typically costs around 30% of the annual salary at minimum, considering recruitment expenses, onboarding, lost training time, mistakes, team friction, and more.”

In startups, every people-related decision has a direct impact on the business. “But the strategic power of HR doesn’t mean you need to hire a full people-management team all at once,” says Jiménez.

“At Kaatch, we see this often,” he explains. “We meet startups and companies in the middle of a growth phase that feel lost because they haven’t realized they can design a tailor-made HR service that acts as a strategic lever, without needing to build an entire in-house department with all the fixed costs that entails.”