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Take a look at their jobs page.
1. If they are hiring, that’s a good sign of growth.
2. If they are hiring engineers, that means that they are investing in building a better product
3. If they are hiring more sales people than engineers, they may be using sales to cover for a weak product.
(This is a general rule of thumb, not the only thing to look at.)
Example: We’ve started using Central Desktop. Current openings: 2 sales/marketing, 1 support, 3 engineers. Good ratio.
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4. If they’re hiring more support people than engineers, be worried.
I am not certain how much information you really can draw from just the HR needs.
For example, hiring lots of
* engineers — They have a lousily engineered product and their current engineers are frustrated and bailing.
* customer support — they are zappos.com : “A service company that just happens to sell shoes”
* sales people — The company was a bunch of engineers who just discovered that the product doesn’t “sell itself”.
* not hiring at all — when I worked for linkedin .com, we did the entire job + paypal integration with less than 10 engineers – in ~3 months – over the xmas holiday season – working 9am-5pm. LinkedIn was one of the most efficient companies I have ever worked for. They didn’t need to hire a lot.