Abstarct: Startups are regarded as major drivers of innovation, employment generation, and economic growth; however, despite their considerable development potential, they face high failure rates. Among the factors affecting their performance and survival, human resource management and challenges related to recruitment, training, performance evaluation, employee retention, and motivation play a significant role. Despite the importance of this issue, a substantial part of the existing human resource management literature has focused on large and established organizations, while human resource challenges in startups, particularly in emerging economies, have received less systematic attention. Therefore, this study aims to identify, evaluate, and prioritize human resource challenges in startups. Iraq was selected as the context of the study, and 40 human resource challenges were investigated across nine startup companies. A mixed-method approach was employed, incorporating the Fuzzy Delphi Method, the baxse Criterion Method (BCM), and the Polar Coordinate Distance Model baxsed on Opportunity Losses (POCOD-OPLO). The Fuzzy Delphi Method was used to identify and screen the challenges and achieve expert consensus, while the BCM was applied to determine the relative weights and importance of the challenges. Finally, the POCOD-OPLO technique was employed to evaluate and rank the challenges according to their degree of opportunity loss. The findings indicated that lack of organizational familiarity was the most important challenge from the experts' perspective, with a weight of 0.05895, followed by inability to provide social benefits, high competition with other companies for talent acquisition, and competition from larger companies in attracting talent. In terms of the degree of opportunity loss, talent acquisition challenges showed the greatest distance from the desirable condition, with a DOL of 0.0426, followed by lack of a human resource system and lack of organizational familiarity. In contrast, ambiguity in roles and expectations, with a DOL of 0.000222, as well as conflict between professional and family roles and lack of coordination among different human resource activities, demonstrated the lowest degrees of opportunity loss. The integrated analysis of challenge weights and opportunity-loss degrees classified the identified challenges into four strategic groups. Accordingly, challenges related to social benefits, competition for talent, and low salaries were identified as critical priorities, whereas challenges such as lack of organizational familiarity, talent acquisition, and insufficient financial resources for recruitment and training require long-term planning, sustained investment, and structural changes. Furthermore, the evaluation of the startups showed that Companies 2 and 9 achieved the best performance, whereas Companies 4 and 7 demonstrated the weakest performance in managing human resource challenges. baxsed on the findings, strengthening talent recruitment and retention practices, establishing formal human resource structures, developing technological and training infrastructures, improving employee benefits and motivation systems, and enhancing managerial awareness can contribute to reducing opportunity losses and improving human resource management performance in startups.