Craftsman they may be known for their boldness “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign. but the reality is that every founder needs to assemble the right team if they want to scale. Fast growing AI startup builds AI employees for outbound sales and customer engagement. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen spoke with Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the co-founder and CEO of Artisan about the early days of their team’s development and the hiring mistakes that could have killed them before they took off.
Making the wrong hires or paying for the wrong positions are mistakes that compound quickly. They waste time, drag down morale, and often create an execution delay that can be fatal for a startup just starting to scale.
“I’ve made a lot of hiring mistakes — like a lot in any role,” Carmichael-Jack said. “We’ve probably hired over 100 people to get to the 40 people we have now.” But each mistake led to a valuable lesson that the founding team was able to apply going forward.
Overemployment
It’s much harder to keep a team of 50 people on track and aligned with the mission than a team of 10. “I thought we’d scale faster if I hired all these roles and built this huge team, but it actually makes it harder to scale,” Carmichael-Jack said.
No one on the team of an early startup should have downtime. Recruitment should only be done when there is too much for the team to handle.
Market with logo
An impressive resume with experience at some of the tech giants doesn’t always signal a person who’s ready to dive into a startup. The skills required to perform well in a large, well-resourced team do not always match those required to perform in a startup environment. A candidate’s experience and passion matter more than big name logos on a resume.
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Hiring too senior or too junior
Someone who is too far along in their career may not be able to function in the chaos of an early-stage startup and may expect structure that doesn’t yet exist. On the other hand, a hire who is too junior will not have the skills to scale their operation.
Being too quick to hire and too slow to fire
The hiring process must be patient and thorough, even with an impressive candidate. Meanwhile, decisive action is better when someone is not a good fit for the team.
“Early on, we were very slow. So we’d sit on a decision for weeks or months and not do anything and try to help them a little bit, but not really, and just wander around. And it never works when you do that,” Carmichael-Jack said. “You can tell when someone isn’t working in a role, and they usually know it, too.”
Carmichael-Jack’s early mistakes are a reminder that recruiting isn’t just a business job. it is strategic. The wrong hire doesn’t just slow you down. it can reshape your culture, lower your standards, and make any future hires more difficult. The right ones, however, come together just as quickly.
In the end, even the employees of an AI company learned the same lesson every founder eventually does: You can’t scale a company without people — it just has to be the right people.
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