Don’t stop hiring people, stop hiring the wrong people, says Artisan founder

Artisans may be known for their bold “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign but the truth is that every founder needs to assemble the right team if they want to scale. The fast-growing AI startup is building AI staff for outside sales and customer engagement. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen speaks with Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, co-founder and CEO of Artisan about the early days of growing their team and the hiring mistakes that could have killed them before launching.

Hiring the wrong employees or filling the wrong positions are mistakes that escalate quickly. They waste time, lower morale, and often create implementation delays that can be fatal to a startup that is just starting to scale.

“I made a lot of recruiting mistakes, like a lot of mistakes at every single position,” Carmichael Jack said. “We probably hired over 100 people to have the 40 we have now.” But each mistake led to a valuable lesson that the founding team was able to implement moving forward.

Over-employment

It is much harder to keep a team of 50 people on track and aligned on the mission than it is a team of 10 people. “I thought we would scale faster if you hired all these roles and built this huge team, but it actually makes it more difficult to scale,” Carmichael Jack said.

No one on a startup team should have downtime. Assignments should only be made when there is too much for the team to handle.

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An impressive resume with experience at some tech giants doesn’t always indicate someone ready to dive into a startup. The skills needed to perform well within a large, well-resourced team do not always match what is required to execute in a startup environment. A potential employee’s experience and passion are more important than big-name slogans on a resume.

Hiring too old or too young

Someone who is further along in their career may not be able to work within the chaos that surrounds an early-stage startup, and may expect a structure that does not yet exist. On the other hand, an entry-level employee will not have the skills necessary to expand their job scope.

Being too quick to hire and too slow to fire

The hiring process must be patient and thorough, even with an impressive candidate. At the same time, decisive action is best when a person is not a good fit for the team.

“Early on, we were very slow. So we would sit around making a decision for weeks or months and not really do anything and try to help them a little bit, but not really, and just walk around. And it never works when you do that,” Jack Carmichael said. “You can tell when someone isn’t rehearsed for a role, and they usually know it too.”

Carmichael Jack’s early missteps are a reminder that recruiting is not just an operational task; It’s a strategy. The wrong hire doesn’t just slow you down; It can reshape your culture, weaken your standards, and make every future hire more difficult. However, the right items pile up just as quickly.

In the end, even companies building AI employees learned the same lesson that every founder eventually learns: You can’t scale a company without humans — they just have to be the right humans.

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