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

Artisan may be known for its bold “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign, but the reality is that every founder needs to build the right team if they want to scale. Fast-growing AI startups are developing AI employees for outbound sales and customer engagement. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen talks with Artisan co-founder and CEO Jasper Carmichael Jack about his early days growing his team and the hiring mistakes that could have killed him before he could get off the ground.

If you hire the wrong person or fill the wrong position, the mistake quickly becomes compounded. They waste time, hurt morale, and often cause execution delays that can be fatal for startups just beginning to scale.

“I’ve made a lot of recruiting mistakes, like, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in every role,” Carmichael-Jack said. “We probably hired more than 100 people to get to the 40 we have today.” But every mistake led to valuable lessons that the founding team was able to implement going forward.

overemployment

Keeping a team of 50 people on track and coordinating a mission is much more difficult than a team of 10 people. “We thought if we hired all these roles and built this huge team, we would be able to scale faster, but it actually makes it more difficult to scale,” Carmichael-Jack says.

No one on an early startup team should experience downtime. Hiring should only be done when there is too much for the team to handle.

logo shopping

An impressive resume with experience at some of the tech giants doesn’t necessarily indicate someone ready to jump into a startup. The skills needed to perform well in a large, well-resourced team don’t necessarily match the skills needed to perform in a startup environment. A prospective employee’s experience and passion are more important than a celebrity logo on a resume.

Hiring someone who is too senior or too junior

Those too advanced in their careers may not be able to operate in the chaos of an early-stage startup and expect structures that don’t yet exist. On the other hand, hires who are too young don’t have the skills to expand their roles.

Hire too soon, fire too late

Even with the best candidates, the hiring process must be patient and thorough. On the other hand, if someone isn’t right for your team, it’s best to act decisively.

“Early on, we were too slow, so we waited for weeks and months for a decision and didn’t really do anything and tried to help them a little bit, but we didn’t really, we just hung around. And doing that never works,” Carmichael Jack said. “You can tell when someone isn’t doing well in a role, and usually they know it too.”

Carmichael Jack’s early failures are a reminder that hiring is not just an operational task. It’s a strategic thing. The wrong hire doesn’t just slow you down. It can reshape a company’s culture, dilute its standards, and make future employment more difficult. However, the right ones compound just as quickly.

As it turns out, even companies building an AI workforce eventually learned the same lessons that all founders experience. You can’t scale a company without people. Humans just need to be the right humans.

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