AI Made Their Recruiting Team 200% Faster (Here’s How)

Rather than trying to change or fix company culture, Taylor emphasizes selecting founders whose core values align with your people philosophy. He recommends conducting root cause analysis on previous workplace tensions to identify whether conflicts stemmed from value misalignment or strategic disagreements. Ask founders directly about their expectations for the people function and how they want to partner with you. This approach prevents the notorious tension between HR leaders and CEOs by ensuring alignment before joining.

At companies with established cultures like January's nine-year foundation, the people function's role shifts from building culture to understanding what works and amplifying key elements. Taylor identifies the most important cultural differentiators that contributed to success, then helps leadership become "maniacal, repetitive, and unwavering" about reinforcing these elements. This requires studying the founder's natural leadership style and extending their best qualities throughout the organization while softening sharp edges.

Taylor reframes the common question of "how to preserve culture during scaling" by acknowledging that doubling headcount inevitably changes culture through new personalities and perspectives. Instead of fighting this natural evolution, he focuses on identifying the simplest list of unique elements that drove success and remaining open to how culture evolves at scale. Leadership must consistently reinforce core differentiators while allowing organic cultural development.

January transformed from relying on inbound applications to building an intensive outbound search function, giving them control over talent bar and pipeline diversity. Without marketing team or brand awareness, they created custom sourcing strategies using AI tools like Juicebox and custom GPTs to optimize messaging based on response rates. This approach enables selective hiring for companies that can't rely on employer brand to attract top talent.

Taylor positions AI adoption as career-critical, stating that companies banning AI tools provide "the best reason to quit your job." His team implements AI across all recruiting functions: Granola for automated interview transcription and scorecard creation, custom GPTs for hiring strategy development, and AI-powered sourcing tools. Team members report working 50-200% faster in specific areas, making AI proficiency essential for resume competitiveness in the next two years.

January's founder explicitly aims to plateau headcount at 250-300 employees while continuing business growth, enabled by AI and efficiency tools. This model challenges the traditional startup mentality of hiring for every problem and instead focuses on finding the most exceptional people who align with rigorous, truth-seeking culture. Taylor manages this by treating each hire as precious, investing extraordinary effort in outbound search to ensure every addition maintains cultural and performance standards.

For new people leaders, Taylor prioritizes trust-building with stakeholders over immediate system implementation. He acknowledges that people operations involves working with leaders who each have different expectations, making relationship building crucial for success. New people leaders should align upfront on priorities and focus areas, as most initiatives require more work than stakeholders realize and explaining this complexity requires established trust.