How to Hire Creative Strategists When AI Writes Every Sample | Jess Bachman, FireTeam
How do you hire creative strategists and copywriters when AI writes every work sample?
Stop judging creative strategists on work samples, because you can no longer tell what the candidate wrote and what AI wrote. Make them do the actual job instead: FireTeam's AI interviewer hands candidates a deliberately flawed brief, asks them to find and fix the problems, pushes on why each fix is right, and flags pasted answers. Past that screen, the strongest signal is proof that someone builds and tests with AI while staying skeptical of its output, such as a steady record of GitHub commits.
In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Will Sartorius talk with Jess Bachman, co-founder of FireTeam, about how to hire creative strategists and copywriters when AI writes nearly every work sample. You'll learn how Jess's AI interviewer tests how candidates think, how FireTeam's AI brief writer outperforms a strong human copywriter, and why he would judge a creative strategist by their GitHub commits.
Jess runs FireTeam, a performance creative agency that gets paid when ads win. He deployed the AI interviewer to hire a copy engineer and has iterated on it since, and every FireTeam brief now runs through the agency's AI brief writer.
We discuss:
Why work samples stopped being a useful way to hire creative talent
How an AI interviewer uses a deliberately broken brief to show how a candidate thinks
Paste detection, dictation false positives, and whether AI screeners turn off good candidates
How FireTeam proved its AI brief writer beats a human copywriter, using its own win data
Why AI is still terrible at coming up with ad ideas, and what the team does instead
Why client learnings, not the prompt, drive 75% of the results
Why Jess keeps performance analysis entirely human
Why the creative volume game is not coming from Andromeda
Why AI raises the floor to a C but cannot turn someone into a builder
The hiring signal Jess trusts most for AI-era creative strategists
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Guest: Jess Bachman, Co-Founder, FireTeam FireTeam: https://fireteam.is
Jess on X: https://x.com/HireFireTeam
Jess on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessbachman/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com
To connect with Will Sartorious DM him here https://x.com/will_sartorius
To connect with Thomas Moen DM him here https://x.com/thomasmoen
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This Episode is sponsored by Motion's very own Runneth. Runneth is the AI Tool that is quickly becoming the go to decision maker brands turn to when it comes to creative decisions within their ad accounts. From Creative stratigest to hook insporations and creative briefs, runneth can do it all. See the case studies and try runneth yourself https://runneth.com/
Chapters
00:00 How to hire creative strategists when AI writes every sample
02:17 Inside FireTeam's AI interviewer and its deliberately broken brief
04:16 Paste detection, and whether AI screeners scare off good candidates
07:21 How an AI brief writer beat a human copywriter
10:44 From a brainstorm gist to a finished brief in 30 minutes
16:33 Why your data, not your prompt, makes AI copy win
21:29 Does AI only help people who could already write?
22:24 Why the creative volume game was never real
27:50 Can AI turn an average employee into a 100x employee?
31:52 Why GitHub commits are the new creative strategist portfolio
Transcript
(00:04) If you work in DDC and you use AI and you're wondering what the F is going on every week, this is your podcast. The AI to see F podcast your home for tactical tips, strategies, and ideas that you can implement right now in your AI workflows to make your brand or agency more money. Okay, welcome to another episode of AI D to see what the.
(00:26) With Will and I and Jess Bachman from Fireteam Incredible episode already ahead. You could. Right now I can just tell you it's going to be good. So if you are thinking about leaving anywhere in this, it's on Poly Market. And if you're thinking about any leaving during this podcast at all, you're going to regret it.
(00:45) It's going to be the worst mistake of your life. Like the football coach in high school that I had, who told me that quitting football was the biggest mistake of my life? It's that it's that level and that still lives rent free in your head, right? You think about that? Yeah. I don't think about that. Ever.
(01:00) A natural athlete brought to my knees by the football coach. But we are here talking about AI with Jess. Jess has built a ton of stuff. Just as somebody who I love and respect and has an incredible agency. Awesome team. Jess, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Love to be here with you guys. So let's talk about the thing that you most recently built, which is this AI hiring tool agent situation.
(01:24) What is this? Let's get into this. Yeah. So we are we are hiring a copy engineer. Or you could say that's a copywriter or something. And this is a process that we've done a lot. And also I'd lump in creative strategist hiring that. And so if you've ever hired a creative strategist I'm sure will you know, this is that like you asked you ask for work samples and you read their briefs and stuff and you cannot distinguish what is written by them or what it's written by AI.
(01:55) And even when like, it takes a lot of time to read samples and stuff. And so it's a it's a terrible heuristic to find people. And then also when we give people specific briefs to be like, all right, let's let's do a sample. Let's see how you work. Everything comes back as AI. And so it's I just did not want to run that playbook again hiring for this role.
(02:18) So what I did was I created a AI interviewer. And what it does is on the left hand side of your screen is a poorly written brief with all sorts of like errors and things inserted, and that it prompts you after it gets like your details of where you're where you live and whatever it prompts you to to find where the issues are.
(02:42) And so that like, I need to see your thinking about how you're looking at stuff, because that's the actual work that you need to do at our industry is find these particular errors and fix them. And so it will prompt you to find them. It'll prompt you to to fix them, but it'll do another thing where it prompts you to it'll like push on why you think that's an issue.
(03:05) Because I don't want to I don't want someone who's just coming in based off, you know, vibes or something. Like if you if you say like, you know, this is weak and it needs to be this way. Like what? What is the truth that you're bringing to that that makes you feel that way? Like, is it something you researched or previous winners or whatever? And so it'll do a whole bunch of turns of that probably takes 10 or 15 minutes.
(03:28) And, and then the last stage is to be like, all right, forget this brief, come up with a brand new idea for this client, and it gets a turn at doing that. So like editing and so like what I found in reviewing people's responses is like, there is so much signal in, in this stuff. I mean, it's kind of like a real interview, you know, but except I don't have to be there at all.
(03:56) And I can give it to like 50 people at once. And there's this, this is like they the people are. Let me interrupt like a second. They're they're getting the questions on there and they're speaking their responses or they're writing their responses. Yeah, they're typing it. It's just like typing the clod. It's the same like that sort of thing.
(04:17) One thing I had to put in there was paste detection and timing on their responses, because I was really worried that people would take the brief and then put that in the cloud, and then take the question and put that in the clod, and then take the answer and put that back in there. And so it detects if someone does a paste.
(04:38) And so I, I deploy this on Tuesday and I've already iterated a lot, a lot on it. One, I found it there was a lot of people that were using paste. And what I found out is people that are using like dictation or like speech to texting will be detected as a paste. So I put in a question up front that's like, are you using a dictation tool? And if they say no and then they're still pasting stuff in there.
(05:03) Well, it's like I don't know what you're trying to pull here, but there was a lot of that going on to. So it's it's been a it's been a very interesting battle. But save me a ton of time and already found me some great candidate. Interesting. I sort of want to double click on that too. So like the problem that you're trying to solve here is like you were just getting candidates that were effectively writing or giving their answers to with Claude.
(05:29) And counterintuitively, what you're saying is, like, you use Claude to sort of solve for that. Right? And so I guess what I'm trying to understand is, like, do you think that having sort of like an AI screener would be like a deterrent for someone who thinks like, oh, you know, this person can't even put in the time to like, you know, just to play devil's advocate, put in the time to have my initial screening interview.
(05:52) Yeah. Well, funny enough, there was a video that went viral of like the next day of like this AI interviewer but it was like faking a real person and whatever this, this is, this is different, I think. I think just being in chat and not trying to do voice, where you're talking to some weird avatar or something is entirely different.
(06:16) But this is also more than an interview to get at, like your experience, like you're doing the work that you'd be doing here at fireteam. And so the the response that I've got from candidates was like, oh man, this was actually fun to do. So I mean, they could be lying to, to get the job, but that's what they're saying.
(06:36) Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, somebody that's going to be doing that eight hours a day or whatever, you know, your hours are it's like, oh no, you said you guys were 35 hours a week or whatever because you get half day off on Fridays or whatever. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So, so whatever, 35 hours a week they're doing this.
(06:51) You need to make sure it's like they should find this fun because like ultimately what what like a value proposition. And, you know, in the marketplace that you guys have had for a long time, is that the work that you do is different. And it's fun. Like, you know, I mean, it's it's like what sets you apart from going to, you know, another place to, to do this kind of work and people who are good at their job, they like to be tested.
(07:13) They like to show off their skills if they're like nervous or worried about it. That's already like a red flag. That's probably not okay. So you also in this said that you have an AI brief and script writer that beats human copywriters. Can you tell us about this? What are your houses built? What's you know, how do you how do you kind of think of this idea and what sets it apart? Yeah.
(07:40) So I've been man ever since like chat you first came out, I was I was very much looking for a way to replace a lot of the work that I do, which is copywriting at the same time, like Fire Team is, is a quality over quantity shop. And so like I am looking to explore like what is the the quality levers that we can pull on AI because we just aren't a quantity shop and we're not going to be that way.
(08:06) So this is this is probably like the 50th iteration of where I'm at here. But all of our briefs are using this brief writing tool and I can go into how it works. But I'll tell you how I know it's effective is because we do. We do have a copywriter on staff who who's very good. She's a very good copywriter, but we treat her as a control and that she does not use this particular tool.
(08:36) And then everyone at fire Team has a, a number. It's called a Windex or a W index, which is measures their ability to affect winning ads or their ability to create winning ads. And it's usually a number. Hopefully it's over 100. And it's super complicated to get into that number in a sense. But the people that are using this tool, myself and a few others, have a much higher Windex number than this other brief writer who's very good.
(09:07) She's very good. And so I have determined that, like, like we've even brought in, like, copywriters that aren't that great. And still using this tool, they're able to put out good briefs and the good I'm trying to be as objective as possible. The good is not like I love that. It's like it wins in ad accounts, like that's the only thing I'm caring about.
(09:29) And that's the only thing I'm really measuring here. So that's how I know it's working. Or better than copywriters manually. Makes sense 100%. Let's let's dissect. So I tend to agree, I found that copywriting has been the hardest unlock by far in terms of creative strategy. Like I was very good at like pointing you in the direction of like iterate on this, you know, build on this.
(10:02) Here's a net new persona to test. But like the copywriting, you know, I think I'm 90% of the way there, but you seem to have sort of cracked the code. So like, let's talk, you know, what model are you using? What is what is like sort of like the step by step process that the model is sort of going through.
(10:17) And then it sounds like you're almost like training junior strategists with this tool to write, to make them write more effective copy. And is that making them better copywriters, or is that just having someone just, like, better the machine? Yeah, I don't know if it's making them better copywriters, but it's certainly making them better at producing winning ads.
(10:40) I'm not I don't know if those things are linked, but I'm certainly going for the latter here. So I'll tell you how it works. So like all all of our all of our ads, they or their ideas, they start with basically a gist, which is just a small encapsulation of what the idea is. This gist is actually pulled out of three hours of brainstorming that we have a week where we'll just we'll just say into the ether like project name, rejuvenate, you know, bedwetting ad and then it'll it'll make that into our project
(11:16) management system sort of automatically from the transcript. It will add the gist about what we talked about, whatever. That just will then get served to the copywriter in the tool when they're ready to write. So we got that for their. Yeah. I just also want to like pause and say like a three hour brainstorming session.
(11:34) Like, I know this isn't about AI, but are you and your team just like hopping on a call for three hours and just like, mind melding? Yeah, it's it's one two hour call and then one one hour call. Wow. I mean, that's that's the that's the differentiator, right? Like immediately right is part of it. It's the impulse. Yeah. This is this is an aside.
(11:53) But the one thing that I found that, like AI cannot do well is come up with ideas. It's just like terrible at it. So it is very much a mind meld with like 13 people all yelling on zoom or whatever. So the the copywriter will get this gist in the system, and then they will go back and forth with buddy, which is the name we give to our AI copywriter about this particular idea.
(12:20) And buddy will reference previously winning briefs for this client or whatever, and it will probe the person be like, what? Like what about this is important? And then they'll like speak into it or type into it until it gets to a point where buddy feels like the copywriter has amplified the idea in the right ways to do the right thing that it needs for the generation, which is the next part.
(12:47) So it'll be like a sort of a simple idea, but what the copywriter needs to be like, what, like what's really going to get someone to tension or what's the tension here and put that in there. So then it will go into the generation and I'd probably say like 75% of what makes it effectively is that from the generation, it's pulling all of the learnings that we have that are both per client and across clients.
(13:18) So we have like for each client, there'll be like 10 to 40 learnings about what actually has been effective in previous ads and things that we've tested. And it'll pull that into the particular brief and write the brief and make sure a lot of that is in there. So to generate a brief based off this, this huge system prompt that we have, then we'll do a quality control check on itself based off things that I have found are generally defective when AI is trying to do a first pass.
(13:51) So I'll do its own second pass before the the human gets a chance to edit it, then it'll finally give like the full version in the in the format that we like. One thing that I found is kind of crazy is that you have to tell the AI to show the work on the learnings that you put in there, and why, because if you don't, it's going to get lazy and it's going to like, you know, fabricate things like, do you you really have to work with it to get it to do exactly what it wants and, and stress it out, to get it to do the thing that you want.
(14:26) And so after it's generated, there's a whole interface where the copywriter can go in and like, change a bunch of lines or do heavy revisions or, you know, talk back to buddy to get it to fix everything. And then at the final stage, they press the button and it just goes right into our project management system.
(14:42) Should take about a half hour per brief if you're doing it right. I mean, incredible process. One theme that I'm that I hear you talking about, as far as you know, you're very clear within anything that you're using AI for to make sure that you're putting guardrails on and definitions around where you believe it's going to screw up or like where it could lead people astray.
(15:04) And, you know, so can you tell me about the common ones that you run through that you're like, okay, you know, I mean, I mean, you know, well, there's a lot of things you don't allow of directions, but what are the common ones that you utilize? This episode of Ada is brought to you by runneth from motion.
(15:25) And, you know, there's so many interesting things about runneth that I absolutely love. The best marketers I know right now are not sitting there going, how do I get ad answer my questions? They're thinking in systems. It's I have taste, I have judgment, I know my customer better than anyone, and they're putting that into runoff and having it work on it in a really sophisticated way.
(15:45) It's putting it in there and runneth is amplifying what they can do with that particular data. It's not a chatbot, right? It's not just Claude, it's not just ChatGPT. That's the thing I love about runneth is that it pushes it further, and it has your ad data, your competitor data, your creative strategy, it has your product data, and it helps you understand all of these things together so that you can genuinely train it on how you think.
(16:08) And it becomes useful from an operational level, saving you time, giving you context, and giving you important information so that you can make the most absolute best decisions as a marketer today, to help make your business run more efficiently. Motion can do so much run if can do so much on top of it. So I encourage you to give it a shot.
(16:30) If you haven't run a calm and go and see what you can build. Yeah. So the latest it's very interesting because the latest iteration is not just guardrails on the AI but guardrails on the human, because previously, like what I did not want it to be was a skill in how you prompt AI. I did not want that because different people have different interpretations and how they talk to it.
(16:53) So the way it works now is like you have a conversation with the AI, and from that conversation it creates the input, which is basically, you know, half of the prompt that then goes into the generation. So it's not like the the writer is, you know, taking their own spin on what the input is or becomes like, they don't know how to.
(17:15) It's just like anything when you do when you talk with AI like or the image generation, like, I'm not going to write in an image prompt, I'm going to tell Claude to write me an image prompt because it knows how AI talks and thinks and whatever. So that's like the way to do it. So reverse prompting. So that is sort of built in there.
(17:31) And that has sort of negated the skill issue, where even our account managers who are not writers can use this tool very effectively, but a good writer can certainly plus it. Okay. I mean, all of the organization and the logic makes sense, but like, what's the source? Like, how are you getting this to write better copy.
(17:49) Like what is the framework? I guess I'd push back on what is better copy because this is not like in the prompt. It says you're the ghost of David Ogilvy or whatever. Like in the prompt it is, it's pulling from the highest value signal that we could possibly get, which is previous like learnings that have previously won on this account.
(18:12) And it's like folding those in there. Like, like we have some clients that have like 50 learnings, even like a great creative strategist isn't going to have all of that in their head and know when to deploy all of those. Whereas this can absolutely like jam packet in all the different layers of what it needs to do.
(18:30) And so that's really the source. It's not like I can't give you I could, I could like totally open source the prompt and give it to you. And it's not going to be the same thing because you don't have the same data that we are feeding into the into the machine. Got it. Yeah. I mean did is obviously the wedge in today's day and age.
(18:49) So it sounds like you sort of have like two data sets that you're feeding this like again, like a time series analysis of like all of the metadata. Like I'm sure you like pulling transcripts from winners and like correlating that to like sort of CPA row as thumbs up, Ctrl whatever. And then on the other piece of the data set is like the brainstorm.
(19:07) And so you're sort of combining those two elements. And based on that, you know, the, the tool is seeing like this is, you know, this is the top performing copy in this, in this ad account, like this is the top performing hook because I put the transcript with Gemini or, you know, you know, sonnet or whatever.
(19:25) And then based on the brainstorming session we just had about this client, like, let's translate everything we just said and reformat it into that exact or not reformat it. But just like re contextualize it based on the winning copy that we've already written effectively. Yeah. Except the the coming up with the winning, like what are the learnings is very much a manual process done entirely by Rachel, our media director.
(19:54) Like I said, I also do not trust AI with analysis. And like I get enough cloud slop from clients to begin with that. And I've tried to like, do a lot of my own, my own analysis. And it's very, very hard to to get at a right place that isn't like you just find one loophole and then it's like, oh, you're right.
(20:17) It's totally the reverse of what you just said or whatever. So all of our learnings are are manually sourced by a human. And I think and like when you, when you when she puts it in, she can put whether it's like, you know, a strong suspicion or you know the different there's like levels of learnings. And then the LM will use that information as well.
(20:41) And like lean into the long stuff, the, you know, the strong stuff and stuff like that. So it's a combination of very human and AI parts. Funny. That's that's so interesting because. Yeah. Wow. That's very, very cool. Because I feel like, you know, we've sort of come down on the other side where I found the AI is very good at analysis but sucks a copywriting.
(21:03) So like I have it sort of do the first 10% and say, like, here are all the new personas to test and like, you know, how are we doing that? It's just like time series, analysis app and Reddit cross-referencing the two. What personas haven't we tested that people in subreddits are talking about? And so then it's like strategist would have that context to go write the copy, but then it's like, I don't necessarily feel comfortable just yet, you know, giving them like a tool to write the copy.
(21:29) So I guess, like when you sort of think about, you know, fire team in five years, like, you know, let's just assume that you want to keep doing this thing and definitely like, how do you sort of think about, like, training talent and like building people if they're just like sort of relying on this to generate better winning ads? It's it is interesting because I think we're at a crossroads where the people that I've who are able to use AI best are the people that had those skills beforehand. Yes.
(21:58) And they know how to edit or basically not trust the outputs. You know, I'm not sure what's going to happen when we get to a stage where there is no beforehand and those people have frigging retired or moved on. You know, I do worry about that, but maybe we just keep hiring older and older copywriters, I guess.
(22:20) I'm not sure. Yeah. Age bias starts going to other direction, right? So I mean, like, what do you so what do you see this all of these things with the AI that you're doing changing in the offerings that your agency has as time goes on to because, you know, you guys do obviously, this very manual process of research and iterative ideas and, and, you know, and then you go in, you know, you're shooting stuff, you're making great ads.
(22:53) You know, as far as I know, you're doing very little in reference to like creating AI is actually creating the statics or anything. I know there's a little bit of that, but that's very small percentage of what you do. And how do you see this evolving in in your agency as time goes on? I think the North Star is that we're a performance based agency.
(23:15) We get paid when things work and when they don't, we don't get paid more. If we deliver more, like we get paid more if things work better. And so with that framing, we're constantly looking for ways to work better. And like we like we have two designers on staff and we have two video editors, and they both use AI all the time, but not for the purpose of like pumping out, you know, 800 statics.
(23:42) That's that's not something that we've seen be effective. And so I think we're going to constantly, you know, like we track our win rate across clients and our hit rate and like our people on staff are looking to improve their own Windex scores and stuff like that. And so I think if you build the incentives internally to do this and it ladders up to the incentives of the agency, which is to, you know, win more, you don't have to, you know, there's a simplicity and a complexity that's like wrapped up into that.
(24:12) And I don't have to, you know, people will find their stride at their agency, at this agency and do what they need to do. I don't know, I'm kind of just rambling, but let me know if this is making any kind of sense whatsoever. I mean, it's yeah, I mean, I think it's your what I hear you saying is you're providing the framework of this is what we do.
(24:30) These are the outputs we need, and this is how we're tracking it. And the way that you get there is, you know, sort of up to you to a degree. And if you're using AI, there needs to be certain guardrails on it. And here's a way that we think about that. But you're giving them the freedom to be creative and be productive to to try to, you know, increase their own Windex or whatever else.
(24:57) And I think if our offer was a set volume of creative, we'd be a very different type of agency and, you know, different that looks different on a margins perspective. And we just operate entirely different in a way that I would literally probably hate my job trying to do. So I very much like what we're where we're at and feel very confident in our offer, I guess.
(25:25) Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's always been as the volume game is always going to be there, right? And it's like as a hedge, you guys are like, look, this is a manual process. It's different. Is it is it, is it always going to be there I think well I think I think if you look in any marketplace like there's always there's always going to be room for people that want the volume style and want like, yes, let's make a bunch of this or, you know, let's give this and maybe, maybe they're not going to pay as much for it and it'll continue to decrease in value.
(25:56) But I think there's always this idea that more is better from a lot of folks. Right. Like, you know, like I think over time it maybe isn't going to perform, you know, as well. And people are like it turns into a negative thing, I guess. I think I think the pendulum will swing back if it hasn't already. The volume game is not coming from I'm telling you, it's not coming from Andromeda or a need for you know what meta wants.
(26:24) It's coming from the ability to create this stuff at scale, which agencies absolutely freaking love because it's so cheap, and then that gets wrapped and then that gets twisted into what like rep say. And then all of a sudden it's like attached to Andromeda, but like you go back historically, it has always been a quality game.
(26:45) Like it is never been a volume game. That's true. And so I think you're right. I guess what I'm saying is, I think there's always this idea that people are like, yeah, I really like that. It can do 50, I can get 500 of these, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, it's like it's a there's a novel concept to it.
(27:01) But in terms of actual quality, I think you're right. And and I think you raise a good point about what how it gets twisted in terms of how it gets talked about. Yes. You need to have more creative and, you know, whatever. And I think a lot of people are listening to this. Would totally agree about the creative and quality piece.
(27:16) I guess to me the question is is always, you know, how do we turn it into, you know, how do we research brands better and make sure that we understand angles that haven't been explored and make quality ads to speak to those people that have not been addressed previously? That's like the challenge of any creative creative shop creative strategist today.
(27:37) And how do you present them in a way that's going to make that company more money, and you don't really know in terms unless you start sort of testing and digging into that, what do you think creative strategy will look like? I mean, the role of a creative strategist has already changed in the last 365 days, dramatically.
(27:56) So like, what's the what's this? It's like a Rorschach inkblot, whatever that term means. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Like, I just wonder what it's I just wonder how it's how the how it's going to evolve creative strategy overall. I mean, I think it's obviously AI enabled, but I, I wonder sometimes there's certainly a lot of talk about 100 X employee right now to like the person can do a lot more.
(28:22) Do you feel that the volume of tasks that a person can accomplish equate to better quality for the end user, for the client volume? No, I my general lens of of AI is is like more and better. Like you can certainly do more, but you also have to do better as well. And and whenever we talk to employees, it's always like where where in your process can we insert AI to allow you to do more, but also, you know, better at the same time in terms of like the 100 X employees, this is something that I've really struggled with
(29:03) because I love building AI and I want my employees to do it. But I've really found that, like you, you cannot turn someone into a builder. Like you can identify the drive to like, improve things, but like, you can't take like a frigging, you know, even like a B+ employee and throw them in a freaking cloud code harness and and be like, look at all the things you can do.
(29:31) And you can't spark that desire to improve something, you know, on the one sense, because they're an employee and you know you're the owner, that's one thing. But also in general, like you kind of need the hunger in the fire to like push this stuff, which is very opaque and hard to work with and confusing at times to get what you want.
(29:53) And you might you might need to like, hire those people or look for those those people in the signal when you're hiring, because it is very difficult, if not impossible to motivate those people, just giving them a tool that can now ten x, you know what they can do. Yeah, they're the way that they think. And the way a person thinks is still a massive competitive advantage.
(30:16) Like the way that they're going to reason through something and sort of look at the why of it, etc.. You know, I agree, and I've seen that definitely happening of like I've given them all the access, I've given them all the tools and they're still not doing what I need. It's like I also to me, that's also like a lack of strategy, that there isn't the will.
(30:36) And I've talked about this in the podcast like there's there's this there's no strategy. It's just like come up with ideas like do more and you're like, well, they don't see it the way that you see it. Like it's not, you know, you have to sort of lay out like, this is why this is important. Here's the idea.
(30:50) Come up with iterative ideas on that and like that or, you know, whatever. Like making it more narrow so the person can sort of start to understand, like what they're trying to accomplish. But yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. You can also instead of just ten axing, you can almost like negative ten x some employees because it allows them to create so much like downstream work or you know, there's error.
(31:14) Like they just allows them to create so much more stuff that if they were a C plus to begin with. Now there's like they're just generating all types of like work. And it can really it can really like gum up your team. Yeah. I mean I completely agree with that. It's like definitely can create a race to the bottom very quickly.
(31:36) And that's like one, you know, downside of saying like, oh, we're AI enabled or like we use AI. You get these people like, oh, I can just like fucking phone it in and just like, you know, not have to think so. I mean, yeah. Anyway, it is it is sort of crazy. Yeah. I think, I think if, if I'm a listener and I'm maybe like looking for a job right now, you know, at a brand or an agency, you know, something you said is like you can't force people to sort of like ten, like who has this like sort of.
(32:06) And you briefly sort of touched on this, but I really want to sort of drill down on it like, like what sort of person has this really worked for, and who's a person that this hasn't worked for? And like, what is a gap and the difference between the two of them? Is it like their copywriting skills, or is it something like more inane that they sort of innately have? What do you mean work for? Like what type of person? Yeah.
(32:25) So is it like and I don't want to just like, you know, lead the horse water here, but like, is it someone who is like intellectually curious about, like, you know, getting better or like, yeah, sort of that idea like, is this going to take like D plus person to an A or you know, or, or like a plus person to a B or is it, you know, only going to really work if you're a B, you know, to an A and like if you are like a D plus now like, how can you get yourself up to be a B like using AI? I'm not sure. I'm not sure you can.
(32:56) I think, you know, the the floor is probably AI is just raising the floor to a C, and if you're a deep person, maybe you can get up there. But it's hard to get higher. And like if I was if I was evaluating a creative strategist, like if I really want to pay a very good creative strategist to change my business, unfortunately, I would be looking at their GitHub commits and seeing how much, how much stuff they are like pushing, because that is the signal that that they're looking to like improve and change and actually be on the forefront of using this AI,
(33:34) like AI is like anything, it's it's the people who are well, there's like there's there's two levels to that to a, there's like being so bought in that you kind of like don't know what you're doing and you can't evaluate it and you're just like, you just like so and you know, we have a lot of clients that are even, you know, like this as well.
(33:56) And then there's like the really effective layer is one layer below that where you have a very healthy sense of skepticism, but you're still building and you're still testing. And that is like the true, productive, productive layer. And so I've seen people like, you know, I built an AI and it's like it's based on consciousness and love.
(34:15) And it's like, that's not the that's like the wrong level, but like, show me what you've built. Whether you are an AI or a strategist or a video editor or whatever. And if it's like a real tool or something like that, that's probably the highest signal for employees. I think that's I mean, I think that's always been the case of, you know, going back thinking about when we were in the early days of meta ads and Facebook ads, like I was always and still to this day, of the most curious with about people that are doing crazy shit like that
(34:47) are trying really strange stuff that are doing, you know, and it's like, and I think if you know, the technical, if it's a person that's competent on writing and can think through things and then has this capability of almost technical AI curiosity, then it's like a winning combo because it's the tools are obviously going to continue to change, you know, and it's like they're going to continue to to evolve and you have to to go for that.
(35:10) So I think looking at GitHub commits is like super interesting idea and one that I was, you know, voiced to another person the other day about, you know, trying to get their employees to be more bought into this. Like, hey, can we look at that as a metric? Because I think that's and for the creative strategist, like for copywriting, it might be one thing, but for a creative strategist, which is a role that spans multiple departments and disciplines, like that is absolutely a place where AI enablement can can like force
(35:39) multiply all sorts of outcomes versus purely like copywriting or I know we're sort of nearing time here, but sorry, I do want to sort of drill down into this because I think it's fascinating sort of the GitHub commit sort of hypothesis. And I again, just playing the devil's advocate, I don't agree or disagree, but like, you know, obviously tech companies for a while were gauging their employees success by the amount of tokens they were using internally.
(36:06) And obviously like that caused the employee that costs the company's a fortune. So they stopped doing that in this case. Like, how do you know that the GitHub repo that they're creating are actually accretive? And they're not just like in this AI psychosis state where they just like are building because it's like fun or just like for the sake of building.
(36:26) Yeah. That's a great question. I think it's it's probably a lot easier to like, run up a huge token bill than, you know, do commits for days and days and months and months. But I think you I think probably, probably what I would do, I would create an AI interviewer that interviewed them specifically on their their thoughts around AI and probably put some like, like, here's a problem.
(36:54) How would you solve that with AI? And if they're like, oh, you need Jack into the matrix, then they're like the wrong person. But that's probably what I would do. Yeah, so much of it. And hiring is always thinking like figuring out how somebody thinks anyway, you know, so just doing that a little bit different speed.
(37:10) So just one more question on the GitHub thing. What is the Willy Wonka golden ticket? If you opened a GitHub and you saw X, you know, would you say like this person has got the jobs to be a great credit strategist? I would say, I would say because a lot of this vibe coding is still pretty new. I just want to see activity to start.
(37:37) I would, I might say that like too much activity or if you're like, you know, contributing to open source or something, it's like you might be too far in the dev side of things, but like, I really just want to see the fire and the determination, even the determination to fricking for a quote unquote creative strategist or someone who feels like their creator, or if they're a UGC creator and they want to become a creative strategist, even to freaking get set up on GitHub and start like pushing stuff requires you to push through some uncomfortableness
(38:08) about what your new identity is, or what I'm doing, or what this future is, and like seeing their ability to do that on a on a consistent basis, regardless of what the, you know, the work product is, is, is a very good start. Well, I'd like to introduce you to interviewer by Fire team. The world of the the world of interviewing is never going to be the same.
(38:32) Or I'm trying to think about all the exact the scripts from the exact same video. So we've lost. Well, I'm more than happy to share the like I posted in the channel, like the the the prompt of how to sort of put this together in a huge EMD file on what I've learned in doing it. And you can just throw it in your car and say, build it.
(38:48) So I'm happy to share that too. Nice. Well thank you. We'll put that in the in the notes. Jess, appreciate your time and appreciate you being here. If anybody has questions or whatever they can reach you on X, we'll put that in the show notes as well. And as always, thank you to our listeners. Always my pleasure guys.
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