Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
AI Recruiting That Actually Works with Ben Johnson
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AI can sift resumes, flag cheaters, and surface real talent—but only if you pair it with clear roles, smart assessments, and disciplined communication. That’s the system Ben Johnson, CEO of Particle 41, walks us through as we compare notes on hiring at scale, building global engineering teams, and turning remote work from transactional to tight-knit. We get specific on how an AI resume scorer and assessment workflow cut through 500+ applicants a week, why an 85% relevance threshold saves recruiter time, and how anti-cheating tools keep the signal clean across technical and non-technical roles.
From there, we zoom out to the leadership moves that unlock elite performance. Accountability charts replace names with roles and outcomes, giving us a cleaner way to design teams, define expectations, and reduce constant reorgs. Ben’s “practice squads” create small, cross-client groups that meet monthly, rotate moderators, and blend personal and professional growth—so engineers become confident consultants, not just coders. Layer on lightweight rituals like daily focus updates and weekly client status reports, and you get fewer meetings, clearer priorities, and faster delivery across time zones.
We also unpack the product playbook: start with design to force hard decisions, define the real MVP, and make smart build, buy, or partner calls where customers feel it most. Before chasing “more AI,” get your SOPs in order, let teams prototype improvements with ChatGPT, and target one workflow at a time—aim small, miss small—to avoid overspending and measure impact. We close with a pragmatic security reminder: never reuse passwords, use a password manager, and assume AI is accelerating both offense and defense. Subscribe, share this with a builder who needs it, and tell us the one workflow you’ll automate first.
Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operation finance, and people, plus product and leadership, to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Guinevere Curry, your host, founder and CEO to Guide to HR. Okay, today's guest isn't just writing the AI wave. He's building a tsunami. Ben Johnson, serial technical founder and CEO of Particle 41, has turned recruiting and other areas into a precision sports, fully AI enabled to uncover the best talent on the planet. We'll also dig into how his practice squad turns elite engineers into world-class impact players and why leadership in tech is less about managing code. And here you go, hold on, folks. More about unlocking human potential. So get ready for the playbook that's part Silicon Valley, part NFL draft, 100% built to win. Well, I'm excited to get started, dive into all of this. Welcome, Ben, to the podcast. Introduce yourself to the audience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you for having me. Um, like you had mentioned, I'm a serial technical co-founder. So I've helped uh several businesses start to exit. And um, and then uh really I created my own brand to do that for uh for many others. So uh I'm the CEO of Particle 41. We've launched over 94 products into market, and uh we love helping people accelerate their software, cloud, and data projects.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. That's such a mirroring of what I love to help people accelerate their growth through people operations. So we're doing exactly the same thing, but in different spaces that business need both of us, right?
SPEAKER_00:That's right.
SPEAKER_01:So, Ben, you've taken AI recruiting, and you know, we're gonna talk about a little bit HR here before we get into too much tech, because I am dying to learn from you on the AI recruiting side, because there's so much talk from different founders and AI experts that, oh, AI has solved recruiting. I personally have yet to see that, but you're telling me that you've learned how to take AI from the buzz to actual a business weapon. So, what does this fully look like in practice?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so in the if you really think about the global recruiting market, um, we're a global company. So we have teammates in India and South America, Argentina, Brazil. Like we we want to find the best talent um in whatever market so that we can bring um bring that to our uh US-based clients. And so in those markets and in the US right now, you get a lot of applications per week. We see when we put out a new role, we see about 500 applicants a week. So the idea of having a human review, all those applications is just not uh not practical. Overwhelming. So we wrote an AI-enabled uh resume scoring tool. It's not magic, it just gives us a score of how well the job description matched the resume. And so those two are brought together with AI. And uh, for example, if we're looking for a data engineer with modern cloud skills, um, I saw an applicant that had 20 years of experience, but that was in SAP data services, not it's so totally different than what we're trying to do. Highly unlikely that that um candidate would be successful in that role. So we only um push forward or interact with people who do an 85% or better. And I'm sure folks will start gaming this a little bit, they'll start redrafting their um their resume to match job descriptions.
SPEAKER_01:It's already happening.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I'm sure. And that would be fine. So we added a second AI-enabled layer, which is an assessment layer, and so even for um office skilled workers, a non-coder type roles, every role has an assessment. So even um even in say a non uh like a non-technical role, maybe an admin or somebody in finance, there are assessments that I can give them to really figure out if they're right for the role, even a typing assessment or um some personality questions. And so we have an AI tool. Uh, we use coder byte primarily to run our assessments, and that's an AI-enabled tool that detects cheating. So it detects if they're just, you know, answering all the questions with AI or they're bouncing back and forth to uh do research, or are the fairly simple questions that the assessment is asking? Can they do those on the fly? Because that's who we need to have in our company.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and and then if they pass the assessment, then we do, then the recruiter is notified and uh she starts setting up an internal candidacy where she can talk, you know, the team can talk to their um practice leaders and get to know some people in the company. And then we take those candidates very seriously. Those are people we really want to talk to and get to know and um continue to uh evaluate.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. So just to recap, basically using AI agents assessments to get through the resumes, and then if they're 85% or higher, then it automatically triggers this actual test assessment sent to the candidate. They complete it based off of that score, then it triggers the recruiter to say, hey, pay attention to this candidate.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, we even have some recovery emails that if they did try the assessment but were bouncing around and you know, just not taking it seriously. Um, we do have an email that goes out and says, Hey, no, we take this assessment really seriously. If you pass this assessment, we're we're really incentivized to talk with you. Um, and so short, just short of a guarantee, like if you if you take your time and do the assessment well that you're the you're the candidate that we want to talk to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that. And so kind of like sidebar question here for you, your tech, I'm HR kind of combination, right? How are you ensuring your assessments and your AI functionality is staying ethical and not actually pulling out people that might be discriminated against through the AI?
SPEAKER_00:So we know exactly the prompt that we've given it. Um we are in an interesting market in those um. So if I were using this at scale in the US, I might have to do a little bit of extra work. But in foreign markets, we're talking about at least um fairly singular race categories. Now there is some you want so we don't have any extra bias or any um we are strictly looking at years of experience and their match. So I think that the AI actually helps. If a if a human is, you know, going through each resume and their job is to get anything out, like really their job is to exclude because they just simply can't spend the time or send a bunch of candidates into our internal employees that are trying to do client work. So we have to be really efficient.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And so I I think that the bias would come in if that at least that initial screening wasn't been wasn't being done fairly systematically.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So you're looking at the skill set, the years of experience, and then you know, the the assessment, and then it gets into the human interaction and engagement.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they've they have we have a lot of objective data before we're um spending any time on subjective decisions.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. That's awesome. Um, what any other tips or tricks in the recruiting front? Because obviously, between the candidates using AI, companies using AI, trying to move faster, trying to find the top candidates, everyone wants to know how to make AI be their superpower when it comes to recruiting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I think really the secret for recruiting is outside of the of the tool. It's, you know, so I use an EOS principle of really understanding my accountability chart. And I think as leaders, we need to go spend some time, not with the people names, but just with the roles and responsibilities of each seat. So think of think of an org chart looking thing, but instead of names, it has the the roles and responsibilities on there. It's really saying, like this seat is for this to cover this thing, like finance or um or HR or recruiting or whatever it is. And then the outcomes that the business wants from that person is clearly defined on here. Then as you go to do your hiring, you know what you're hiring for. And I also find that my current folks understand the fullness of the role that they were assigned to do. And most people should feel a little bit of like, wow, this role is kind of bigger than what I'm currently filling. I need to increase my capacity to fill these edges. And so we we create the accountability chart to just be really clear how we're engineering the team.
SPEAKER_01:I love that because usually when I'm working with a founder and we're talking about restructure, that's exactly what I tell them to do. We're gonna take the names out. I don't care about Bobby, Stacy, Nancy, whoever, right? It's what is it that we need from the for the org to be successful and then build out what are the capabilities and skills, what are they gonna accomplish? And then we can look at the current employees and start plugging and playing and seeing where our gaps are and seeing who's left on the list that might no longer be a good fit for us, which is always a challenge. But if you use it, if you do it with the names in play, then you're just trying to slate people in that is not really what you might need as your for your business.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. And you can limit that the amount of restructuring that you have to do um in your company's life cycle. I know, I know if come of peers of mine, they're working for large organizations and they feel like every six months there's a re-org. And and that's kind of indicative of not having the right people and leadership and then rotating them often kind of creates that constant need to uh to reorganize. And I think just being really clear, we we not only have the accountability chart, but we also have some supplemental seat placement documents. So for every role, there's a clear one pager on like here's all the outcomes that are expected of you. And and then that establishes our whole like staffing and management plan.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. Well, let's switch gears. I kind of queued up NFL. And if anyone knows me, they know I love my football team. Uh, you tell me a little bit about this practice squad you put into place. What is it and what is it really doing for you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we um so we recognized that when COVID happened and we went to a remote organization that the company started to feel very transactional. And so we wanted to pull people back and help them to connect. So in practices that were like 12 people or less, we could like a practice, for example, is our design team or our cloud team or our data team. But in software development, we just had too many people for that. They were all so what so what we did is we broke them into smaller squads, and some practices just aren't are of a size where they can be a squad. And in those uh instances, we wanted people who are working with many clients, not a heavy concentration, you know, where uh a client team and a squad were the same thing. So we wanted to create a little bit of um diversity there. And so if I'm an employee at Particle 41, I have the client team that I'm uh engaged in. Some people might have multiple clients that they're engaged with, but most people have one. And then I have my squad. And my squad are like my homies. And so we've given them a curriculum, uh basically a discussion um experience that goes on throughout the year. And there's some personal development stuff involved in there, some personality testing, some uh top five strengths. Uh, what's your primal question as a good piece of content? And so we just interwork our personal and professional development in through the squad program. So our hope is that the squad becomes close, remotely close, but that the squad becomes close and gets to know each other on a personal level, and that they can also use that content and curriculum as as a means of um some professional and personal development, really get some value out of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and have some people who are peers and mentors that they can go to when they're stuck and or need just need someone to kind of, you know, water cooler conversation that we don't get it when we're working remote, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's our hope. So when we do uh events, we organize them in squads. It's just a ready-made group of usually about eight people. And we uh they every six months they appoint a like a moderator and they go through um some meetings, uh, just about 90 minutes a month is the uh is the requirement there. Some of them probably reduce down to an hour, but we just want people to come together at least 90 minutes a month and and not just talk about the problems that they're solving, but talk about what it means to be a professional, uh, what it means to be a human being, um, trying to keep up with their faith, their family, their fitness, their finance, like all of that, which work is just, you know, a part of.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I love that. And when did you implement this?
SPEAKER_00:So we've been running this for about a year.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So have you gotten any feedback about what your employees like about it?
SPEAKER_00:Or um, I would say it's mixed, predominantly positive. Some folks, um you know, some folks are just they just love the grind, right?
SPEAKER_01:And or they're introverts.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, you're talking about engineers. So I'm like, how is this gonna work with generally in inner oh excuse me, cut that Melvin? But generally, engineers are introverts.
SPEAKER_00:So, but our engineers aren't just engineers, they are consultants. Oh, yes, and so we want to bring that out. I I have a personal belief that introversion is a bit of a mask. So I I get that we're kind of classifying people as introverts and extroverts, and there's some body of work that's done that. But I really want to encourage people that even if they are um are are more hands-on, that they that they speak up for themselves than they speak up for their work.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and and giving them the space to get more comfortable doing so hopefully grows their um confidence so that they can actually do it with clients, with you, whoever else is in the conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I haven't met too many folks that would call them introverts that really sink into that. Um, that their personal life is not also struggling with that, that really like deep introversion. So I think it's it's good to encourage folks, and it's very noticeable to the clients and the fit in the in the culture of engaging with clients.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So you talked about building teams that deliver at a global scale. What's the biggest leadership shift you've seen to unlock uh the most elite performance that you can get from all these people around the world?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um it really comes down to like a heavy degree of communication. And then we've done some things in a remote digital workplace that bring information up. So we really talk about, hey, how is it how are we going to report status? Okay, cool. Client needs to get weekly status reports. Uh, we also use Slack and Teams for our client engagements. And so there's this idea of making everyday count that everybody should hear from everybody at least once a day. And so that could be just simple as like, hey, this is what I'm really focused on today. And when I finish that, I'm gonna move on to this next thing. And then, of course, coming together in meetings and stuff, but we've really been able to minimize the amount of meetings, increase the amount of flexibility by structuring the way people give information and and just giving them kind of a platform to work in. Um, and that's really improved. I mean, even our leadership team does it. Uh, we all we all want to articulate our focus uh for the day, our focus for the week. And and so we we've really structured communication in that way. And I think that that's what works. If you can't feel the people you're working with, then you're naturally going to have this assumption that they're not doing anything.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And and so we just want to, we, we want to have a structure in our our working standard that eliminates that fear.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I do think it's it's great to over-communicate, you know, and set those structures and boundaries and understand kind of like what is happening so that your customers are knowing what is going to get done or if something got behind, why and when they can anticipate a new deadline to be delivered.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. And we really want to work shoulder to shoulder with our clients. So um, so just uh having that daily flow of communication is really important.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that. So I'm curious, what's one mistake that you've seen founders, maybe yourself even, um, make when they're building technical teams? How do they how let me rephrase that? How can they fix any mistakes before it becomes a big cost and maybe time consuming too?
SPEAKER_00:Um in uh in what area? Just in in working with uh offshore or uh just re-ask your question, I guess.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, uh okay. So Melvin, cut all of that off. Um, what's a mistake that you've seen or maybe you've experienced when you're billing out your tech teams, whether it's global or internal, but your engineers, the product designers, uh what have you learned from that? And maybe even if you could go back and tell yourself, don't do this, it'll fix the problem and you won't have so much cost and time lost.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think um it's just being really clear on what you what um what you feel like the user experience. So we have a really great design team, and we find that the uh the clients that really invest in the design, um, they also clarify a lot of their own questions. How are we gonna are we gonna price this? What's the actual product? Um and I also think that there's a really good narrowing on the the MVP, the minimum set of features that you can start engaging with uh customers on. Um in software uh in product development, um you really want to be clear on what you're what you're supposed to build, like what is it that we need to build? And sometimes in that design process, you realize that there are things that you could buy that might get you there faster. So every business is going to do build by or partner and just making the right decisions in that. I find that the things that are closest to the customer, the actual customer's experience, are the things to spend the most time building and customizing. And if those things can sit inside of a CRM or a or a set of tools, great. However, I found most businesses grow out of limiting tool sets on the in the customer engagement layer. And that's where they want to start investing in whatever it is, a mobile app or a portal or some sort of software. And that's where we come in and help. So being really clear on what that thing is just helps helps move quickly. Um the other thing in this topic is it, especially with AI, you need to be really clear on your standard operating processes before you go start to talk to AI consultants. So most people are like going to AI consultants right now and they're just saying, give me more of the AI. And that's a very expensive way to do it. If you go through your SOPs, you give go ahead and give your customers access to or your internal employees access to Chat GPT.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And start start talking about how they're orchestrating like data coming out of emails, going into Chat GPT, what they're what outputs they're creating, and start talking about those individual use cases. Because what they're likely doing is they're taking your SOPs, your ways of doing things, and then they're getting AI involved in those things. Right. And and documenting that is like for me, it's it's almost like uh uh you know looking down the scope of a gun, and I can be very precise on the type of project that we're trying to target, and I can keep the costs very low.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But if we're if we're kind of all over the place and we're like, well, we just need more of the AI, well, then there's some consulting that needs to happen, a lot of discussion. I need to do that documentation for you. And so you're you're gonna pay for that additional uh those additional CPU cycles of some human brains.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um doesn't mean we can't produce uh things quickly. Like I'm using uh gamma AI would be my or gamma.app really great tool for producing PowerPoint presentations.
SPEAKER_01:Oh nice, I love that. Yeah, I find uh some of the clients I'm working with, they have the SOPs, but they haven't been touched for like a year or two. And I mean, I've even gotten into someone like you don't have lever anymore, you don't have, you know, whatever tool you have. I'm like, okay, we have to, I mean, so they might have it, but also like, when was the last time you updated this, right? So that's right. Making sure it's it's the most updated. And also, too, just because that's the SOP you have today doesn't mean that that's actually gonna be what's right for the business tomorrow. And if you just throw AI on it, it's not actually solving the problem. So understanding too what the root causes before you throw tech technology and even people at it, right? Like you got to understand what is the what is good look like, what's the end result, uh, and then go from there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So what we've experimented with is uh we come we come in a lot of organizations that are at that exact stage. So what this is really so not having SOPs or having out-of-date SOPs is a perfect use case for them to go try uh Chat GPT, like or or flawed or something, like okay, go upload your current SOPs, tell it what you're doing differently, have it spit out a new SOP and see if it's right. And a lot of times for for um depending on the the comfort of your workforce, you know, that's a very eye-opening experience. Like, wow, okay, yeah, it's spitting out our SOPs. All right, cool. Now, is there anything? So now as they start to adopt AI more manually, um, you can start helping them move to um, we can start helping them move to an automated workflow.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. I'd actually add on too, once they've done gone through that prompt, taking that SOP and saying, how can it, how should I actually improve this? Where can I make changes? What am I missing, right? Because as humans, like we build SOP, we build things based off of our own experience. And our experiences might be all at small companies, might be at nonprofits, might be at, you know, uh manufacturing, and now they're at a retail shop, right? So uh taking into consideration that we human beings have limited experience, seeing what ChatGPT or any AI has to say about like, oh, well, have you thought about adding this step? Or maybe if you change this to that step or do it before this one, it'll enhance the experience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I agree. Um, yeah, I think that's a great uh I'm just saying, like, be precise, aim small, miss small is my general guidance around anything right now, is that the smaller you can aim, the more precise. Like our recruiting AI solution is very targeted. Like we the amount of work we did was really uh small, refined, and it solved the problem rather than what we're seeing in the market, which is just give me more of the AI. And there's a lot of over overspending.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And too, if you're working on adoption internally and the buy-in from your employee population who might be just scared of the change, who doesn't like change in the first place, potentially, if you just do something small and they see, oh, okay, that made my life easier. I'm still here, everything's good. Then you can just kind of keep adding on to that instead of like trying to have them. What I say is you're trying to have your employees be an ant trying to swallow a whole hamburger at one bite. Like it's not, that's not how it works. You gotta have little tiny bites, make sure they're successful and people are buying in and wanting. And then what I've seen is that then more information comes forward about other processes and other SOPs and other ways that we can incorporate that employees are excited about and want to be a part of.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, with any kind of automation, looking at your incentives and making sure that folks are incentivized on total output, including um what the automation uh does, but also you're stressing with them that they're responsible for quality still. And so what that does is it says, oh, well, if we're able to do if the if the new automation, whether it's AI or whatever, if the new automation works better for us, we're still incentivized based on total output. And we're gonna tell you everything that's wrong with that thing because we're responsible for the quality. And this is a great um, you know, this is a great culture where they're heavily engaged in testing everything and making sure it's doing what it's supposed to do and giving feedback so that you can make the automation better and better. And then at the end of the day, we're all in it together because they're incentivized on total output.
SPEAKER_01:That is so awesome. I love that. And there's a lot we could talk about there. But as we wrap up today, is there any last final tips, tricks, uh tools, or words of wisdom you like to share with the audience?
SPEAKER_00:So, my one piece of point-in advice is a cybersecurity piece of advice, and that's never use the same password for more than one system. And uh, and so we really we we shouldn't be using the same password. Uh, so I'm a big advocate of like Bitwarden or LastPass or one password or password keeper of choice, but having uh having something that's responsible for um really just having a different login for every system is gonna keep you uh you know very safe. So if you do have an issue, uh it's really easy to recover from.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I feel like with AI, there's probably more hacking going on and more success towards that, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I just got back from DEF CON 33, which is a hacking conference I took my son last week. Oh, fine. Um which will which will probably date the episode a little bit. But um, but yeah, it was uh it is uh, you know, AI is getting involved in both the security side and the offensive side. But just a general rule of thumb, if if your exposure is limited to one account, you're in good shape. Yeah. Um and the reality is is that if they if you do use the same password across multiple platforms, that um that infection will will happen in seconds. So um probably by your sleeping. Yeah, well, because they'll be able to test with that password, they'll be able to test all kinds of accounts within seconds. So yeah, just keep yourself safe. It's just a general safety tip.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. Well, thank you, Ben. It was great meeting you and having you on today's call. Thank you for letting me geek out with you on AI, especially on the recruiting and HR front. Uh, for those that are listening, I hope you got some good tidbits and good ideas. And uh Ben's contact information will be in the uh description below. So if you want to reach out and further the conversation, please do so. And until the next podcast, we hope that you have a wonderful day. Thanks for joining us. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynavere Crary, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.
