AI Built A Website, Hired Our Team… Cost Us Less, Did More

Hiring used to be a slow grind: post a role, drown in resumes, miss great people because you can’t move fast enough. We put that to the test by running an international search for high-skill web developers, pulling in roughly 150 applicants in two days, then using AI to cut the pile down to a tight shortlist we could actually interview. The result surprised us: within a couple of days we hired two developers, and our existing team was genuinely impressed by the skill level that surfaced.

From there, we zoom out into what this speed means for the future of work. If a candidate shows up with their own AI “team” already set up, copywriting, video editing, research, and more, are you hiring one person or an entire capability stack? We talk about why AI literacy is quickly becoming a baseline skill in marketing and digital roles, and why the people who learn to orchestrate tools well will pull away from the pack.

We also get practical about AI website development and automation. One of us built a client site in about six hours and estimates around $6,000 AUD saved, but we’re honest about the trade-offs: updates can be clunky, tiny design tweaks can derail outputs, limits and crashes still happen, and complex CMS-style sites remain a challenge. Finally, we connect the dots to bigger business economics: AI-driven efficiency, the risk of hollowing out mid-level roles, and why expensive CRM platforms like Salesforce and even HubSpot face real pressure as AI makes “big company” capabilities cheaper.

Subscribe for more real-world AI workflows, share this with a teammate who’s still doing things the slow way, and leave a review with your take: would you trust AI to help choose who gets the interview?

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Transcript

Using AI To Hire Fast

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A couple of days ago, I actually used AI to hire someone. Actually, not not someone, hired hire two people. And so specifically, we were looking for web programmers, web developers. And these web developers need to be very, very high in skill level because we're not just uh designed for uh a simple front end, but also some complex backend uh user experience functions onto our website. And so we put the job out, we put it out internationally, so not just Australia, but also India and Philippines internationally. We've got about 150 applicants in a space of two days. And there's no way we could go through that, right? I used to listen to a joke where, oh, okay, 150 applicants, let's just check out half of them, keep half of them. And the ones that are chucked out, they're unlucky, so we don't want to hire unlucky people anyway. But we didn't do that this time. We used AI, we put these resumes, drag and dropped them into AI, the drag and drop process was onerous. However, and then we asked AI, okay, filter out all these, come up with the top three or top five, which we did. And we came up with the top five, and then we interviewed top five, and within two, three days, we hired two developers into our ecosystem. And that's the amount of time that AI

AI Agents As A Job Advantage

SPEAKER_00 1:08

could be used to hire people. What are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Very efficient. Yeah, I don't mind that. I mean, look, if you're gonna get 150 applicants, you've got to find a way to try and accelerate the process, and then it's yeah, too difficult sifting through them all on your on your own.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Not only that, but we didn't miss a beat because when you go through that many, chances are you might lose out on that one golden gem of a of a team candidate. We didn't miss a beat because I know because our existing developer had a look and said, wow, this person has twice the amount of skills that I have with twice the amount of experience that I have. Oh my god. So it was quite uh quite incredible. So there's always a new case for AI. Absolutely literally on a weekly basis for me now.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

It's it's remarkable. It's funny because I I come up with a stat that I found online 88% of digital marketers use AI in their daily workflow.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I wonder what 88%. It makes me wonder the remaining 12% that are left out, what are they thinking? But what are they doing? What are they doing? Like they do they have the typewriter out, they're no point writing away on the wireless.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

But I I thought because I have a feeling that'll climb to probably 98% in the next 24 months.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

You'll soon be be left left behind. Yeah. If you don't, you'll be left behind.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Yeah. I can imagine applying for a job. Like imagine someone applying for a job and they tell you, I have a team of AI working as well. So you're not just hiring them, but you're hiring all these resources that come with it as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Uh agents. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Well your agents pre-programmed. So if you're a marketer, for instance, well, I've got a video editing agent, I've got a copywriter that's already programmed to the world's best copywriters. I mean, it's not going to give you a precise answer on what you want, or it might not give you exactly what you're going to copy and paste, but it'll give you a good leg.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

I believe it was uh Claude AI. A couple of weeks ago, they promoted the fact that they only had one marketer, there's a little agent dude that does all the marketing. And Claude AI, 40 40 plus billion dollar company with one marketer. Now, I by no no means of the imagination do I think that that one person did it themselves. I'm sure that he had a lot of um help from different departments around him. Perhaps he needed some input on marketing HR. I'm sure he tapped on the HR person. But one person it's absolutely remarkable.

Building A Website In Six Hours

SPEAKER_01 3:15

I built a website during the week. So one of one of our clients were in the accounting space, they go, I want I want a new brand out on the market. This is how I want it to look and feel. I built the website in six hours. Was it good though? Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Did you need to do revisions after the six hours? Definitely, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

And I think it's a time and a place because if you're going to be uploading, so the way it works at the moment, you go into Claude, tell her what you want. I get her prompt and say, okay, build it as though you're a 20-year veteran of her website development and design and high-end skills, all that all that sort of thing. And it spat me out a layout that was fantastic, like better than anything that I can drag and drop in any of the other website builders. The tricky bit comes where you need to update it. So I think certain applications, it's going to have a lot more impact in the short term. So if you're building a static website that doesn't need a lot of changes, and the reason for that is because in order for me to launch this site, I need to copy all those files, all those HTML files. I need to then drop them into a web hosting service. I need to make sure it's all linked and working, connected, and all that sort of stuff. So it's a bit different to your average Squarespace or your Wix platform. Or even I think Elementor on WordPress, quite a lot of people use that as well. Um, or Webflow, where you make a change, drag and drop, it's seconds and it's published seconds later, that's it. So for certain applications, I think it works really, really well at the moment. But if you're trying to build a big site that needs a lot of changes, a lot of, you know, a real CMS type site, a lot of content. It's not there yet. So unless there's a tool that's already been created that's embedding both of them, that's probably an opportunity to look at.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

I find with AI tools for a general overarching thing is brilliant. It's only when I make some nuances, changes that I find very hard. So websites included, uh even static JPEGs included, where I simply want, I want the sky to be a little bit bluer. And then all of a sudden it just fails all of a sudden. So it's good at taking that overall concept, but micro nuances still struggling just a little bit, at least for my in my experiences.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah, yeah. And it's only gonna get better. I mean, it it did it did crash for me a couple of times when I was doing it and lost a little bit of work, had to backtrack a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

And go, and then I hit some limits, usage limits too.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

So time saving and cost savings, how much do you think you will have saved?

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Probably save six thousand in cost, and then time saving will Australian dollars, obviously. Australian dollars, and then time saving weeks, weeks, easily, easily weeks. Wow. To build to go and get a web developer to go and build it. You know, you need that briefing process, you need them to be able to work it into their workflow and be able to.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Oh, it's yeah, it's it's it's a pain. Talking to these suppliers, they always say, Oh, what's your target audience? What is your objective? What is your strategic brief? And you have to answer all those before they could come up with a pricing for you.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

When you just want a website.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Was your customer impressed?

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah, they were. They they didn't have any they didn't have any negative feedback on it what whatsoever. They wanted to change a little bit of content, which I certainly did as well. Yeah. But they were cool with it. It was great. We're launching this afternoon, off we go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

I can't wait.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

So yeah, that's that's six thousand in savings in terms of just I suppose cash, but the time saving is where it really adds up. Yeah. So speed to market.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Yeah, yeah. It side topicing, but also somewhat uh similar.

AI Cuts Costs And Reshapes Firms

SPEAKER_00 6:20

A day or two ago, I think uh was it one of the big accounting firms, Deloitte or PwC or what or KPMG, they said that the partners have increased their salaries, obviously at a turbulent economic times as we are right now, simply because AI has replaced a lot of the headcount and hence they're lighter on their feet, and because of that, their final profit number is a lot higher. I think on average a partner is now in 841,000 and up from last year, and possibly more to go. So it's really interesting because I could see the out of businesses where you have some junior level people, for example, you're always going to need a reception, receptionist. You're always going to need someone to do the grant tasks, you know, delivering documents back and forth. And then you have the middle, middle management, and then you have your senior management. I really see in the coming years that there's going to be a bigger split. The middle will be hollowed out. You don't need so many mid-level managers simply because they've been replaced. They are in roles where perhaps there's a systemized process where it is now systemized. And then the really, really good people at organizing and creating these tools sit at the high end. I don't know how that gives well for a well workplace, though, but it seems to be happening already.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of fear out there of that happening, certainly with those in that sort of mid-tier role. I can definitely appreciate that. How do you see that in in your business sort of playing out? Are there some particular functions that you're thinking, oh well, we're probably better off just kind of using AI for them or yeah, so so it's tricky.

CRMs Under Pressure From AI

SPEAKER_00 7:48

For us, not yet, possibly not in the foreseeable future, simply because when customers call us up, for better or worse, they want to talk to a person. They want to share good stories with an actual person, yet at the same time, they also want to complain to an actual person. No one wants to complain to an AI system, right? So get even more frustrated. It gets them more frustrated. So that's never going to change because of the client facing roles. Yeah. The back office roles that we do have, I could foresee their functions change. So for us, it's not going to be hollowing out, but for us, it's going to be a greater diversity of work that they're going to be needing to do. So for example, maybe a backup first person will be doing graphic art, was never doing graphic artworks for a client. Well, now you will be doing graphic artworks. Uh perhaps there might be a marketing piece where we're pitching to a customer where previously maybe just a phone call would be fine or just an email would be fine. But now we're going to need to do a three-page flyer just for that customer, just on an email. And there's a big chance they might not open it anyway, but we're going to have to do it anyway because it's the competitive edge that we could have over what we previously previously did previously.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah, yeah. I like that. So if a customer inquires and they want it'd be ad advantageous for you to be able to provide them with a mock-up of how things are going to look, if you could just press a button.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

And it goes and ra rapidly builds that. Yeah. You have your stuff, have a have a quick look over it, make sure it looks all good, fire it off.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also having conversations where they're more pre-research. Things like Salesforce and the other CRM systems, one of the reasons enterprises pay so much money is because the amount of data that sits on it that's available at the fingertips for account managers or business development managers to utilize and phone calls. And so with the AI systems and with people having more free time, they can now assume a lot of the roles that previously had to pay thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands to get this type of data. So now we could play at the big boy level with our big boy expenditure. I hate to be holding on to stocks from uh places like Salesforce. I really can't see them thriving as much as they did over the past five to ten years.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

No, no, I agree. And there's other players, I mean there's so many other players in the market now in terms of CRM platforms. We're using HubSpot at the moment, which works quite well. But there's so many other competitors out there.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

There are, there are. HubSpot sits at the tier below Salesforce, but it's still expensive.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It is very expensive, especially if you're building out more and more users. And that's what we're doing. We're recruiting more and more marketing assistants over in Vietnam. And I'll be training them on AI. That's that's part of their remit is to be training on AI and make sure making sure that they're up to speed with it and using it very frequently. But I think per user it's going to cost us another 60 or 70 bucks per user per month. So adds up very quickly. Adds up very quickly. It does. And the competitors, I mean, their their advantage obviously price, if they can be a bit more nimble on that, but flexibility and you know how fast can you change? How seamless is that process where you can just take an export of your data from one system and drop it in the other. It's a it's a concern for some of the bigger players, but it's an opportunity for some of the smaller ones.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

At the risk of having an executive from HubSpot listening in, do you foresee yourself using HubSpot in two years' time, three years' time, or five years' time? I think so. Yeah. I think so. I think we do. Okay, I don't foresee myself using HubSpot. Hopefully they're not listening, but any more than a year, simply because a lot of the tools there on HubSpot we can build out very, very quickly using AI tools. And that's all that we can capture in as well. And all the integrations from XyPiel, once again, yeah, there are many, many tools that could enable that the integration.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

So they got some work to do then.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

They do, they do.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

They want to keep your