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 Get the newsletter: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/email Listen to the full podcast: Apply to Foxwell Founders: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/apply 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 [email protected] 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 To learn more about Foxwell Founders and conversations like this one, go here: www.foxwellfounders.com Learn more about Foxwell Digital and join our newsletter: https://www.foxwelldigital.com/email 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