Daniel Chait is co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the hiring platform behind more than 7,500 companies. He's been arguing for structured hiring for over a decade, and he thinks it matters more now than ever, because AI applied on top of a chaotic process just scales the chaos.

Joelle and Daniel get into why neither employers nor job seekers are winning right now, what the best companies do differently before AI enters the picture at all, how AI interviews can either destroy or expand fair access to a first conversation, and what happened when Paradigm's own hiring process ran into candidates who weren't who they said they were.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

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Jevan is a five-time chief people officer who has scaled teams at Square, Stitch Fix, Blue Bottle Coffee, and AI drug discovery company insitro, and he's been working at the intersection of technology and people for over two decades.

In this episode, Jevan and Joelle Emerson dig into why AI amplifies whatever your organization already is, for better or worse. Jevan shares findings from WRITER's recent adoption survey, including the surprising number of employees actively sabotaging AI initiatives at their companies, and explains why bottoms-up experimentation alone almost never produces business results. They also get into why he predicted years ago that the chief people officer would need to become the chief change officer, what he learned about humans and algorithms working together at Stitch Fix a decade before it was fashionable, the return of the generalist, and the difference between an efficiency culture and a resilience culture.

Below the Surface is a podcast from Paradigm about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Cristina Cordova is COO of Linear, the product development system for teams and agents. Before Linear, Cristina was an early employee at Stripe, helping scale the company from under 30 employees to over 3,000, and later helped build partnerships at Notion.

In this episode, Cristina joins host Joelle Emerson to discuss why Linear has explicitly rejected the 996 culture common in tech startups. She explains why Linear treats headcount as a deliberate choice rather than a byproduct of growth, why the company's hiring bar is about learning ability and risk-taking rather than resume checkboxes, and why focus, not raw output, is Linear's real competitive advantage.

They also discuss Linear's paid work trials, how the company organizes engineering into project-based "collapsible teams," and why investing in brand early pays off for years.

If you're thinking about how to build a high-performing team without overhiring, or how to design a hiring process that actually predicts success, this conversation is for you.

Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. Before joining Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, led global recruiting at Pinterest as the company grew from 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and built Growth by Design Talent into the talent advisory firm behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma.

In this episode, Adam joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about why most companies are still building recruiting teams the way they did decades ago, and what needs to change now. He explains Cursor’s approach to hiring, why the best recruiting processes look more like executive search than a traditional funnel, and why companies should focus less on hiring efficiency and more on hiring efficacy.

They also discuss talent density, referral mining, work trials, founder involvement, compensation philosophy, AI in recruiting, hiring junior engineers in an AI-native world, and what it takes to close exceptional candidates in a market where speed, judgment, and conviction matter more than ever.

If you’re thinking about how AI is changing recruiting, team design, and the future of high-performance organizations, this conversation is for you.