How Brands Should Build a Hiring System with AI

Bella Vasta has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years. She's built and coached service businesses across every stage - from scrappy startups to multi-million dollar operations. And after all those years, she'll tell you that the number one problem killing service businesses isn't marketing or sales. It's hiring.

Most small business owners treat hiring as a necessary evil. They post a job ad when they're desperate, interview a few people, pick the least-bad option, and hope for the best. Bella thinks that's insane. She's developed a 10-step AI-powered hiring system that treats the hiring process exactly like a marketing funnel - because, as she puts it, "hiring IS marketing."

What makes Bella's perspective unique is her combination of battle-tested business experience and a deeply personal resilience story. Her daughter spent time in the NICU shortly after birth, and that experience fundamentally changed how Bella thinks about what actually matters in business. Not the hustle, not the revenue targets, but the systems that let a business survive when the founder can't be there.

This episode covers Bella's 10-step AI hiring system, why culture isn't a poster on the wall but a filter for every hiring decision, how AI fits into service businesses as a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing switch, and what two decades of entrepreneurship taught her about building businesses that outlast your worst days.

Key Takeaways: Hiring as a System, Not a Scramble

Hiring is Marketing:

• The job posting is your ad copy - it needs to attract the right people and repel the wrong ones
• Your employer brand is just as important as your customer brand
• The candidate experience IS your first impression as a company - if your hiring process is chaotic, they'll assume your company is too
• A systematic approach means you're never hiring from a place of desperation

The 10-Step Framework:

• Starts with defining your culture and non-negotiables before you ever write a job description
• Uses AI to screen initial applications, score responses, and identify red flags
• Includes structured interview questions that every candidate gets, removing bias
• Ends with onboarding that integrates the new hire into your culture, not just your workflow
• Each step has a clear purpose - no step exists "just because that's how it's always been done"

AI as a Spectrum:

• AI in service businesses isn't about replacing humans - it's about augmenting the parts that are tedious and repetitive
• Screening 200 resumes manually is a waste of human judgment - AI handles the filtering, humans handle the evaluating
• AI can draft job descriptions, score applications, suggest interview questions, and flag inconsistencies
• The human judgment moments - culture fit, emotional intelligence, leadership potential - should stay human

Q: You've been an entrepreneur for 20+ years. What's the one problem that keeps showing up?

Bella Vasta: Hiring. Without question. I've coached hundreds of service business owners, and every single one of them has the same story. They can't find good people. When they do find someone, they can't keep them. And when they lose someone, it takes months to recover.

The root cause is always the same - they don't have a system. They wait until they're desperate, throw up a job post, interview whoever applies, and make a gut decision. Then they wonder why it doesn't work out. You would never run your marketing that way. You wouldn't say, "I'll think about marketing when I really need a customer." But that's exactly how most small businesses approach hiring.

I started treating hiring like a marketing funnel about five years ago, and everything changed. Top of funnel is awareness - making sure the right candidates know you exist. Middle is engagement - the application and interview process. Bottom is conversion - the offer and onboarding. When you frame it this way, business owners immediately understand what's broken in their process.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: If you wouldn't run your sales pipeline on vibes and desperation, stop running your hiring pipeline that way too.

Q: Walk me through the 10-step AI hiring system. How does it work?

Bella Vasta: Step one is defining your culture. Before you write a single job description, you need absolute clarity on your values, your non-negotiables, and the kind of person who thrives in your environment. This isn't a mission statement exercise - it's a practical filter. If "attention to detail" is a real value, then sloppy applications get automatically rejected.

Step two is writing the job description with AI assistance. I use AI to draft the initial description, but the key is feeding it your culture document and examples of your best employees. The AI then writes a description that attracts people similar to your top performers. You review and adjust, but it gives you a strong starting point.

Step three is multi-channel distribution. Don't just post on Indeed. Use your social media, your team's networks, local community boards. AI can help you adapt the same job description for different platforms - LinkedIn needs a different tone than Instagram.

Step four is the application filter. This is where AI really shines. I add screening questions to every application - scenario-based questions where there's no "right" answer, but the response reveals how someone thinks. AI scores these responses based on criteria you define.

Step five is the phone screen. This is still human - 15 minutes to verify basics, assess communication skills, and check for enthusiasm. You can't automate gut feeling.

Step six is the structured interview. Every candidate gets the same questions in the same order. AI helps you design questions that reveal what you actually need to know. Scoring rubrics for each answer. This removes bias and makes comparison fair.

Step seven is the skills assessment. For service businesses, this might be a practical test - can they actually do the work? AI can help design role-specific assessments.

Step eight is reference checks. Most people skip this or do it poorly. I have a specific set of questions I ask every reference, and AI helps me analyze patterns across multiple references.

Step nine is the offer and negotiation. AI can help you benchmark compensation for your market. But the conversation itself needs to be human and personal.

Step ten is structured onboarding. The first 90 days make or break a hire. AI helps create personalized onboarding checklists, training schedules, and milestone tracking. But the human element - making someone feel welcome, introducing them to the team culture, giving them a mentor - that's all human.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Ten steps sounds like a lot until you calculate the cost of one bad hire. For service businesses, that number usually has five digits.

Q: When you say "hiring is marketing," what do you mean practically?

Bella Vasta: Think about how you attract customers. You define your ideal customer, you create messaging that speaks to them, you put that messaging where they hang out, and you guide them through a journey that ends with them choosing you. Hiring is exactly the same thing.

Your ideal candidate is your "customer avatar." Your job description is your "ad copy." Where you post is your "channel strategy." Your interview process is your "sales funnel." Your offer is your "closing."

When I frame it this way for business owners, light bulbs go off. They suddenly realize their job descriptions sound like legal documents instead of compelling pitches. Their interview process is confusing and inconsistent. They have no idea where their best candidates actually come from.

The other parallel is repelling. Good marketing repels the wrong customer just as much as it attracts the right one. A great job description should make the wrong candidate self-select out before they even apply. If your description is so generic that everyone applies, that's not a good thing - that's a failure of specificity.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Your job posting is an ad. If it reads like a legal contract instead of a compelling pitch, don't be surprised when only desperate people apply.

Q: Your daughter's NICU experience changed how you think about business. How?

Bella Vasta: When my daughter was in the NICU, everything else stopped. Business, clients, revenue - none of it mattered. All I could think about was her. And that experience showed me something brutal about my business: it couldn't survive without me.

I had built everything around myself. I was the sales person, the coach, the content creator, the operations person. When I was forced to step away, things started falling apart. Clients weren't getting responses, projects were delayed, revenue dipped.

That was a wake-up call. When I came back to work, the first thing I did was start building systems that could run without me. Hiring was the biggest piece of that puzzle. I needed people who could make decisions, serve clients, and keep things moving even if I disappeared for weeks.

Now I tell every business owner: build your business like you might have to walk away tomorrow. Not because you want to, but because life will eventually demand it. The NICU taught me that your business needs to survive your worst day, not just your best day.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The real stress test of a business isn't a market downturn. It's a personal crisis that pulls the founder away completely. Build for that.

Q: How do you think about AI as a spectrum for service businesses?

Bella Vasta: I hate the binary conversation around AI - either it's going to replace everyone or it's useless. The reality for service businesses is that AI is a spectrum. On one end, you have fully manual processes. On the other, you have fully automated. Most service businesses should be somewhere in the middle.

Screening 200 resumes is a task that should be mostly automated. You're looking for keywords, qualifications, red flags. AI does that in seconds. A human doing it takes hours and is inconsistent - by resume number 150, you're not reading with the same attention as resume number 1.

But evaluating culture fit in an interview? That should be mostly human. AI can suggest questions and even analyze speech patterns, but the nuance of whether someone will thrive in your specific team requires human judgment.

The mistake most service businesses make is trying to go from zero AI to full AI overnight. Start with one step. Automate resume screening first. Get comfortable with that. Then add AI-assisted job descriptions. Then scoring. Build gradually.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI isn't a light switch. It's a dimmer. Most service businesses need it at about 40% brightness, not 100%.

Q: What's the biggest mistake service businesses make with hiring?

Bella Vasta: Hiring when they're desperate. When you're three weeks behind on client work and burning out, you'll hire anyone with a pulse. And that desperation hire almost always turns into a six-month nightmare followed by another round of hiring.

The second biggest mistake is hiring for skills over culture. I can teach someone how to use software, how to follow a process, how to improve their craft. I cannot teach someone to care, to be proactive, to be honest, or to fit into a team. Skills can be trained. Character cannot.

The third mistake, honestly, is not having a system at all. When every hire is different - different questions, different process, different evaluation criteria - you have no way to learn from your successes or failures. You're making the same mistakes with every single hire because nothing is documented or repeatable.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The cost of a desperate hire isn't just the salary. It's six months of mediocre work, team morale damage, and another hiring cycle. Slow down to speed up.

Q: How do you define culture in a way that's actionable, not just inspirational?

Bella Vasta: Culture isn't a poster on the wall. Culture is what you do when nobody's watching and what you don't tolerate even when it's inconvenient. I define culture through three lenses: behaviors, non-negotiables, and stories.

Behaviors are the daily actions that reflect your values. If "customer first" is a value, the behavior is "we respond to every inquiry within one hour." Not "we believe in great customer service" - that's useless. What does it look like in practice, today, in concrete terms?

Non-negotiables are your deal-breakers. Things that will get someone let go regardless of their performance. For me, dishonesty is a non-negotiable. I don't care how talented you are - if you lie, you're gone. Having clear non-negotiables makes hiring decisions much easier.

Stories are how you transmit culture. New hires learn culture through stories about what happened when someone went above and beyond, or when someone violated a value and what happened next. AI can't create culture, but it can help you document and organize these stories so they're part of onboarding.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: If you can't describe your culture in three specific behaviors, you don't have one. You have wishful thinking.

Q: How should service businesses think about AI in their actual operations, beyond hiring?

Bella Vasta: Service businesses have a unique challenge with AI because the service itself is often human-to-human. A dog walker can't send an AI to walk the dog. A house cleaner can't deploy a robot (yet). So AI in service businesses lives in the back office, not the front line.

Scheduling, invoicing, customer communication, marketing content, data analysis - all of these can be significantly improved with AI tools. I've seen service business owners save 10-15 hours per week by automating administrative tasks with AI.

The key insight is that AI should give your team more time to be human where it matters. If your dog walker spends an hour each day on scheduling and invoicing, that's an hour they could spend with an extra client or giving better service to existing clients. Automate the admin, amplify the human touch.

But be honest about what AI can and can't do in your specific business. If your competitive advantage is the personal relationship between your staff and your clients, don't automate those touchpoints. Automate everything around them instead.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI in service businesses doesn't replace the service. It replaces the paperwork so your team can do more of what clients actually pay for.

Q: After 20+ years of entrepreneurship, what's the biggest lesson?

Bella Vasta: Systems beat hustle. Every single time. I hustled for the first decade and burned out twice. The second decade, I built systems, and things got dramatically better. Not easier - building systems is hard. But more sustainable.

The hustle mentality tells you that working harder and longer is the answer. It's not. Working smarter, building processes, hiring the right people, and creating businesses that don't depend entirely on the founder - that's the answer.

I've also learned that most business problems are people problems. Bad marketing? Probably a people problem - wrong person running it. Bad operations? People problem. Inconsistent quality? People problem. If you get the hiring right, most other problems either shrink or disappear entirely.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Hustle gets you started. Systems get you through. The founders who burn out are the ones who never made the switch.

Q: What role does resilience play in long-term entrepreneurship?

Bella Vasta: Resilience isn't about being tough. It's about having the systems and support that let you fall apart and come back. The NICU taught me that. I needed to fall apart. My daughter needed me emotionally present, not "hustling through it."

The businesses that survive long-term aren't the ones with the toughest founders. They're the ones where the founder built something that can absorb a hit - a team that can handle things, systems that run without constant oversight, a financial buffer that buys time.

I tell founders: build your resilience into your business, not into your personality. Your personality will crack eventually. Everyone has a breaking point. But if your business is resilient - meaning it can function at 60% even without you - then your personal breaking point doesn't become a business-ending event.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Real resilience isn't the founder being indestructible. It's the business surviving when the founder breaks.

Q: What advice would you give a founder who's ready to make their first hire?

Bella Vasta: Don't rush it, and don't wing it. Your first hire sets the tone for every hire after. If you hire sloppy the first time, you'll hire sloppy every time. If you build a system for hire number one, that system scales to hire number fifty.

Write down exactly what you need this person to do - not a vague job title, but specific tasks with measurable outcomes. Then define the kind of person who would thrive doing those tasks in your specific environment. Only then should you write a job description.

And please, pay fairly. The number one reason service businesses can't find good people is they're paying below market. If you can't afford to pay someone fairly, you can't afford to hire. Go back to working solo until your revenue supports a real salary. A cheap hire costs more in the long run than waiting until you can afford a good one.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Your first hire isn't just an employee. It's the prototype for your entire team culture. Get it right.

Final Thoughts: Building Businesses That Survive Your Worst Day

Bella's guiding principle: "Build your business like you might have to walk away tomorrow."

The bottom line: Bella Vasta's 10-step AI hiring system isn't just a framework for recruiting. It's a philosophy about how service businesses should be built - systematically, with clear values, and with enough structure to survive without the founder holding everything together.

The "hiring is marketing" insight is the kind of reframe that changes how founders think about their entire business. When you realize that your job posting is ad copy, your interview process is a sales funnel, and your employer brand is just as important as your customer brand, suddenly the hiring problem isn't a mystery anymore. It's a marketing problem, and you already know how to solve those.

The personal resilience story ties it together. The NICU experience wasn't just a life event - it was the moment Bella realized that hustle-dependent businesses are a liability, not an asset. Systems, people, and processes are what let a business survive when life happens. And life always happens.

For service business owners drowning in hiring problems, Bella's message is simple: stop treating hiring as a distraction from your real work. It IS your real work. Get the people right, and everything else follows.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about the hiring system?

Bella Vasta: You can find me at Jump Consulting - we work specifically with service-based businesses. I'm very active on social media, especially Instagram and LinkedIn, where I share frameworks and tips regularly. If you're a service business owner struggling with hiring, reach out. I do coaching, workshops, and have resources on the AI hiring system that we discussed today.

Final words: After 20 years of building and coaching businesses, Bella Vasta boiled it down to one uncomfortable truth - most service businesses fail because they treat hiring as an afterthought instead of a system. Her 10-step AI hiring framework is practical, not theoretical. It starts with culture, uses AI for the tedious parts, and keeps humans for the judgment calls. But the deeper lesson is personal. When her daughter was in the NICU, Bella's business nearly fell apart because it was built entirely around her. That experience transformed her from a hustle-first entrepreneur to a systems-first one. The question she now asks every founder: "If you couldn't show up for a month, would your business survive?" If the answer is no, hiring isn't your next step. Building a business that doesn't need you to breathe is.