Causa Prima · ~7 employees · Seed
Causa Prima
Interim talent leadership for a newly funded AI startup: from an inbox of 400 unscreened applications to four senior hires in eight weeks.
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Senior hires
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Offer acceptance
0+
Applications triaged
The situation
Causa Prima — the agent-to-agent network for finance teams, built by the team behind Taulia and Finoa — had just closed its seed round when we were brought in. The founders were running senior technical hiring themselves on top of building the product and needed to scale fast. When the first roles went live — five engineering and one product — the inbound came fast: around 400 applications in the first few weeks. The CTO had a clear, high bar for who he wanted, but absorbing that volume while building the product was too much to ask of a founding team. We were brought in to own the operational layer — screening, process design, ATS setup, and candidate communication — freeing the hiring managers to focus only on the conversations that needed them.
The search
Stepped in as interim Head of Talent. In our embedded model, one of our senior consultants operates between the incoming pipeline and the founders' calendars. The job was to learn each hiring manager's bar well enough to filter for them, so their time goes only to the candidates worth it. Got the pipeline moving. The 400+ unreviewed applications were triaged so screening could begin immediately. Every candidate received a response, including those being rejected, to keep the candidate experience intact. We assessed the bar for each role, worked out where inbound was strong and where it wasn't, and sourced the gaps directly. Rebuilt Ashby into a system that works at scale. We restructured the pipeline to reflect the real interview stages, introduced a consistent feedback template, and pulled the team's call notes into Ashby so every decision had a reviewable trail. The result is a system they still run and adjust themselves. Ran the volume so the founders didn't have to. The interim Head of Talent conducted roughly 140 interviews, ten a day at peak, balancing the inbound backlog against outbound sourcing across three live roles. The goal throughout was to surface a wide range of profiles quickly so the CTO could calibrate fast and focus on the right handful. Earned the room to go off-brief. We moved at the pace an early-stage startup needs, and put in the work early to calibrate quickly and get the bar right. That trust went both ways: the CTO gave us the room to bring forward candidates who looked slightly outside the brief on paper, which ended up being some of the best hires — people who matched the team as much as the role. Proved the shortlist model with results. Early in the engagement, the team wanted to see more volume, a reasonable instinct when you haven't seen the quality yet. We ran the experiment: brought the numbers, let them sit alongside the original shortlist, and let the hires make the case. Two of the first five shortlisted candidates got offers. A third came from the internal pipeline, and the fourth came through a candidate strong enough that the team created a role to bring him in. One hire, a DevOps engineer, had already been interviewed and well-received before we started, but the process had stalled; we spotted it, pushed for the conversation to continue, and he became the first hire in the cohort.
The outcome
Our work rarely stops when an engagement is contractually complete. In this case, one hire came with a complex visa process attached — the kind that typically adds up to eight weeks before someone can actually start. We stayed on it, working the case down to four weeks so the hire could get to work sooner. Once we'd hit the original goals of the engagement, we switched into a contingent model so Causa Prima kept access to search support for whatever came next.
Hires made
- DevOps Engineer
- Backend Engineer
- AI Engineer
- Technical Program Manager
