The Founder’s Guide to Dataworks: Building Elite AI Teams

There are plenty of recruitment companies that can send you CVs. That isn’t really what we built Dataworks to do.

We work with VC-backed startups, predominantly across AI, helping founders build GTM, engineering, data and product teams across the US and Europe. Sometimes that means one critical founding hire. Sometimes it means helping build an entire function.

Why we focus on early-stage AI

Startup hiring is different. The person who looks perfect on paper isn’t necessarily the person who will thrive when the playbook is unfinished, priorities move quickly and there are fewer places to hide.

We’ve supported businesses from Seed through Series C, including companies scaling new US teams, building their first commercial functions and hiring specialist technical talent. That has taught us that context matters enormously.

A founding seller is not simply an AE at a smaller company. A first marketer isn’t just someone who can run campaigns. A founding engineer often needs a different level of ownership from somebody joining a mature 500-person organisation.

We start with the problem

Our best searches begin with a proper conversation about what the business actually needs. What has to change because this person joins? What will success look like in six or twelve months? What have you already tried? Where is the risk?

That sounds basic, but vague briefs create vague searches.

We would rather challenge a requirement at the beginning than spend four weeks searching for the wrong person.

Retained and exclusive by design

We increasingly work on a retained or exclusive basis because it creates better alignment. It allows us to go deeper into the market, represent the company properly and take responsibility for an outcome rather than racing several agencies to the same LinkedIn profiles.

For larger hiring programmes, our embedded model can also act as an extension of an internal talent team, managing sourcing and process while giving founders and hiring managers time back.

What our work looks like in practice

Our experience includes building sales teams for HealthTech AI companies, supporting US launches, hiring Data Science and Machine Learning specialists, and partnering with global SaaS businesses on longer-term hiring programmes.

You can see examples in our case studies. The common thread is rarely a simple vacancy. It’s usually a company at an important point in its growth that needs the right person quickly without compromising the bar.

Data helps, judgement still matters

We use market mapping, salary data and live search information to help clients make better decisions. We also use AI internally where it saves time. But recruitment is still a human judgement business.

We’ve written about our experience using AI in recruitment, including where it helps and where it creates more noise. The short version: technology should make a good recruiter more effective, not replace the conversations and judgement that actually decide a hire.

Who Dataworks is for

We’re probably a good fit if you’re building an AI startup, hiring into a market where the obvious candidates are already being approached, launching into the US or Europe, or simply don’t have the internal bandwidth to run a specialist search properly.

We’re probably not the right partner if you want ten agencies sending CVs as quickly as possible.

Final thought

Hiring is one of the biggest levers a startup has. The wrong person can slow a company down. The right person can change its trajectory.

That’s the part of recruitment we like working on.

Learn more about Dataworks, see what we’ve been building, or talk to us about your next hire.