Hiring used to be a volume game. You hired more people, accepted some misses, and trusted that the winners would carry the class.
Asad Zaman says that math is changing fast. “You need less people,” he told me. “But as you need less people, what seems to be happening is that the need for those people to be exceptional is higher.”
That is the part most CEOs feel and cannot quite name. Headcount is down. Expectations are up. Mistakes are more expensive.
Asad runs STA, a sales talent agency that has helped more than 1,500 companies hire go to market leaders and teams. He has seen the patterns across stages, markets, and cycles. He also co-hosts the Topline podcast, which means he is not just watching hiring. He is watching the narratives people use to explain hiring.
His view is crisp. The talent crunch is real. It is not going away. AI is making it sharper.
AI Is Shrinking Teams And Raising The Bar
Asad started with the ecosystem, not the org chart. He said you cannot talk about talent without talking about the environment you operate in. Right now, the biggest force shaping that environment is AI.
He gave a concrete example. A friend runs a go to market team at an AI company doing more than $150 million in revenue with only 35 salespeople. That is a radically different staffing model than the SaaS era at the same revenue level.
Then he landed the punchline. “We need less people, but we need really good people. Our bar for talent has moved higher and our ability to make mistakes has reduced as well.”
This is not just a recruiting problem. It is a CEO problem. If you only hire 10 people, every miss hits harder than when you hired 50. “The impact of those people is much higher on your business, much broader,” he said.
This is why the market feels confusing. You can look at macro data and conclude hiring has slowed. Asad thinks that is the wrong interpretation. The fight for truly exceptional people has intensified. “Over there, the competition has increased, not decreased,” he said. “It’s harder to get them than it was before.”
The Decay Problem CEOs Underestimate
As I asked Asad about CEO blind spots, he described something I see all the time. Organizations decay.
Early on, the CEO is involved in every hire. The bar is high. The team is small. The bets are forced to be good.
Then you hit scale. Hiring moves into the middle layer. Promotions happen. Managers hire. The bar drifts.
Asad explained it in a way that is hard to unsee. “When you meet companies that are really large organizations and you spend time in the middle layer,” he said, “you feel like the bar for talent from where they were and what got them there, it kind of went down over time.”
A big cause is how leadership roles get filled. People get promoted because they were strong individual contributors. They hit targets. They want the next step. The company wants to reward them.
The mistake is not promoting from within. The mistake is skipping the question that actually matters. “Before you promote somebody into leadership,” Asad said, “ask, is this person suited to be a leader?”
He described the failure mode clearly.
- The new manager is not strong at hiring
- They do not spike in developing others
- They make bad hires
- Those hires do not get equipped correctly
- The decay spreads
You feel it as a CEO as soon as it happens. The org stops feeling sharp. Execution slows. Politics creep in. Talent leaves. You blame the market. The real issue is internal.
CEOs Can Control Hiring Longer Now
Asad sees an opening that did not exist a few years ago. Smaller teams mean CEOs can stay involved in hiring for longer.
He gave a stage comparison that makes it obvious. A standard Series B company used to have 150 to 200 employees. “That same company could be 50 employees today,” he said.
That changes the CEO’s leverage.
- You can be present in more hires
- You can protect the bar longer
- You can push the decay problem farther out
This is why he pointed to Google as impressive. Not because it never had problems, but because it maintained high talent density at massive scale. “That is very hard to do,” he said.
Most CEOs accept decay as inevitable. Asad is saying it is not inevitable, at least not as early as you think.
Scaling Yourself Is A Yearly Job Change
Asad was direct about what makes the CEO seat hard. “Your job changes every year,” he said. “Every year you have a new job that you need to get ready for and adjust to.”
He brought in a recruiting concept that I think applies to CEOs as well. Stage appropriateness. When hiring leaders, you look for people who have proven they can win in the specific jump you are making. Not just big logos. Not just generic competence. The stage matters.
CEOs do not get that luxury. You cannot hire a new CEO each year. You have to become stage appropriate yourself.
Asad described his approach in a way that felt real, not performative.
- Read, listen, learn, contemplate
- Build a small circle of people whose feedback you actually trust
- Be selective about input instead of drowning in it
“I’m very particular about whose feedback I want,” he said. He is not interested in feedback from everyone. He wants signal, not noise.
Then he said something that more CEOs should say out loud. Your body changes as you age, and that changes how you lead. He became a CEO in his early 30s. Now he is 38. “My endurance for hours even is different,” he said. “My nervous system gets tired a little bit faster.”
He described a day of nine straight hours of meetings and how he felt it the next morning “in a way that I wouldn’t before.”
That is not weakness. That is reality. The mistake is pretending your reality has not changed and trying to white knuckle your way through the job.
“I knew very little then and I had a lot more endurance,” he said. “I have a little less endurance now, but I know a lot more.”
A CEO who understands that trade learns how to use the knowledge advantage without punishing their body to prove something.
Don’t Fall In Love With Your Chip On Your Shoulder
Asad referenced a point he heard from Figma’s CEO that stuck with him. Early success is often fueled by a chip on your shoulder. That chip can be useful. It can also become a trap.
“Don’t fall in love with that chip on your shoulder,” he said. “You can be happy and fine and also be effective.”
He described the mindset he is aiming for, and I think it is the right one. Balance optimism and skepticism at the same time.
“Optimists are the ones who build the future,” he said. You need that optimism to create. You also need skepticism to allocate resources, pick priorities, and let other fires burn.
That balance is not a one time decision. It is a skill you practice. What works for you in one season stops working in another. Then you adjust.
AI, Taste, And The Humanity Problem
Asad runs two businesses. STA, where he is dealing with people’s careers and some of the most important hires a CEO will make. And Topline, where he is dealing with media and audience trust.
In both, he sees the same challenge. Use AI aggressively without losing the human part that makes the work valuable.
In media, he is blunt about the risk. It can turn into “AI slop.” He wants the reader to feel “a human wrestled with this.”
In recruiting, the stakes are even higher. “We’re talking about people’s lives,” he said. “We’re talking about usually the most important hires a company is making in that given year.”
This is where his AI stance gets interesting. He is progressive about using technology, but he refuses to abdicate judgment. He gave a practical example. Many firms use AI to source candidate lists and screen them. “We have made a decision that AI will play no role there,” he said. “We actually have our most senior people do that job.”
He also gave a clean take on writing workflows. AI has no taste. It is better when you write first and use AI to improve, not when you ask it to draft and you polish from there. “The former is far superior of a workflow than the latter,” he said.
That is a principle CEOs can apply broadly.
- Use AI where right and wrong are provable
- Keep humans where taste and judgment matter
- Don’t use AI just to do more
- Use it to do better
What This Means For You
The company you are building right now probably needs fewer people than you thought. That does not make hiring easier. It makes it riskier.
Asad’s warning is clear.
- The bar is higher
- Mistakes cost more
- Decay starts when leadership roles are filled without leadership skill
- CEOs can now protect talent density longer than before
This is a moment where hiring becomes strategy, not HR. You cannot outsource it and hope it works out. Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO here.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs. If you are feeling the new hiring math, trying to raise your talent bar without slowing growth, and want a plan to avoid the decay that hits at scale, let’s talk.
