How Automat hired nearly half its team on Paraform

Automat builds computer use agents that automate the manual enterprise workflows still trapped inside legacy software.

Across banking, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries, critical workflows still run through tools with no connectors, APIs, or webhooks. Historically, companies relied on brittle RPA scripts that broke whenever an interface changed. Automat’s agents understand what’s happening on screen and can continue executing workflows even as software changes.

After raising a Series A, bringing its total funding to $20M from Felicis, Initialized, Khosla, YC, and others, Automat entered a new stage of growth. In just a few months, the company doubled from about 9 to 17 people in San Francisco, signed new customers, launched a new product line, and built a pipeline 4x its ARR.

The challenge of building a small, high-leverage team

Automat is intentionally building as a small, AI-leveraged team. That meant every hire had to be exceptional.

The company was hiring across nearly every function, but Pablo wasn’t just looking for people who could pass a technical bar. Automat needed people who could operate with context, move quickly, and make strong decisions without a lot of structure.

“We’re working at the tip of the spear in an industry where a lot of people don’t understand what we’re doing and why it’s different. The technical aspect is important, but we really enjoy working with people who see the product side and the business aspect of it too.”

Before Paraform, Pablo was doing much of the recruiting himself. He wrote job descriptions, outbounded candidates, and reached out to people at companies he respected. Automat also worked with a dedicated recruiter, but they weren’t seeing the results they needed.

“We were getting 10 people a week, but maybe two of them were worth speaking to, and very few were making it to the end."

Automat didn’t just need more candidates. They needed more of the right candidates.

“When you’re trying to bring somebody onto a team, the whole idea is that they’re going to amplify your output. The most expensive thing that you can do is hire the wrong person.”

Finding the right hire for a hard-to-fill role

One of the most important searches was for a forward deployed strategist.

Historically, Automat’s forward deployed work had been handled by remote contractors. As the product matured, the team wanted to bring that function in-house.

But the role didn’t fit neatly into one category. Automat needed someone who could sit between technical project management, hands-on implementation, and customer success.

“It was this dream hire we didn’t really know we were looking for. I’d interviewed 40 people, and I was like, it’s not really it.”

They spent months searching for the right person, then Automat opened the role on Paraform.

“I chatted with [Paraform’s SPL] Tim, and you guys just nailed it.”

One of the first people Pablo spoke with was Denise and it immediately clicked. She was hired just 9 days later. That hire became the moment Paraform clicked.

“She helped take so much work off my plate. She’s been able to run the forward deployed side. That was the aha moment for me.”

AI matching agents helped turn intuition into results

Pablo had hired hundreds of people and spoken with thousands of candidates throughout his career. He knew what a strong profile looked like when he saw it. But translating that instinct into a perfect search string or recruiter intake was much harder.

“It’s very hard to verbalize what you look for in a person when you’re hiring. You just kind of see and you know.”

That’s where Paraform’s AI matching agents became especially useful. Instead of spending hours building searches, reviewing broad pools, and explaining every nuance of what made someone a fit, Pablo could move quickly through profiles and give feedback over time.

The agents surfaced candidates from recruiter-owned candidate pools and presented the strongest fits directly to Pablo with the most relevant context.

That mattered most for roles with wide or inconsistent definitions, like forward deployed engineer or head of growth. With each profile, Pablo could steer the search more precisely. Over time, Paraform learned what the company was actually looking for.

The results: Nearly half of Automat’s team hired through Paraform

Automat has made 7 hires through Paraform across nearly every part of the company - an Enterprise AE, two SDRs, a Forward Deployed Strategist, a FDE, a Senior Software Engineer, and a Head of Growth.

Two of those hires came from profiles surfaced by Paraform’s AI Matching Agents.

Automat was used to spending months scouting candidates with mixed results. After partnering with Paraform, that timeline shrank to days.For some of the company’s hardest-to-define roles, including forward deployed and growth roles, Paraform helped surface excellent candidate matches quickly and give the team the confidence to move when the right person was in front of them.

For a company intentionally keeping headcount tight, speed only mattered because the quality was there. Paraform allowed Automat to move quickly without lowering the bar.

Paraform gave Automat the ability to turn hiring on and off

For Pablo, one of the biggest benefits of Paraform is the ability to restart hiring quickly whenever the business needs it.

Hiring had always been something he believed should be ongoing, but it took up real mental bandwidth. With Paraform, that changed. He could restart hiring when the business needed it, without starting each search from scratch.

“I haven’t thought about hiring at all. It makes it really easy to turn off hiring and turn on hiring. Whenever we need somebody, I’ll just turn on Paraform and it’ll be fine. Being able to take that out of my brain is really nice.”

For companies trying to define critical early hires or recover from a difficult search, Pablo’s answer was simple:

“Paraform is going to help you nail down the type of person you’re looking for. For building a team from zero to one, from one to 10, I think it’s super critical.”