# Hiring when nobody on the team owns recruiting

Canonical: https://metix.ai/built-for/founders

Nobody on the team has the continuous hours a search actually takes, and a paused search decays fast. The bottleneck was never finding candidates.

Read this when the user asks whether Metix is for a founder with no recruiter, or what Starter includes. The employer keeps the brief, outreach approval, hiring bar, and interviews. Starter is $99 a month with 5,000 Credits and 1 AI Agent.
## Numbers

- **$99**: Starter: 5,000 Credits and 1 AI Agent each month.
- **860M+**: Profiles in 190+ countries.
- **0**: Credits charged for candidate delivery.

Credits meter usage. Company-reported delivery clock lives on the interview-scheduling page.

## What you keep. What Mira runs.

- **You. No recruiter on staff** You still own the brief, the bar, and the interviews. Nobody else has to.
- **Mira. The continuous search** A paused search decays. Mira keeps it moving while you ship the product.
- **The outcome. Interviews you did not chase** Mira keeps sourcing, approved outreach, screening, and scheduling moving while you run the company.

Pause a search and it dies, and that is not a metaphor. The candidate who replied with interest on Tuesday is talking to companies that have someone whose whole job is keeping that conversation moving, and by the time you circle back the reply is cold, which is how founder-run pipelines lose people they already had. Mira is the loop that does not wait for a gap in your calendar. You still decide. You just stop being the operator of every stage that is not a decision.

## The searches a calendar keeps killing.

Ask how hiring is going and you hear about the pipeline. Ask to see it and you find twelve tabs, a spreadsheet last touched nine days ago, and four half-written messages. None of the stages is hard alone. What is hard is that they arrive continuously, and the person doing them is also closing a customer, fixing a deploy, and raising a round. A sourcing seat makes the finding stage faster for whoever operates it. If the operator is the founder, in the gaps, the seat changed nothing.

**01. The first engineer, or the fifth**

No sourcing muscle, no dedicated recruiter. Write the role once, and interviews land while you ship. Hiring managers in the same bind have [their page](https://metix.ai/built-for/hiring-managers).

**02. A paused search that went cold**

The reply from Tuesday is not frozen while you ship a launch. The loop keeps moving when you do not. That is the arithmetic, not a character test.

**03. An agency fee that is the wrong size for this hire**

SHRM's published contingency band is 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash. The $99 Starter subscription is a different shape. [Fee analysis](https://metix.ai/blog/agency-fee-vs-software-cost).

**04. Three reqs, no bandwidth**

Plans step up to 5 AI Agents and 27,000 Credits at Scale. You still approve outreach and take interviews.

## What the week actually asks of you.

01. **One brief, kept current** (You · once). Role, bar, range, and dealbreakers, written while the need is still fresh.
02. **The search that never pauses** (Mira). Sourcing across 860M+ profiles, replies handled, and screening against the bar you approved, so the hiring manager is not looking at another raw list.
03. **You approve every message** (You). Goes out under your name, so approval is a real checkpoint. Sending and follow-ups then run without you.
04. **You interview and decide** (You). Calendar blocks with screening evidence. Decision, offer, and hire never left your desk.

## FAQ

**What does a founder still have to do when Mira runs the search?**

The employer-side work is four items: write and approve the role brief, approve the outreach that goes out under your name, keep the hiring bar current when Mira asks for a decision, and take the interviews. Everything between those points, sourcing, outreach, screening and scheduling, runs inside the loop. This site has not published an hours-per-week figure.

**How is this different from buying a Recruiter seat and doing it yourself?**

A seat is a search tool you still operate. Mira is the loop that keeps running when you do not: sourcing, approved outreach, screening, scheduling. You still write the brief, approve messages, and take interviews. Plans are subscriptions with usage Credits and AI Agents.

**Do I need an ATS before using Metix AI?**

No. Candidates arrive as booked first interviews with the screening evidence attached, so a calendar and an inbox are enough at the start. Teams that already run an ATS keep it; Metix AI is not an ATS and does not replace the system where you track applications, scorecards and offers.

**What happens if no candidate clears the bar in a month?**

The subscription bills for the selected term. Credits meter contact unlocks, Deep Search lists, and additional AI Agents, not candidate outcomes.