Introducing People ATX: Austin's New Talent Partner Built for Founders

Jami and Andrés have spent over 30 combined years in talent and recruiting, Andrés on the executive search side, Jami on talent strategy and change management. This year they launched People ATX, a retained search and talent advisory firm built exclusively for Austin's founders, startups, and the investors who back them.

You're Choosing From the Wrong Pool

If you have posted a role recently and received 400 applications in a week, half written by the same AI tool, you will understand. Post the role that decides whether your next 18 months work, the engineering lead, the first real GTM hire, the operator who can take a team from 12 to 60, and you'll hear almost nothing.

The people who can do those jobs aren't applying. They're being recruited directly, usually while they're winning somewhere else. If your hiring process depends on who shows up, you're choosing from the wrong pool.

The Real Cost of a Bad Hire

Founders tend to price a bad hire at the salary. The real bill is the salary, plus the recruiting cost, plus six to nine months of a critical function running poorly, plus the good people who quietly start interviewing. At a small company, one wrong executive hire can burn a quarter of your runway and most of your momentum.

That math is why every engagement we run starts with strategy, not a job description: we do the mapping, what hires are actually needed, and build your plan before we open a single search.

One Thing You Can Do This Week

Before you write your next job description, create the scorecard instead: what this person must have accomplished by month six, month twelve, and month eighteen.

Be specific: revenue shipped, team built, system replaced. If you can't write it, you're not ready to open the role. If you can, you've just made the search twice as fast, because now you're screening for outcomes instead of keywords.

Every search we run starts with this framework. People ATX works across four areas: talent strategy, executive and retained search, AI change management, and a career academy, because in 2026, deciding who to hire and deciding what AI changes about your org are the same conversation.

Why This Isn't a Typical Recruiting Pitch

Most recruiting firms sell a single transaction: a role, a fee, a placement. For a growing company, funded or not, that's the wrong unit of work. The right unit is the next eighteen months of your team, the three or four hires that determine whether your plan is achievable, mapped before you're in a panic to fill them.

So, we look at your stage, your runway, your roadmap, and build the hiring plan backward from where the business needs to be. Then we go find the specific people who can get you there, often from adjacent industries and roles your competitors aren't thinking to look at. A search that only considers people with your exact title at a company like yours is fishing in the same small pond as everyone else.

For senior roles, discretion isn't a nice-to-have, it's the search. Your best candidate is usually employed somewhere that would be unhappy to learn they're looking. A process that can't move quietly loses those people before it ever reaches them.

The firm runs leaner and faster than the legacy search model. What it doesn't cut is the discretion and judgment that retained search exists to provide in the first place.

What We Actually Do

Talent Strategy. The roadmap for who you need, when, and why: tied to your stage and growth plan, whether that's funded, bootstrapped, or somewhere in between.

Executive Retained Search. Discretion-first search for the roles that decide whether your next eighteen months work, with sourcing that reaches the people who aren't applying anywhere.

AI Change Management. Helping your existing team adopt AI tools and workflows: the unglamorous, high-leverage work most companies skip until it's a crisis.

Career Academy. Structured career guidance for the candidates on the other side of the table, because a healthy talent market needs to have real support.

The AI Layer

Every company we work with is asking a version of the same question: which of our roles and workflows should be redesigned around AI, and which absolutely should not be? That's not a question a generic recruiter or a generic consultant can answer, because answering requires understanding both the talent market and the operational reality of how these tools perform inside a growing company.

Most AI rollouts follow the same pattern. Buy the tool, send the Slack message, hope adoption happens. It usually doesn't, and not because the tool is bad. A new tool dropped into an old workflow doesn't change the workflow; it just adds a step. Real change means deciding what stops: which approvals disappear, which roles get redefined, which meetings end because the work that justified them is now automated. No platform makes that call for you.

Which is the whole point. "We use AI" is no longer a differentiator; nearly everyone says it. The differentiator is whether you've actually rebuilt the work around it, and whether the people doing that work were part of the redesign or just told about it afterward. That's a partner problem, not a software problem.

Built for Austin

We work with companies at every stage, from first hire to scaling team, and with the investors backing them across a portfolio. It's the stage where a single hire can make or break a quarter, and where most companies are too lean to have an internal recruiting function but too important to leave critical roles to chance. For VCs, it's the difference between a portfolio company that finds its next leader in time and one that doesn't.

Austin's startup community has grown fast. The infrastructure supporting it: the lawyers, the bankers, the recruiters, hasn't always grown with the same level of sophistication. We built People ATX to be that infrastructure for talent, specifically for this community.

Get the Free 2026 Talent Report

We've put together our 2026 Talent Report: a practical breakdown of how AI is reshaping hiring, workforce planning, and org design, with guidance for founders, operators, and the investors who back them, at any stage. It's free, and you'll get it by email when you sign up.

Let's Talk

We're not trying to be the biggest search firm in Austin. We're trying to be the one founders, and the investors who back them, trust when the role on the line is the one that matters most. If you're hiring, planning headcount for what's next, supporting a portfolio, or trying to figure out where AI fits into your org, we'd like to be part of that conversation.