How an AI-native company actually hires right now

Hiring hasn’t worked the same way in years, and most companies haven’t updated for it. Job descriptions test for skills that no longer predict who succeeds. Interviews screen for habits that used to matter and now get in the way. Filling a role isn’t the hard part anymore. Figuring out what a team needs to be capable of is.
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Jonathan Durnford-Smith, Head of Talent at Synthesia, the AI video platform, previously of Google DeepMind and QuantumBlack, walks through what that looks like in practice. He’ll cover why he treats every hire as capital allocation rather than a backfill, how Synthesia rewrote its criteria across teams to prioritize product thinking, customer empathy, and problem definition over pure execution, and why he’s done away with “culture fit” as a hiring signal.
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Jessica Zwaan, Leapsome’s VP of People and Operations, will share how this plays out at a company that didn’t start out AI-native: where Jonathan’s approach holds up at different company sizes, what it demands from a People team structurally, and where these principles meet a more traditional org chart.
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We will discuss:

• Why recruiting should be treated as building a company’s capabilities, not filling open seats, and what changes when talent teams act as strategic partners instead of order-takers
• How to rewrite hiring criteria as AI changes what the job actually requires, and why Jonathan revisits his bar across the business at least every six months
• What to test for in interviews instead of pure execution, and why “culture fit” gets replaced with alignment on values and working style
• What changes in onboarding and team structure when new hires are expected to work alongside AI from day one

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