# Hire an AI Employee Browse the Marketplace and hire an AI employee for a specific role: a department specialist, a personal assistant, or a custom role you define from scratch. Hiring is free and instant. You land straight in the new employee's chat, and every skill, duty, and tool it starts with can be changed afterward from its dashboard. The Marketplace is one grid: your two personal assistants first, then a specialist for every department (Marketing, Sales, Support, HR, Operations), then Sistava's built-in mentor, then a Custom AI Talent card for building a role from nothing. Search by name, role, tagline, or connected tool, or open the Filters panel for Department, Level, and Tools. Click a card's photo to preview its full profile before deciding, or click Hire to skip straight to work. Hiring itself costs nothing. No credits are consumed by the act of adding someone to your workforce; credits are only spent when an employee actually does work for you. That separation matters because it means you can build out a full team shape first, department by department, and only pay for the requests you send them. The difference from just describing a task in a chat window is that hiring creates a standing employee with its own identity, memory, and default skill set, not a one-off answer. A department specialist arrives already carrying the skills and tools that role typically needs, so it can act immediately instead of you having to configure a blank agent before it can do anything useful. Custom AI Talent is the other end of that spectrum: it starts intentionally blank, with only basic research skills, so you build the exact role from its own dashboard when none of the pre-built templates fit. ## What Every Hire Starts With A department specialist arrives pre-configured with the skills, duties, and tool connections its role typically needs, so it can take on work the moment it's hired rather than sitting idle until you build it out. Personal assistants (Alice and Bob) are standalone and available on every plan, including Free, so the very first conversation on the platform never depends on a purchase. Everything a card ships with is a starting point, not a fixed configuration. From the employee's own dashboard after hiring, you can add or remove skills, change which tools it connects to, adjust its persona, and pick which AI model it runs on. Nothing about a marketplace template locks you into its defaults. ## How Many You Can Hire How many employees you can have hired at once is governed by your plan's employee limit, shown on the pricing page and enforced the moment you try to hire past it. Higher plans raise the ceiling; the highest plan removes it entirely. This limit counts total hired employees, not requests or credits. You choose how to spend your slots: a few specialists doing heavy work, or a wider bench covering more roles lightly. If you're at your limit, terminating an existing employee frees a slot for a new hire. ## How It Works **One grid, one click, then you land in their chat** Open the Marketplace from the workspace. Every hireable role appears in a single grid rather than separate team and individual sections, so browsing feels like scanning one roster instead of hunting through menus. Each card shows the employee's name and role, a department badge with its skill count, the tool icons it already connects to, and a Hire button. Clicking a card's photo opens its full profile, skills, duties, tools, and persona, so you can see exactly what you would be hiring before committing to it. Clicking Hire skips the preview and adds the employee to your workforce immediately; you land directly in its chat and can start delegating right away. New individual hires land in the Bench team by default, unassigned to any department, until you move them to a specific team from that team's Members tab. You can only have one active employee per named marketplace template at a time; to hire that same role again you terminate the existing one first. Custom AI Talent has no such limit and can be hired as many times as you want. ## Use Cases ### Standing up a department fast A solo founder opening a Sales pipeline for the first time hires the Sales specialist directly from the Marketplace instead of writing a role from a blank page. It arrives with department-relevant skills and tool connections already in place, so the first real conversation can be about the actual pipeline, not initial setup. ### Testing fit before committing a slot Before spending one of a limited number of plan employee slots, a user previews a candidate's full profile, skills, duties, tools, persona, by clicking its card photo, then only clicks Hire once it looks like the right fit for the work they have in mind. ### Building a role nothing in the catalog covers When a business need doesn't match any department specialist, a user hires Custom AI Talent, which starts intentionally blank, and configures its exact skill set, tools, and persona from its dashboard so the resulting employee matches the job precisely instead of approximating it. ### Replacing an employee that isn't working out A user unhappy with how a hired specialist is performing terminates it and hires the same marketplace template again fresh, resetting to the template's default configuration instead of trying to untangle accumulated custom settings. ## FAQ ### Does hiring an employee cost credits? No. Hiring is free and does not touch your credit balance. Credits are consumed only when an employee actually processes a request for you, so you can build out your full workforce shape before spending anything. ### Can I try an employee before hiring them? Yes. Click anywhere on a card's photo in the Marketplace to open its full profile, including its skills, duties, tools, and persona, before you decide to hire it. ### Can I hire the same role more than once? Not for a named marketplace template: only one active employee per template is allowed per workspace, so you'd terminate the existing one before hiring that role again. Custom AI Talent has no such limit and can be hired as many times as you need. ### What if none of the pre-built roles fit what I need? Hire the Custom AI Talent card, which starts blank aside from basic research skills, and build out its skills, duties, tools, and persona from its own dashboard. Or hire the closest matching specialist and adjust its configuration afterward. ### Where does a new hire show up after I click Hire? You land directly in the new employee's chat. Individual hires appear under the Bench team in the sidebar until you move them into a specific team from that team's Members tab. ## Where Hire an AI Employee fits Hire an AI Employee is part of Things you hire or set up. Browse a marketplace of pre-built AI agent roles and full teams, or build your own from scratch. Organize them into teams with leaders, set up your org chart, and onboard new hires in minutes. Every employee arrives configured and ready to deliver from day one. - [Things you hire or set up](/en/features/hire): A full workforce. Hired in seconds. ## Read the guide - [Guide: Hire an AI Employee](/en/guide/getting-started/marketplace) ## More in Fast Onboarding - [Interview Before Hiring](/en/features/hire/interview_employee): Chat with any employee template before you hire it, on the public marketplace pages or inside the app, to see how it thinks and communicates about your actual work. When you're convinced, say so in the conversation or click Hire; nothing is added to your team until you decide. - [Employee Builder](/en/features/hire/custom_employee): Employee Builder is the "Build Your Own" card in the Marketplace: instead of hiring a pre-built role, you start from a blank template and set the name, role, and persona yourself. The new hire starts with one skill, Research & Brief, and nothing else pre-assigned, so you add skills, duties, and tools from the Skills, Duties, and Tools tabs to match the exact job you need done. It is a Custom-plan feature; every other plan hires from the marketplace's pre-built roles instead. - [Personal Assistants](/en/features/hire/personal_assistants): Every account starts with a Personal Assistant already hired, ready to talk before you decide who else to bring on. No marketplace trip, no setup, no decision to make first. - [Get Started Through Conversation](/en/features/hire/employee_driven_onboarding): When you hire an AI employee, they land in your chat with a short greeting that names their role and what they handle, then ask what you need first. There is no setup wizard, no progress bar, and no settings panel to fill in before they can work. You customize name, persona, skills, and tools later from their dashboard, but none of that is required before the first message. - [Model Selection](/en/features/hire/model_selection): Every employee runs on a model you choose, not one fixed default. Switch models per employee from the AI Models page whenever a job calls for more reasoning power or a cheaper, faster response. - [Manage Employee Status](/en/features/hire/employee_state_lifecycle): Pause, resume, or let go of an AI employee without losing anything. Suspend an employee when you don't need them right now and bring them back exactly as you left them, or terminate one and keep their full chat history and work record in your Alumni list. Terminated employees stop counting against your plan's employee limit, and you can re-hire the same role later. - [Hire a Full Team](/en/features/hire/hire_full_team): Hire a complete pre-built team from the Marketplace in one click: every member configured, a leader assigned, and sprint planning ready to start. Or build a custom team from your existing hires, pick a leader, and set it up yourself. Either way, you talk to one leader and they coordinate the rest. - [Keep Former Team Members](/en/features/hire/alumni_team): When you let an employee go, they don't disappear. Sistava moves them into your Alumni list, where their chat history and work stay intact and readable. If you need them back, one click restores them to active with everything they knew still in place. - [Marketplace](/en/features/hire/marketplace): The Marketplace is where you browse and hire AI employees: two personal assistants, a specialist for every department (Marketing, Sales, Support, HR, Operations), and a Custom AI Talent card if none of the pre-built roles fit. Click a card's photo to preview its skills, duties, tools, and persona before you commit, then click Hire to add it to your workforce and land straight in its chat. Hiring is free; you only spend credits when an employee does work. - [Employee Avatar Upload](/en/features/hire/employee_avatar_upload): Upload a custom profile photo for any AI employee straight from their Profile tab, replacing the default generated avatar. JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP files up to 5 MB are accepted, and the change takes effect immediately. The photo appears everywhere that employee shows up: chat, the org chart, the virtual office, notifications, and task cards. Any member of your workspace can change it, not only the person who hired that employee. - [Multiple Workspaces](/en/features/hire/multi_tenancy): Create additional workspaces under the same login, each with its own AI employees, conversations, training data, billing, and collaborators. Nothing crosses a workspace boundary by default, so a separate client, business, or department stays fully isolated. Your plan sets how many workspaces you can create, and you switch between them without signing out. - [Academy Live Sessions](/en/features/hire/academy_live_sessions): Learn how to put an AI employee to work in a live session with an Applied AI Engineer, tailored to your business. Sessions run about an hour, one on one or in a small group, and walk through the same curriculum as the free Academy course. Free for founders, one hundred dollars per session otherwise. ## Explore - [Every feature](/en/features) - [Hire an AI employee](/en/market) - [Pricing](/en/pricing)