Comparing two similar specialists
Interview both a Content Marketer and a Copywriter template with the same brief and read the two drafts side by side before deciding which one joins your team.
Interview Before Hiring
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.
Hiring from a template today, and hiring from a template after a real conversation with it, are different decisions. Interview Before Hiring lets you start that conversation first. Click Interview on any marketplace card, on the public site or inside the workspace, and you get a live chat with that exact role: same persona, same skills, same tools, same reasoning. You ask it to draft something, plan something, or explain how it would approach a task you actually have, and you judge the fit from the answer instead of from a bullet list of capabilities.
The candidate is not a scripted demo. It is a real employee runtime instance running with the template's full configuration, just flagged as a candidate instead of a hire. That is why it can hold a genuine back-and-forth: draft a real email, work through a real brief, or push back on a real assumption, the same way it would after you hire it.
The difference from just reading a profile card is that a profile lists what an employee can do; an interview shows what it does. Two employees can carry identical skill lists and still write, plan, and prioritize differently, and that gap only shows up once you give one of them an actual instruction. Interviewing also costs nothing against your plan while you decide: candidate employees do not count toward your workspace's hire limit, so you can run several interviews in parallel without spending a hiring slot on someone you end up rejecting.
Deciding is just as low-friction as starting. Say something like "you're hired" in the chat and the candidate recognizes the confirmation and finalizes its own hire, or click the Hire button if you'd rather not phrase it in chat. Either path runs through the same plan-limit check, team assignment, and default setup a normal hire gets. Not convinced? Reject the session and the candidate is gone, no employee left behind to clean up. Changed your mind later? Reopen a rejected session and pick the conversation back up.
Judge The Work, Not The Description
A marketplace card can tell you an employee has a research skill or a writing tool connected. It can't tell you whether its writing sounds like your brand, or whether its research goes three levels deep or stops at the first source. An interview answers that directly: give the candidate the same instruction you'd give a hire, on the same kind of task you actually need done, and read the result.
This matters most when you're choosing between similar-looking roles, say two marketing specialists with overlapping skill lists, or deciding whether a generalist or a domain specialist template fits a task you have right now. The conversation makes the difference visible before it costs you a hiring decision.
Zero Commitment Until You Say So
Interview candidates are excluded from your plan's employee limit, so opening a conversation never uses up a hiring slot. You can run interviews with several templates side by side, compare how each one responds to the same brief, and only commit a slot to the one you actually choose.
There's no separate cleanup step either. Reject a candidate and it disappears with the session; there's no half-hired employee sitting on your Bench that you have to remember to remove.
How It Works
A real employee runtime, flagged as a candidate until you say yes
Clicking Interview on a template creates a candidate: a normal employee instance built from that template's skills, duties, tools, and persona, marked internally so it stays out of your team lists and your hire count while it's unresolved. Message it like you would message any employee; there's no separate demo mode or reduced feature set.
Inside the app, the Marketplace's kanban view tracks every interview by status: To Interview for a candidate you haven't messaged yet, In Interview once you've sent the first message, then Hired or Rejected once you decide. Re-opening the Interview button on a template you're already talking to resumes the same session instead of starting a duplicate.
Confirming the hire, whether by chat confirmation or the Hire button, runs the exact hire path a normal hire uses: the plan's employee-limit check, assignment to the Bench team, and default schedule setup. A rejected candidate is removed; nothing partially hired is left in your workspace.
Use Cases
Testing tone and voice fit
Ask a candidate to draft a customer email or a social post in your brand's voice, and see whether it needs heavy editing or already sounds right, before it becomes a permanent hire.
Checking depth on a real task
Hand a candidate a research or planning task you actually need done and see how far it goes on its own, rather than trusting a skill list that says 'research' without showing the output.
Evaluating from the public site pre-signup
Start a conversation with a template on the public marketplace pages to judge the fit before creating an account, then hire it once you sign up.
FAQ
Does starting an interview count against my employee limit?
No. Interview candidates are explicitly excluded from the plan's employee count, so you can interview as many templates as you want without spending a hiring slot until you confirm the hire.
How do I actually hire the candidate I'm interviewing?
Either tell them so in the conversation, something clear like "you're hired," and the candidate recognizes it and finalizes its own hire, or click the Hire button on the session. Both routes run the same plan-limit check and team setup a normal hire gets.
What happens if I decide against a candidate?
Reject the interview session. The candidate employee is removed; nothing stays behind on your Bench or Alumni list. If you change your mind later, a rejected session can be reopened and the conversation picked back up.
Can I interview before I even sign up?
Yes. The public marketplace pages let you start an interview with any template without an account. Inside the app's Marketplace, interviews run from the same kanban view alongside employees you've already hired.
Is the candidate a real employee or a scripted demo?
It's a real employee runtime instance built from the template's actual skills, duties, tools, and persona, just flagged as a candidate. It reasons and responds the same way it would after being hired.
Where Interview Before Hiring fits
Interview Before Hiring 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: A full workforce. Hired in seconds.
Read the guide
More in Fast Onboarding
- 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.
- Employee Builder: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.