How april Scaled Outbound Recruiting for Hundreds of Tax Season Hires

Building Enough Outbound Capacity for Tax Season

april builds tax planning and filing software, with a recruiting team that supports both its full-time workforce and the seasonal tax professionals it brings on for tax season. Lauren Wilganowski, Recruiting Manager at april, leads the three-person US recruiting team responsible for hiring across engineering, customer success, legal, finance, and seasonal tax preparation.

Every Q4, that team’s workload shifts dramatically. april needs to build a seasonal workforce of hundreds of tax preparers, almost entirely through outbound sourcing, while full-time hiring continues in parallel.

The math gets demanding quickly, during the peak hiring push, the team extends six or seven seasonal offers a week. And because experienced CPAs and Enrolled Agents rarely come through inbound, nearly every one of those hires starts with the recruiting team going out and finding them.

“Pretty much our inbound pipeline for the seasonal staff roles is non-existent. Me and my team are having to source to get any type of candidates in the pipeline.”

That meant the team needed a way to create significantly more outbound capacity without spending every available hour manually sourcing, sending messages, and following up.

When the Outreach Math Stopped Adding Up

Lauren had first come across Juicebox at her previous startup and kept it on her radar. At april, the opportunity was clear: Juicebox Agents could help carry the volume of seasonal hiring while giving the team more room to keep full-time searches moving.

Before the rollout, Lauren spent plenty of time thinking about how the team could possibly reach its seasonal target with its existing workflow. The challenge was capacity. Every candidate had to be found and contacted, unanswered Hey messages needed follow-up, and the team still had full-time roles to fill.

“I don’t think there’s enough hours in a day or enough recruiter capacity to be able to hit our target without having some type of automated platform that we can source in, and then additionally an agent that’s able to source and sequence while we’re not looking at it.”

Lauren says those questions caused “a lot of sleepless nights” before Juicebox went live. 

Today, she says the team is on track, if not slightly ahead, of its seasonal hiring target and does not think they would be there without Juicebox.

Agents on the Volume, Recruiters on the Conversations

April’s Recruiting team supplements their work with three Juicebox Agents.

Two continuously source seasonal tax preparers against a specific profile: US-based CPAs or Enrolled Agents with five or more years of experience handling mid-to-complex returns. Together, those Agents surface roughly 50 candidates per day, with outreach sent automatically on behalf of the recruiting team.

Lauren uses the third Agent for april’s harder-to-fill full-time searches, including senior full-stack engineers in New York City. The team still sources manually every day, but Juicebox enables them to keep building pipeline when their attention is moved elsewhere.

“We’re in it every single day, and then if there’s an off day that we’re not in it, we have agents that are running for us and doing outreach and sourcing on our behalf.”

The same continuity carries into follow-up. Juicebox keeps outreach moving across multiple steps automatically, so recruiters can move on without losing candidates who need a second, third, or fourth touch.

When candidates do respond, Juicebox drafts replies in the recruiter’s voice for them to quickly review and send.

“Juicebox does a really good job of learning how I talk to candidates and then drafting that response. I just have to quickly read it and then I send it, which saves me so much time.”

When the Recruiter Gets Cold Called

Within the team’s first few weeks of using Juicebox at full capacity, that background outreach produced a result Lauren had never experienced before.

An Agent had reached out to a seasonal tax preparer. A couple of hours later, Lauren’s phone rang.

“I got a cold call from a candidate and she said, ‘Hey, Lauren, I just got an email from you about an open role at april. I’d love to chat about it.’ And I was like, I have no idea who this person is.”

Lauren searched the candidate’s name in Juicebox, saw the outreach that had gone out earlier that day, and screened her on the spot.

The candidate moved through april’s process, received an offer, and is joining for tax season in January. She became the team’s first confirmed Juicebox hire after only a few weeks of full-capacity usage.

It was a tangible example of what Lauren had hoped Juicebox would do: keep creating opportunities in the background while recruiters stepped in when their judgment and conversations mattered most.

Building More Than This Season’s Pipeline

The added capacity also gives Lauren more room to improve how the recruiting function operates.

Rather than spending all of her available time on high-volume sourcing, she can focus on recruiting analytics, internal systems, candidate messaging, and harder-to-fill full-time searches like customer success and engineering.

“I can focus on actual internal tools and systems that will better me and my team versus just spending time manually sourcing and talking to candidates.”

As april heads deeper into its busiest hiring season, Juicebox is helping the team build pipeline at a scale that would be difficult to sustain manually, while maintaining april's high standards for tax professionals. Every candidate must hold CPA or EA credentials, have an active PTIN, bring at least five years of tax preparation or review experience, and have experience preparing or reviewing at least 85 complex returns per season.

Even with those specific requirements, the team is making strong progress toward its seasonal hiring goals:

• Hundreds of seasonal tax preparers targeted for this season

• ~50 qualified candidates per day sourced by two Juicebox Agents

• 6 hires sourced through Juicebox in 2 months

• On track, if not slightly ahead, of the team’s seasonal hiring target

“It frees up our time that we’re not just doing recruiting high volume. We’re able to actually make process improvements for our team, not only for now, but for years to come as well.”

For april’s three-person recruiting team, Juicebox helps keep the seasonal pipeline moving while the recruiters stay focused on the conversations, decisions, and improvements that need their attention.