How CircleCI Achieved a 42% Candidate Response Rate With Juicebox

Building a More Productive GTM Recruiting Engine

As CircleCI's Go-to-Market Recruiter, Matt Newlin has a lot on his plate. Between hiring account executives, sales managers, and customer success talent, he's typically juggling several searches at once. And with a lean recruiting team, his days are filled with sourcing, interview coordination, and everything else that goes into keeping the hiring process moving.

To keep pace with CircleCI's hiring needs, Matt needs a reliable way to find qualified candidates and get them interested in a conversation.

With Juicebox, he starts each morning with 50 candidates already sourced and ready for review. That consistent pipeline helps him spend more time engaging qualified talent, with his strategic account executive outreach achieving a 42% response rate.

Finding the Right Candidates, Not Just More Candidates

Before adopting Juicebox, CircleCI was already investing in outbound sourcing. Matt and his teammate had access to another sourcing platform, but while searches returned plenty of profiles, finding candidates who matched their requirements was taking more effort than Matt wanted. Outreach was also generating a reply rate of around 3%.

"It wasn't a lack of candidates by any means. It was a lack of quality candidates."

Matt knew the difference better targeting could make. He'd had an opportunity to demo Juicebox independently and was impressed by how precisely he could define his searches. When CircleCI began evaluating new sourcing tools, he and his teammate became two of Juicebox's biggest advocates.

With Juicebox, they could narrow their searches around the experience and qualifications they were actually looking for, giving them a stronger starting point for every new pipeline.

50 Candidates Ready Every Morning

Every morning at 8 a.m., Matt sits down to review the candidates his Juicebox Agents have sourced overnight.

"I can wake up in the morning, know 50 are going to be ready for me to review. It's unbelievable."

Of those 50 profiles, Matt typically approves 40 to 45 and moves them forward for outreach. That gives him a fresh pipeline to work from each day without having to start every search from scratch.

Setting up an Agent is quick, too. Matt typically starts with a job description, reviews the initial results, and makes adjustments. The entire calibration process takes him less than five minutes.

When a candidate isn't quite right, he leaves a brief note explaining why. That feedback helps his Agent refine its next round of sourcing, improving the quality of candidates over time.

"I can give it a yes, tap a quick note if they're a no, and it fixes the sourcing for the next day. As it gets smarter, the candidates get better and better. Not usually, every time."

Matt still decides which candidates move forward, but much of the initial discovery happens automatically. He blocks an hour each morning to review his Agents' results, though the process can take as little as 20 minutes. That leaves more room in his day for additional searches, candidate conversations, and the other responsibilities that come with recruiting.

Turning Better Sourcing Into a 42% Response Rate

Once Matt approves candidates, he moves them into Juicebox Sequences to start building relationships. He typically uses three-step outreach campaigns, combining Juicebox's AI writing capabilities with his own conversational style.

"I'll usually write the first message using your AI mixed with my language, and then the second two I just let y'all handle."

Matt likes to keep his messages short and personal, but he knows that a single email isn't always enough to get someone's attention. In some campaigns, he estimates that roughly half of his responses arrive after the final follow-up.

His strategic account executive outreach has achieved a 42% response rate, compared with the roughly 3% reply rate he previously experienced with CircleCI's former sourcing platform.

For Matt, having better-matched candidates and an easy way to follow up consistently means more opportunities to start conversations with the people he wants to hire.

More Time for the Work That Keeps Hiring Moving

Matt's responsibilities extend well beyond sourcing. He coordinates his own interviews, manages candidates in Greenhouse, and handles the administrative work that comes with supporting multiple open roles. With qualified candidates ready to review each morning, he has more flexibility to fit those responsibilities into his day.

"I can actually focus on the quality of sourcing versus just throwing numbers against the wind."

Juicebox's Greenhouse integration makes it easy to move candidates into the ATS, while Talent Insights helps Matt quickly research unfamiliar companies and identify relevant sales talent.

The results go beyond candidate engagement. In just two weeks, CircleCI made two hires through Juicebox, and the team has built a pipeline of 12 candidates for a particularly difficult-to-fill field engineering position, with more candidates progressing through the hiring process.

As new hiring needs come in, Matt can start building qualified pipeline almost immediately. With Agents consistently sourcing candidates and Sequences keeping outreach moving, Juicebox has become part of how CircleCI approaches every new search.

"Every role has a Juicebox project."