How ElevenLabs Sourced 20+ Hires While Raising the Talent Bar

Building a More Intentional Sourcing Strategy

When Adam Earles joined ElevenLabs' talent operations team about six months ago, the talent team had around 12 people. Today, the talent team has more than tripled in size as ElevenLabs continues its rapid growth, with Talent Partners spread across Europe and North America, plus the Middle East and Asia, and hiring across EMEA, North America, LATAM and APAC.

“Up until now, it has been just go, go, trying to keep up with the rest of the pace and the growth of the company.”

With the foundational hires in place, the talent team is now putting more structure around quality, with speed as the underlying continual thread.

That shift is already showing up across the talent function. The ElevenLabs talent team is rebuilding its interviewer training program, setting up quality of hire and hiring manager experience tracking through regular surveys, and embedding Talent Partners more deeply with the hiring managers they support.

The next step was bringing that same intentionality to sourcing. 

Their Talent Partners needed a consistent way to reach the candidates who meet ElevenLabs' hiring bar, and a way to make room for it in a day already full of inbound.

Finding the Candidates Who Never Apply

ElevenLabs has no shortage of applicants. Its employer brand brings in a steady stream of inbound, and referrals drive 35 to 40% of hires.

However, for specialized roles, ElevenLabs found that the strongest candidates were often the ones who never applied. Reaching them required dedicated sourcing time, which was hard to find with inbound filling most of the day.

Juicebox is now the first place ElevenLabs Talent Partners go when they source, especially for senior go-to-market roles, research, software engineering, and AI and automation engineering. Adam says it has made the team's searches more targeted and intentional.

"It's given the team a really intuitive and more in-depth way to source, especially for niche roles."

This precision has allowed ElevenLabs to expand into new regions, where they have fewer established talent networks to draw from. Juicebox enables the team to map those markets, understand who is available, and build targeted pipelines around the profiles they want to reach.

Sourcing that Runs in the Background

ElevenLabs also leverages Juicebox Agents to keep sourcing moving without adding to the team's workload. When a new role opens, an Agent can run a targeted search alongside inbound, surfacing candidates in the background while the talent team focuses on the rest of the hiring process.

That model still keeps Talent Partners firmly in the loop. On one tough search, a Talent Partner set especially strict criteria, then calibrated the Agent by approving or rejecting the candidates it surfaced. Even against that high bar, the Agent reached a 63% approval rate.

"His dedicated Agent, which he called his 'cracked engineer Agent,' has a 63% hit rate, which is insane given the insanely strict criteria."

The team started with one Agent per Talent Partner, and they’ve already asked for more. 

“I could easily use 15 Juicebox Agents myself. In my opinion, anyone not using an Agent doesn’t know how powerful they can be.”
– Ben Summersgill, Talent at ElevenLabs

That level of enthusiasm reflects how sourcing is starting to fit into the team’s day-to-day work. ElevenLabs is building toward a model where proactive sourcing runs alongside inbound from the beginning.

Expanding Who Can Source

Juicebox has also given the talent team a new way to support hiring managers. When one hiring manager needed to move quickly on urgent roles, the talent team gave them access so they could run a search themselves. That search identified strong candidates and led to two hires.

"Someone that didn't have to have loads of background knowledge … was able to get into the system, use it, and then it actually resulted in some hires."

Hiring managers know their teams better than anyone, and Juicebox gave this one a way to put that knowledge to work quickly. The talent team still played an important role around the search, bringing the market view, helping sharpen what good looks like, and putting the right tool in the hiring manager’s hands when speed mattered.

It’s a great example of the kind of partnership ElevenLabs is building across the business, with Talent Partners staying close to the teams they support and adapting how they help based on what each search needs.

Raising the Bar as ElevenLabs Scales

Earlier in ElevenLabs’ growth, the immediate challenge was keeping pace with the speed of the business. As the talent team has scaled alongside it, the company has more room to invest even more deeply in how it hires, with proactive sourcing becoming a consistent part of the model.

Juicebox supports that next stage by helping proactive sourcing stay in motion as ElevenLabs grows, including:

• 63% candidate lead approval rate from Agents 

• 20+ hires made with minimal enablement

• 15 to 20 minutes to calibrate a new Agent

For Adam and team, Juicebox has become an integral part of their sourcing motion.

"If I was a recruiter, Juicebox would be the first thing that I'd be setting up and configured as soon as I get a brand new role. It’s their own dedicated AI sourcer in their pocket."

ElevenLabs is already proving how quickly it can scale. The talent team is now building a sourcing model that helps every function be more deliberate about who joins next, and gives Talent a stronger role in shaping the teams behind the company’s next stage of growth.