How ezCater Cut Sourcing Time in Half With Juicebox

The Market Shifted, and So Did ezCater

For a while, recruiting was working exactly as expected. During the post-pandemic hiring boom, strong applicants were plentiful. Recruiting teams could rely on inbound pipeline, work through referrals, and still consistently find great talent.

Then the market started to change.

By 2023 and 2024, recruiting teams across the country were seeing the early signs. Candidate quality was becoming less predictable, application volume was growing harder to navigate, and more recruiter time was being pulled into reviewing applicants, identifying fraudulent candidates, and managing referrals just to find the people worth talking to.

ezCater saw where things were heading and decided not to wait. Instead of reacting to a noisier applicant pool, the team rebuilt its approach around proactive sourcing.

Sage Timoteo, Lead Recruiter, Tech & Product, and Brad Schiff, Senior Tech & Product Recruiter, have both been at ezCater for four years and helped shape that shift.

“I think sourcing-first is best. It protects our hiring managers' calendars and our own, and it keeps us strategic about who we reach out to and how we spend those conversations.”

What had worked in the previous talent market wasn’t going to be enough for what came next, so ezCater made an intentional shift toward a sourcing-first candidate exploration strategy to find better-aligned talent and keep pace with the company’s hiring needs.

Finding More of the Talent Traditional Search Misses

Before Juicebox, the ezCater team relied heavily on a manual sourcing platform. But those searches depended on filters and Boolean logic, which meant recruiters had to anticipate the right keywords and hope candidates described their experience using language that matched. That works well when titles and experience line up neatly, but specialized talent rarely fits a search quite so cleanly.

Juicebox takes a different approach, inferring relevance based on what recruiters are actually looking for and the experience embedded within candidate profiles. It can surface candidates across varying levels of alignment, giving the ezCater team a denser pool of relevant talent to evaluate without scrolling through pages of loosely matched profiles.

“If I’m looking for a Director of Product for an enterprise platform, a Boolean search is going to look for those specific terms. Juicebox understands what I’m actually looking for and can surface a Head of Product or Senior Manager whose experience and scope might make them a great fit for the role.”

It also gives the team more visibility into harder-to-find corners of the talent market. Someone may have an outdated online profile, for example, while maintaining a more current presence on a platform like GitHub. For a team competing for increasingly specialized product and technical roles, that broader view gives recruiters more places to start and more ways to find people they may otherwise have missed.

“Juicebox is actually inferring based on the text that I put and the actual experience embedded within people’s profiles. It actually ranks how strong of an inference it’s making based on text that isn’t necessarily a keyword match.”

Using Search to Map the Talent Market

For ezCater, Search is also a way to better understand where relevant talent exists. Instead of starting with a predetermined list of target companies, the team can use what they learn from each search to uncover new pockets of relevant talent and decide where to look next.

“I’ve found companies I wouldn’t have thought to look at and realized, ‘This isn’t the right person, but I can start here and find similar profiles that get me where I need to go.’”

Natural-language search also helps recruiters get sharper on the profile itself. Instead of translating a job description into a string of Boolean terms, they have to articulate the experience, context, and characteristics that would make someone successful in the role. Sage has found that process useful beyond the search itself:

“I think it makes you a better recruiter when you have to parse out in natural language what a role actually is doing.”

That clearer understanding helps recruiters refine their searches as they learn more about the market, while giving them a stronger grasp of the role when they start talking to candidates.

AI Agents Keep Pipeline Moving in the Background

While Search helps the ezCater team find relevant talent faster, Juicebox Agents give recruiters another way to keep sourcing moving when their attention is needed elsewhere. Over time, that extra capacity has become an integrated part of how the team works:

“The way we use it today is like having an admin assistant on the side.”

The team allocates Agents based on where additional sourcing capacity will have the most impact. If a recruiter is wrapping up several existing searches, they can put an Agent on a new req and start the following week with pipeline ready to review. If a search loses several finalists or an offer falls through, an Agent can help replenish the top of the funnel without requiring the recruiter to stop everything else.

“I like putting an Agent on a new req. If I’m still wrapping up a couple other searches, I can get an Agent started so I walk into the next week with a head start.”

Agents are especially useful when the talent pool is narrow:

“For some of those harder niche searches where the talent pool feels really small, that’s a great use for an Agent. It might only feed me five candidates at a time, but having that steady flow of highly aligned profiles is super helpful.”

That flexibility gives ezCater another way to keep pipeline moving across changing priorities and increasingly specialized searches.

“It allows us to handle a higher req load more seamlessly without losing the sourcing or personal touch that comes with recruiting.”

Sourcing Is Now Driving More Hires

The shift is already showing up in ezCater’s hiring outcomes. Brad estimates that sourced candidates made up roughly 5–10% of accepted offers when the company began its sourcing-first initiative. Today, that number is closer to 30–40%.

That growth reflects ezCater’s broader investment in sourcing as headcount needs have increased and applicant quality has become less predictable. Juicebox has become a primary driver helping feed the sourcing pipeline behind that strategy.

The productivity gains are just as significant.

“Building 50 to 75 sourced profiles on a weekly basis used to take about three hours of heads-down sourcing. With Juicebox, I can get to that same number in about an hour to an hour and a half.”

The team is also seeing a denser concentration of quality in those results. While recruiters may be reaching out to more people overall, Brad says a greater percentage of the candidates surfaced through Juicebox meet their quality bar.

“I'm doing more outreach overall, but I'm not having to do as much to get the same percentage of strong-fit candidates. The rate of candidates who meet the bar has gone up because of the alignment I'm getting, rather than just matching on keywords.”

That means sourcing can contribute more to ezCater’s hiring process without requiring a proportional increase in the time recruiters spend doing it.

A Sourcing Strategy Built for What Comes Next

ezCater’s sourcing-first strategy will continue to evolve as the business does. As the company builds new products and its hiring needs become more complex, the team will continue competing for specialized talent alongside companies looking for many of the same profiles.

Juicebox has helped make that strategy sustainable. The team has cut sourcing time by roughly 50%, can consistently build lists of 50–75 qualified profiles in about 1–1.5 hours, and has expanded to nine Agent seats as sourcing becomes a bigger part of how the team hires.

With a more reliable sourcing motion in place, ezCater has more control over who enters its pipeline and more capacity to focus on what happens once the right candidates are there.