How 1five Built an AI-Native Recruiting Agency with Juicebox

Standing Out in a Crowded Recruiting Market

For 1five founder Joel, building a successful agency comes down to results.

The firm operates in one of the most competitive corners of recruiting. They typically work closely with clients that are early-stage companies trying to build highly technical AI teams for the first time, while the candidates they want to hire are among the most sought-after people in the market.

And even when recruiters identify the right person, getting these candidate’s attention is becoming increasingly a difficult task. 

But when you’re running an agency, that challenge is a competitive advantage. His philosophy was: in a market where many agencies have access to similar talent, how do you actually reach candidates others cannot?

“You just have to have more than one modality. You can’t just LinkedIn message your way to success.”

Building a Multi-Modal Outreach Strategy

Traditional agency sourcing often depends heavily on a single professional network for both finding and contacting candidates. With the talent 1five recruits, that approach was becoming less effective. Candidates they are after often get a high volume of recruiter messages arriving every day.

That led Joel to adopt Juicebox as a competitive advantage. 

With Juicebox, their recruiters could still identify candidates, run automated email sequences, find phone numbers, and introduce SMS outreach when another channel failed to generate a response.

“The kinds of candidates that we tend to recruit and hire may be getting pinged multiple times a day... many of them may have LinkedIn accounts but completely ignore the messages that come inbound.”

Multi-modal outreach gave 1five more ways to turn a strong profile into an actual conversation. In a market where agencies increasingly have access to similar talent pools, how a recruiter reaches someone becomes part of the competitive advantage.

Using Agents to Consistently Hit the Client’s Quality Bar

Better outreach solved one side of the equation. The next challenge was maintaining quality as sourcing volume increased. Juicebox Agents became an increasingly important part of that workflow.

With the latest generation of Agents, Joel saw a noticeable improvement in both personalized messaging and candidate response rates.

“Just from the last like two months, I noticed a substantial increase in response rates and in the sort of quality of personalized messaging to candidates.”

His team now runs Juicebox Agents autonomously across active searches. Once calibrated to a client’s requirements, an Agent can continuously identify and engage candidates who meet the talent bar without requiring a recruiter to manually review every profile first.

They’ve found that pipeline to be remarkably consistent.

“I’ll log in pretty much every morning and have... one to three candidates who are interested in chatting with me about a role. And those are from Agents.”

Instead of spending each morning rebuilding the top of the funnel, Joel and his recruiters can start with interested candidates already waiting for a conversation.

“It’s less effort and less time for me and more calls.”

Giving Recruiters More Time to Differentiate

The additional leverage in sourcing Juicebox brings is also changing how 1five structures the recruiter role within their business. 

The goal is to enable each recruiter to work across more of the full hiring cycle. Agents can absorb more of the repetitive sourcing work, while recruiters focus on candidate conversations, client relationships, closing searches, and the strategic work surrounding each hire.

“Giving some of that workload to agents means that the recruiter can have more candidates at the same quality or better and spend more time in client-facing interactions, closing roles, selling candidates, that kind of thing.”

That model fits particularly well with how 1five serves early-stage companies. The team often works as an extension of the client itself, helping founders improve interview processes, become better interviewers, strengthen employer positioning, and ultimately close difficult candidates.

For highly specialized technical searches, that higher-touch work matters.

“It is comparable to executive search for ML / AI engineers right now.”

As more of the top-of-funnel work becomes automated, Joel and his team can spend more time delivering the white-glove experience that differentiates their agency experience for their clients.

The Results

For 1five, the advantage of leveraging Juicebox comes from combining better candidate access with more leverage for every recruiter.

Multi-modal outreach creates more opportunities to reach talent that ignores traditional recruiting messages, while Agents continuously build pipeline against each client’s quality bar. 

With Juicebox, their recruiters could now gain more time for the conversations and advisory work that ultimately move searches forward for earlier stage startup clients.

That approach has translated into measurable results:

• 66x ROI on 1five’s Juicebox investment in the past year

• 13 placements sourced through Juicebox in roughly 11 months

• 5–7 hours saved per week across the team through Juicebox Agents