How Chalk Filled 40+ Roles in One Quarter Without Lowering the Bar

The Need to Scale at a Hypergrowth Pace

When Mackenzie Martinez joined the team, Chalk had 30 employees and a growth plan that demanded far more. Demand for its AI data platform was accelerating, and the company needed to nearly quadruple its team within the year without compromising on who it hired.

But that kind of scaling does not happen on its own. Recruiting Manager Mackenzie and her team had to build the machine that finds, evaluates, and closes that much talent. Every recruiter needed to source roughly 200 candidates per week, in service of what Mackenzie describes as the highest talent bar she has ever worked against.

"In my career I have had to build very technical, high caliber teams, but the talent bar at Chalk for sure takes the cake."

However, she knew the company's existing workflow could not carry that growth mandate. Traditional recruiting software surfaced plenty of people from well-known companies, but it could not answer the questions Chalk's recruiters actually cared about.

For example, had someone worked at a startup while it was still early? Were they there during the hypergrowth period, or did they join after the curve flattened?

Answering those questions manually was taking up hours of every recruiter's day. The team needed a sourcing engine that could keep pace with the growth plan without consuming its entire week.

Translating Chalk's Talent Bar Into Search

Mackenzie turned to Juicebox to build the sourcing engine the growth plan demanded.

What convinced her was how closely the platform matched the way a recruiter actually works. She has lived inside recruiting tools her whole career, and she felt Juicebox gave the team a more precise way to translate Chalk's talent bar into search criteria.

"You could tell Juicebox wasn’t just made by engineers who have never touched a recruiting interface or spent time understanding the pains of hiring. It's clear there’s consistent one-to-one time with recruiters to better understand how they would actually use the system."

That fit mattered because Chalk's requirements were anything but generic. The team's first move with Juicebox was turning the standards in recruiters' heads into criteria a search could actually execute.

Using nested filters, Mackenzie and her recruiters pinpointed people who had worked at early-stage companies during their exact hypergrowth window, rather than treating every employee from the same company as equally relevant.

"With Juicebox, we were able to find candidates  that worked at early-stage hypergrowth companies during that exact growth curve."

The same approach allowed Chalk to find candidates from adjacent backgrounds that performed well in its environment, including quantitative firms and former founders.

"It really opened our pool up. It enabled us to land talent from a diverse set of pools: hypergrowth companies, solid quant firms, and beyond"

Instead of shrinking the talent pool to maintain quality, the team could broaden it around the characteristics that actually mattered.

Turning Chalk's Hiring Priorities Into Better Searches

As Juicebox became part of the team's daily workflow, Chalk's recruiters used search as a way to express full recruiter judgment. They could stack-rank criteria by priority, making it clear which signals were essential and which were nice to have.

"The ability to stack rank your priorities for the criteria is incredibly helpful."

The team also uses Juicebox's company discovery capabilities to expand beyond the organizations already on a recruiter's radar. Starting from companies they know produce strong talent, recruiters can generate related companies and uncover relevant pools they may not have considered otherwise.

"It's great for our team to find relevant companies that we’re unfamiliar with, but in adjacent domains."

That combination of precision and discovery meant no more manually assembled target-company lists. Every new role stayed anchored to Chalk's hiring bar without the busywork of maintaining them by hand.

Reverse-Engineering Chalk's Talent Strategy

Some of the team's sharpest sourcing moves go well beyond titles and company backgrounds.

Mackenzie and her recruiters look for deeply technical candidates using signals like competitive programming experience, from top Advent of Code finishers to olympiad medalists surfacing niche indicators directly instead of hoping they show up in a conventional profile search.

"Those are especially the types of people that we love to interview, and Juicebox has made it seamless. "

With Similar Profiles, the team works backward from the people it already knows are great. By loading in recent hires, recruiters uncover patterns that were never part of the original search criteria. In one case, the team noticed several strong hires shared Rust experience, handing everyone a brand-new signal to source against.

"It's been able to help us uncover the common denominators between those who perform well in our interview process."

At the same time, Chalk uses its ATS connection to exclude people the team has already evaluated, keeping new searches focused on genuinely net-new talent even as the company processes a high volume of candidates.

Enabling Every Recruiter with a Team of Agents

As hiring accelerated, Chalk also began using Juicebox Agents to create more sourcing capacity across the talent team.

The company currently has an eight-person recruiting organization and uses Agents across both high-priority and evergreen searches. Each of Chalk's recruiters is given an Agent and the flexibility to deploy it where additional pipeline will have the greatest impact.

"The Juicebox Agent yields really great results. Each recruiter gets an agent: take it,run with it, and deploy it as you deem fit."

For example, with evergreen roles such as forward-deployed engineering, Agents can continuously surface candidates in the background. On more urgent searches, Agents can also provide another way to expand the pool quickly without compromising the criteria recruiters have already established.

That additional leverage became especially valuable as Chalk's hiring volume increased.

Rather than needing to expand recruiting support at the same pace as company headcount, Chalk could now get more capacity from the recruiters already in place and redirect more of their time toward the rest of the hiring experience rather than solely on the top of the funnel. For Mackenzie herself, the change was concrete.

"I was not able to tackle any of the broader business projects that I wanted to. That would have had to be an after-hours, 8 PM type situation. Now I'm able to fit that within the actual work day. 

The Results

For Mackenzie and team, the goal went beyond sourcing more profiles. The recruiting team needed to support Chalk through an extraordinary period of growth while holding the talent bar and building a candidate experience worth talking about.

By cutting hours of manual top-of-funnel work, their team was able to do exactly that:

• 40+ hires in a single fiscal quarter

• 30 to 100+ employees in roughly one year, delivering the growth plan on schedule

• 50% reduction in daily sourcing time, from approximately six hours to three

Sourced candidates also now account for more than half of Chalk's offers.

"More than 50% of our offers were sourced, and I would dare to say almost all of those are from Juicebox."

Recruiters could work on onboarding programs, improve interview processes, train new interviewers, build better candidate collateral, and spend more time with candidates during onsite interviews. Work that previously would have fallen into nights and weekends could now happen during the workday.

"Juicebox made our team much  more efficient. It's enabled us to focus on the things that matter, like candidate experience. I think it's really the reason why we were able to hire 43 people within a quarter, which is just crazy for a startup at any stage."

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Chalk is hiring across engineering, GTM, operations, and beyond. Check out their open roles at chalk.ai/careers.