How Numeral Scaled to 120 Employees with Hiring Managers Leading the Search

Building the Hiring Engine as a Fast-Growing Startup

As Numeral began to scale, hiring quickly became one of Sam’s biggest priorities as CEO and co-founder. The company was growing across engineering, sales, and operations, but there was no internal recruiting team to own the search.

For Sam, waiting to build one was not an option. Hiring was too important to wait, and he wanted the people closest to each role involved in defining what great talent looked like from the start.

“There’s like two things you have to do as a founder. The first is to set strategy and then second is to hire the best people possible.”

That meant Sam was personally sourcing candidates, calibrating on profiles, and helping hiring managers learn how to evaluate the market themselves. As hiring demand increased, however, the challenge became finding a way to extend that judgment across the company without requiring Sam to personally run every search.

“I didn’t have time to wait to get a recruiter in seat. So I decided, for now let’s just go do it ourselves, which is often what you have to do as a founder.”

Searching for a Better Way to Source

Before Juicebox, Sam’s sourcing process was fragmented. He personally searched for candidates through startup talent networks, while external recruiters provided additional coverage when needed.

As Numeral’s hiring needs grew, Sam started evaluating enterprise sourcing software that could give the team more direct access to talent. One legacy solution came with a minimum commitment of roughly $100,000.

The price was difficult to justify, particularly for a product that still did not give Sam the search flexibility he wanted.

“They told me it’s going to cost us $100k minimum to expand our plan - for tools that weren't even that good.”

That’s when he started exploring Juicebox as an alternative. Juicebox provided natural language search, more advanced filtering, and built-in outreach made it possible to source directly without taking on a large enterprise software commitment.

Sam started with just two or three seats. But instead of keeping them within a centralized recruiting function, he began giving Juicebox directly to the people making the hiring decisions.

That decision would become the foundation of Numeral’s hiring model.

Calibrating Hiring Managers on What Good Looks Like

Sam’s goal wasn’t to centralize sourcing around himself. It was to give hiring managers enough context and tooling to lead searches for their own teams.

So instead of translating requirements through layers of recruiters, Sam can sit directly with a hiring manager in Juicebox, review the same candidate pool, and calibrate on profiles in real time.

“We just sat in Juicebox - and I can say change this filter, or here’s why I’d reject this person. We’d go through it live.”

That shared workspace gives Sam visibility into how each team is approaching a search while helping hiring managers develop their own sourcing judgment.

The team then uses Juicebox’s advanced filters to turn that calibration into increasingly specific candidate pools. For some searches, that means targeting a defined set of companies where Numeral has seen strong talent.

One of his most-used examples is the preset for companies backed by tier-one venture firms.

“We like to hire from other Tier One VC backed startups - it’s a great filter, but it’s hard to paste in 500 companies myself.”

Instead of manually assembling hundreds of companies, Sam can encode the characteristics he associates with high-performing startup talent and give hiring managers a much broader starting point.

“It allows me to get a lot of reach. I do want to make sure I’m filtering on companies that have a high bar for talent and the presets help me identify them.”

For Sam, the real value of Juicebox came from the ability to turn an intuitive understanding of what makes someone successful at Numeral into something the rest of the organization can actually use.

Pairing Hiring Calibration with Agentic Sourcing

Numeral is now extending the same philosophy to Juicebox Agents.

The interest came directly from the hiring team. Sam’s Onboarding Manager went out of his way to request Agents be added to the company’s Juicebox plan, and teams have begun using them on active searches.

Rather than rewriting a brief or passing feedback through another person, they reviewed profiles together in Juicebox, adjusted the search, and trained the Agent against their company’s talent bar.

That workflow maps closely to how Sam thinks about recruiting leverage more broadly.

“If I can explain my calibration to the agent and have it do it for me - it keeps our team much more nimble to focus on other priorities.”

To date, Numeral’s two Juicebox Agents have generated 2,400+ approved candidates, creating a steady pipeline for interviews and hires.

Streaming Outreach to Interview

Once a search is calibrated, Numeral keeps candidate engagement inside the same workflow.

The team runs its sequences directly through Juicebox, with hiring managers able to move from finding candidates to reaching out without exporting profiles into another engagement tool. 

Sam approaches those messages much like other forms of outbound: concise, relevant, and easy for someone to act on.

Numeral also connects Juicebox with Ashby (their ATS of choice) to make that next step easier for candidates. Booking links can be embedded directly into outreach, giving someone the option to schedule a conversation immediately rather than waiting through another round of emails.

“We put booking links in, in the sequences as well. If you’re busy and you don’t miss a candidate’s response, they can grab time directly on your calendar.”

That direct path from sourcing to outreach has helped Numeral generate 300+ interested candidate responses across high-priority roles.

The Results

For Numeral, the challenge to keep hiring moving while the company was still small, scrappy, and scaling quickly.

By giving hiring managers the tools to source directly and extending their calibration through Juicebox Agents, Sam was able to build a meaningful candidate pipeline without waiting for a larger recruiting organization to be in place.

That approach has translated into measurable results:

• 120 employees reached before bringing on its first in-house recruiter

• 2,400+ high-quality candidates sourced by just two Juicebox Agents

• 300+ interested candidate responses generated across high-priority roles

• 1.6x more qualified candidates found compared with Numeral’s previous sourcing approach

Juicebox gave the Numeral team more leverage during a critical stage of growth, while keeping hiring managers closely involved in finding and evaluating the people who would ultimately join their teams.