Connor Carion, Talent Operations, and Justin Shotwell, Recruiting @ Render
Reduction in sourcing time
Average email open rate
Fewer recruiter screens per hire
Render is a modern cloud platform that helps developers and teams build, deploy, and scale applications without the complexity of managing infrastructure. As Render grows from roughly 150 employees toward 200+, its talent team is building the recruiting infrastructure to scale alongside the business.
Highlighted Juicebox features
Agents
Sequencing
ATS Integration
Render’s Next Stage of Growth
Render builds accessible and reliable cloud infrastructure that helps software teams ship products quickly and at scale. After a Series C extension in February, Render set ambitious hiring goals to keep pace with its growth.
Its talent team needed a recruiting function that could scale alongside the business.
Historically, sourcing wasn’t a major part of Render’s recruiting strategy, and with a lean talent team focused on hiring quickly, the company utilized referrals, partnered with third-party agencies, and did some traditional sourcing through a legacy platform.
Connor Carion, Talent Operations, and Justin Shotwell, Recruiting, saw an opportunity to change that. They wanted better control over the team's pipeline, especially as hiring expanded past engineering into first-in-function leaders across marketing, sales, and finance.
“As our brand and talent strategy matures and scales, we do see a large need to build out a strategic sourcing function. And these days, you have to be using AI to compete for the top talent.”
Inbound applications were also increasingly affected by fraud, and specialized roles require Render to proactively find the relatively small pool of people who meet its hiring bar.
That’s when Connor, Justin, and the rest of their talent team started looking for alternatives to help them bring this vision to life.
Why Render Chose Juicebox
Rather than going with the loudest recommendation, the team ran a structured evaluation.
They gathered input from their networks, trialed the leading options, and scored each one across six criteria: UI and ease of use, search speed, candidate quality, data accuracy, complex search capabilities, and integrations with Render's existing tech stack.
Juicebox consistently came out ahead:
“We scored Juicebox against our second option, and Juicebox consistently scored higher across the board. There was pretty much overwhelming conviction that it was the superior option.”
The experience throughout the trial reinforced that decision. The Juicebox team provided hands-on training and support, while the product made candidate research faster and easier than the traditional sourcing tool workflow the team was used to
Render was also encouraged by how quickly Juicebox continued to ship new capabilities:
“We had a lot of faith that you guys could grow into an even better solution for what we’re going to need over time. In the last couple months, you’ve very much met that expectation.”
For Render, Juicebox could support the sourcing function it needed today while continuing to grow alongside its recruiting strategy.
More Sourcing Capacity With AI Agents
With Juicebox in place, the team began making sourcing a more consistent part of Render’s recruiting motion.
Each recruiter has two Juicebox Agents they can allocate based on which pipelines need the most support. Once calibrated around the right criteria, Agents give recruiters additional sourcing capacity without requiring them to manually execute every search.
That flexibility is especially useful as Render’s hiring needs evolve.
Recruiters can put additional sourcing capacity behind the roles that need it most while staying focused on candidate relationships and the rest of the hiring process.
Once the team finds the right candidates, Juicebox helps turn them into pipeline. Render has built about 25 sequences with hundreds of candidates currently active in them, and the team A/B tests its outreach rather than sending and hoping.
But for Render, the goal isn’t to just send more messages, it’s to find the right candidates faster:
“We have a really high bar for talent, and we need to make sure that we’re effectively wrapping our arms around those people in a lot of different ways.”
A More Connected Workflow With ATS Integration
Building a stronger sourcing function also means connecting it to the recruiting systems the team already uses.
The Ashby integration has become part of how Render kicks off new roles. Recruiters can search their ATS from Juicebox and apply the criteria they’re looking for before going to market.
“Instead of having to go through 900 applicants, Juicebox flushes up the best seven or so that meet our criteria. That’s a massive time saver.”
That workflow helps Render identify qualified applicants faster and surface candidates already in its ATS. Recruiters can also see previous candidate history, avoid double-contacting people, and automatically move responding candidates into the appropriate ATS stage.
Render has spent years building candidate relationships across every channel it runs. Those relationships are now the starting point for a new search, not something the team has to rediscover.
A Platform That Grows with Render
Part of what gave Render confidence in Juicebox was the pace at which the product was evolving. And as its recruiting strategy grows more sophisticated, so does its vision for what AI can take on.
The team wants AI that understands more of Render’s recruiting context: its talent bar, what strong candidates look like across functions, who the team has engaged before, and what it has learned from past searches.
That vision is already starting to take shape. In the week between our conversation with Render and writing this story, Juicebox launched Agent 4.0, bringing more context intelligence into Agents.
They can now draw from connected recruiting tools and organizational memory, using information from past hires and feedback to better understand what teams are looking for and calibrate searches accordingly.
“All of these things are doable. A human can do these things. It just used to take weeks. And if we can build the ecosystem correctly, you can make it happen in hours.”
Render’s recruiting function will continue to evolve as the company grows, and Juicebox will evolve alongside it. For the team, that’s where the opportunity gets bigger: using AI to give recruiters more context and capacity to operate strategically.
Becoming an AI-Native Team
Render is already seeing the impact of that shift in both hiring outcomes and recruiter capacity.
One recruiter has made three sourced hires through Juicebox while improving their recruiter screen-to-hire ratio from 24:1 to 11:1, meaning they now conduct less than half as many recruiter screens for every hire.
“That’s a HUGE win for my calendar and for the quality of our candidate funnel.”
The impact on sourcing time has been just as significant. Another recruiter estimated that sourcing work that previously took 20 to 25 hours every two weeks now takes roughly five to seven hours, a reduction of around 70%.
“Juicebox allows our recruiters to effectively build pipeline through sourcing while still doing all of the other really busy parts of a recruiter’s job.”
That capacity is helping Render make a larger organizational shift.
Sourcing has gone from playing a limited role in its hiring strategy to becoming an intentional internal function, giving the team more control over how it builds pipeline as the company grows.
Render gives software teams the infrastructure to scale their products. And with Juicebox, its talent team is building the recruiting infrastructure to scale right alongside them.
