How Lovable is building a sourcing engine for hypergrowth

Growing fast without lowering the talent bar

Lovable has a talent-dense team built around high velocity, extreme ownership, and people who care deeply about their craft. Even as the company has grown rapidly, that philosophy has stayed central to how it thinks about hiring.

When Lydia Price joined to lead the sourcing team, Lovable was around 60 people. Today, it is over 6X that, and the company continues to scale. The dedicated sourcing function behind that growth is still relatively new.

The challenge is maintaining the same talent bar while the company builds at extraordinary speed.

That has required Lovable to become more deliberate about how it hires. Lydia’s team has invested heavily in recruiting processes, hiring manager calibration, and a sourcing function designed to find people who may never enter the inbound funnel on their own.

As Lovable’s recruiting needs have become more sophisticated, Juicebox has become the platform the team is building its sourcing motion around.

A great brand still needs a good sourcing strategy 

A company with a brand and product as strong as Lovable’s generates plenty of inbound interest. 

“We’re looking for a very specific kind of talent.”

For Lovable, proactive sourcing is less about adding another candidate channel and more about taking control of the talent bar. That’s why Lovable has invested in a sourcing team focused on pipelines and long-term relationships with hard-to-reach talent.

Jeremie D'Espagnac, one of Lovable’s sourcers, describes Lovable itself as “more of a mindset and a way of working.” A title and a few matching keywords rarely tell the team enough to know whether someone will thrive there.

“It’s not just, you’re an engineer at Uber, you’ve been there for four years, you’re amazing. What have you done before? What are you doing outside of work? What are you learning right now? What is your GitHub looking like?”

That level of evaluation means going beyond company names and job titles to understand what someone has actually built, how they think, and whether they’ve operated in environments that resemble Lovable’s pace and complexity.

Outbound sourcing with Juicebox gives Lovable a more intentional starting point. Instead of waiting for the right person to find a job posting, the team can identify people who match its talent bar and start building those relationships directly.

Building the search together

Finding exceptional candidates is only part of Lovable’s recruiting strategy. The company also wants hiring managers, the people closest to the role, to be deeply involved in defining what exceptional looks like.

At previous companies, Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Operations Lead, had seen sourcing live almost entirely within recruiting. Lovable operates differently.

“We’ve had a lot of hiring managers request seats to source themselves, and to have their teams involved in sourcing sessions together with the recruiting team.”

Juicebox is becoming a shared workspace for Lovable’s recruiting and hiring teams, giving hiring managers a more active role in sourcing from the start.

“Having one place where a recruiter and a hiring manager can look at the same profiles and agree on what great looks like means that alignment happens before outreach starts, not after."

Jeremie has changed his own process around that idea.

“The biggest mistake that I made before was setting up  criteria myself based on the job description.”

Now, he opens Juicebox with the hiring manager and starts calibrating against real profiles in the same session. They can look at the market together, refine the criteria, and build a shared understanding of the talent bar before outreach begins.

That collaboration also shapes the hiring process itself. Looking at the market together has helped the team adjust job descriptions, refine processes, and reset expectations when the available talent looks different from what everyone initially imagined.

Turning the company’s network into a sourcing advantage

Lovable’s collaborative approach extends beyond hiring managers.

When new employees join, the recruiting team brings them into sourcing early so their networks can become part of the hiring strategy from the start. That matters especially at Lovable, where engineers often have deep relationships across the talent market.

Network sourcing is a major priority for the team. By making those relationships easier to see and act on, sourcers get more visibility into where someone inside Lovable may already have a path to a strong candidate.

Juicebox has surfaced more than 385,000 network overlaps across Lovable, helping the team turn those relationships into another source of highly relevant talent.

Jeremie recently brought that same collaborative approach into a sourcing workshop for a Growth Engineer search. In the second week, the team used Juicebox to shortlist roughly 70 candidates and ultimately hired two of them.

The workshop shows what sourcing at Lovable looks like when it works well: collaborative, fast-moving, and tightly calibrated from the start.

Driving efficiency in the recruiting workflow 

As Lovable has leaned further into outbound, Juicebox has become increasingly central to how the sourcing team operates.

Juicebox now sits across much of Lovable’s sourcing workflow, from kickoff and intake through candidate placement. It gives the team one place to search, calibrate, shortlist, activate networks, and manage early-stage sourcing before candidates move deeper into the recruiting process.

This means the team has more room to focus on the parts of sourcing that require judgment, including calibrating with hiring managers, understanding the market, and evaluating the people most likely to thrive at Lovable.

Building a sourcing motion that grows with Lovable

Sourcing is becoming more deeply embedded in the way Lovable hires. Hiring managers help define the search from the start, employees contribute their networks, and recruiters use Juicebox to bring those inputs together into a more proactive sourcing motion.

As Lovable continues to refine that model, the partnership with Juicebox is becoming more collaborative too. Lovable’s engineering team has already prototyped ideas around network sourcing internally, and the recruiting team is working with Juicebox to bring more of that workflow into the platform.

That kind of collaboration fits the way Lovable already works: test ideas quickly, make the workflow more useful, and keep evolving the sourcing model as the company grows.

Lovable’s sourcing function may still be relatively new, but the operating model is already taking shape: proactive, collaborative, and built around a shared understanding of the talent bar.