How Verse Medical scaled from 90 to 200 employees with a lean recruiting team

Building a Talent Function for Hypergrowth

When Peter Oh joined Verse Medical as Head of Talent, the company had just raised its Series C and was preparing for its next stage of growth. He joined when the company was around 90 people, with a mandate to build the recruiting function capable of supporting more than 100 hires as the company scaled.

“We had to figure out how to scale recruiting without the luxury of scaling headcount at the same rate.”

With a recruiting team of just four, Peter needed to create substantially more sourcing capacity without scaling headcount or adding unnecessary cost and complexity to the recruiting stack. For a company where the majority of hires are driven by proactive sourcing, building the right sourcing infrastructure would be critical to hitting that hiring plan.

Choosing the right partner for scalable growth

Supporting that hiring plan required a sourcing stack that could expand with the team. At the time, Verse Medical was using a few legacy recruiting tools and was looking into expanding their plan to support their growing recruiting team as a potential next step.

For four recruiters, however, the upgrade would have required a three-year commitment totaling roughly half a million dollars.

“I had to explore different options where we could, you know, still get access to this talent, but maybe not pay an arm and a leg, and still be able to operate well.”

That search led Peter to Juicebox. 

He started by testing the product himself, drawn to both its capabilities and how quickly it was improving. Over time, Juicebox became embedded in the team’s day-to-day sourcing, Peter was able to consolidate more of the workflow into a single platform.

“For all intents and purposes, we pretty much sunset our previous sourcing toolstack. We’re just using Juicebox at this point.”

Today, the majority of Verse Medical’s sourcing and outbound recruiting runs entirely through Juicebox.

Finding a Viable Path to Top Talent

For Peter, the value wasn’t simply replacing one sourcing tool with another. Juicebox gave his team a broader view of the talent market while still providing the precision required for startup hiring.

Candidates could be surfaced across sources like Wellfound and GitHub, then narrowed using company size, industry, stage, titles, and other criteria that reflected the profiles Verse Medical was actually looking for.

“I think the breadth of the candidates that I can find is kind of what I like the most.”

Juicebox’s built in AI features helped recruiters identify adjacent companies and titles, giving them a more complete starting point before they begin reviewing profiles.

The result is a different division of work. 

Instead of spending as much time manually constructing searches, recruiters can focus their attention on evaluating the results and deciding where to invest their time.

Juicebox also helps his recruiters personalize messaging, but the team still reviews and edits the output before it reaches a candidate. The goal is to use AI to remove manual work without removing the judgment and personal touch that make recruiting effective.

“I wanted the ability to actually have a human touch and Juicebox as much as it uses AI allows us to be more human that way which is kind of cool.”

Extending Recruiter Capacity with Agents

As Verse Medical’s hiring volume increased, Peter began using Juicebox Agents to extend the sourcing capacity of his four-person recruiting team.

Rather than deploying them across every opening, the team reserves its four Agent seats for the searches where additional coverage can have the greatest impact.

“We essentially have them reserved for like the top priority searches we have.”

Peter staffs two Agents who support software engineering, where the team A/B tests different markets and messaging. 

Another Agent runs against higher-volume roles like Strategy and Operations, while the fourth is focused on a highly specialized RCM analyst search requiring both healthcare industry expertise and quantitative experience.

The model gives Peter flexibility to match Agent capacity to the needs of each search, particularly across higher-volume roles like engineering, sales, and consulting.

And the team is already looking to expand that capacity further.

“We have four agent seats at the moment. We’re in the midst of getting more. And I think the goal is to have one agent per recruiter.”

Turning Sourcing Into a Connected Workflow

As Juicebox became the team’s primary sourcing platform, Peter connected it directly to Ashby so recruiters could carry existing candidate context into every new search.

Rather than resurfacing people the team has already engaged, recruiters use Ashby data to keep searches focused on net-new talent.

“Any candidate that we’ve already reached out to, I’ll just have Juicebox exclude from the search.”

The integration also reduces the manual work required once outreach turns into an active pipeline. When a candidate responds through Juicebox, they can automatically move into the appropriate stage in Ashby.

“If a candidate responds, we have it set up so they automatically flow into the right stage in Ashby.”

Together, those workflows keep his Juicebox Agents and the ATS working from the same candidate context, helping a four-person recruiting team spend less time reconciling systems and more time moving qualified candidates through the process.

The Results

For Peter, the measure of a scalable recruiting function is whether a lean team can keep pace with the company’s hiring goals without adding unnecessary headcount or tooling.

Juicebox has helped Verse Medical expand its sourcing capacity, consolidate more of its recruiting workflow into one platform, and turn that pipeline into hires across technical and business roles.

The impact extended across the recruiting function:

• 9 hires sourced through Juicebox across engineering, talent, operations, sales, and leadership

• 40% of engineering hires sourced through Juicebox, including multiple software engineers and the Head of Data

• Scaled headcount from 90 → 200+ employees supported by a recruiting team of just four

• ~$500K legacy tooling commitment avoided while maintaining access to the talent needed to scale

And with the majority of Verse Medical’s hires driven by proactive sourcing, Juicebox has become a core part of the recruiting infrastructure Peter built to support that growth.

“The majority of our hires are actually made by sourcing, and I think the reality is we have to get our name out there. And Juicebox is critical for that.”