How Guard Owl hired a full sales team and a top tier engineer in 1 month with Jooba
“The best part about Jooba was that it felt like they weren’t just finding people looking for a job they were finding the people who were actually the best candidates for Guard Owl. That’s a huge difference. We weren’t getting more candidates; we were getting the right candidates.”
The challenge
Inbound job posts and a traditional recruiting agency had both come up empty, none of it surfaced the right candidates for Guard Owl. Then a late-stage candidate took another offer, leaving them with a hard constraint and no pipeline: an engineer in seat in Los Angeles by the end of August, and an SDR, fast.
The approach
After a kickoff call covering both roles, Jooba ran top-of-funnel in Slack, with outreach going out from the founders' own LinkedIn profiles: Sam's for engineering, Narek's for SDR. No dashboard, no extra software. Rather than cast wide, Jooba took the time to understand the specifics of what Guard Owl needed, the stack, the stage, the kind of engineer who thrives as an early hire, and targeted the most aligned candidates from the outset. That precision showed immediately: the engineer Guard Owl went on to hire came from the very first batch of outreach, contacted the same day the engineering search went live.
“The best part about Jooba was that it felt like they weren’t just finding people looking for a job they were finding the people who were actually the best candidates for Guard Owl. That’s a huge difference. We weren’t getting more candidates; we were getting the right candidates.”
The results
- Hires made: Full-Stack Engineer and Sales Development Representative
- Fastest contact of the eventual engineer: same day engineering outreach went live
- Engineering intros: 22 candidates intro'd
- SDR intros: 34 candidates intro'd
Why it worked
The people Guard Owl wanted weren't answering job posts, and an agency hadn't reached them either. Outbound from the founders' own profiles did, fast enough to beat a hard deadline. That experience is why Jooba has become Guard Owl's go-to hiring solution: as new roles open across the company, Jooba is their first call.
“Early on, we were paying recruiting firms more than 3x what we pay Jooba, and the whole process was still incredibly manual. We had Google Sheets we were constantly updating by hand, it was hard to keep track of candidates, and the results honestly weren’t as good. With Jooba, the process just felt much simpler and more connected, and the candidates were much better aligned with what we were actually looking for at Guard Owl. Not to mention having everything right in our Slack is amazing.” ”
About Jooba
Jooba is reimagining recruiting services from the ground up. By combining proprietary AI tooling with experienced talent engineers, Jooba serves as an embedded recruiting partner running top-of-funnel for high-growth technology companies. Backed by a16z Speedrun, Genius Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Founders Future, and operators from OpenAI, ServiceTitan, and more.
