How this YC company hired 4 engineers in 1 month on Paraform
When Apriora – the company behind autonomous AI recruiting agent Alex – needed to scale up their hiring efforts, they faced a common challenge: balancing hiring efforts without compromising on quality or burning through time.
Like many similar startups, the team relied heavily on the YC Job board and their personal founder networks. But as their hiring needs grew, they needed a more scalable solution. Through recommendations from fellow YC founders who had success with the platform, including Pylon’s CEO Marty, they discovered Paraform.
After only a month, the results were clear:
- 4 engineers hired in 1 month, with 100% candidate satisfaction
- 9x less time spent on recruiting, including recruiter relationship management
- 5x faster hiring pipeline from job posting to offer
- Consistent higher-quality candidate matches compared to previous methods
Hedge recruiter risk while scaling quality
Before Paraform, Apriora’s team believed working with external recruiters was a risky investment. Their co-founder Aaron had dedicated significant time into building different relationships and searching for the right recruiter, with no guarantee of success until months in.
“Working with individual external recruiters can be risky. There's a big investment in finding the right one, and you don't know if they're good until they either succeed or fail. Whereas on Paraform, you're getting quality candidates right away from multiple recruiters. Paraform hedges your recruiter risk because you have several high-quality recruiters sending strong candidates. They also generated much higher quality candidates compared to our attempts at hiring external external individually.”
The definition of "high quality candidate" varies between companies, but for Apriora, it meant those who matched both the technical criteria and the harder-to-quantify soft skills that can be tough to assess. The team found that there were great recruiters on Paraform who could consistently find those types of folks.
Put recruiting on autopilot
What surprised the team most was how quickly they could get started.
“It took us under an hour to create our job posts and onboard onto Paraform. Getting set up was super easy, as was working with recruiters.”
The platform transformed Aaron’s daily recruiting workflow into an efficient routine:
"It was essentially automatic from our point of view – when I wake up, I'll check the candidates that were submitted to us yesterday and see if they're good or not. If they're good, I could interview them right away."
As an employer, he could easily calibrate candidates, say yes or no, and comment and why or why not as feedback for recruiters to take into account.
The Kanban-style candidate tracking became Aaron’s most-used feature:
"I need to see everybody. This is essentially an interactive view of our main hiring pipeline. It was good to see who I had followed up with, who I hadn't, and simply organize my pipeline."
And when it when it came to extending the offer letter, recruiters were very helpful in clarifying candidates’ desired salary and other expectations. The quick start and efficient processes helped Aaron hire four founding SWEs within a month of posting the role – that’s an average of one new hire a week.
Save time & energy for other core business needs
Hiring is tough for any startup, and takes a lot of energy and time out of the team and hiring managers.
"The biggest challenge before Paraform was that I had to manage multiple recruiter relationships and processes when I could be working on building my company. It was getting in the way of all my other work at Apriora."
Apriora needed to achieve two things: hire a lot of people quickly, and free up leadership bandwidth for other critical tasks.
This is where Paraform came in.
“You can trust the folks on Paraform to put the same care you would into hiring, so you focus on other things just as crucial to growth.”
The shift to Paraform meant:
- Reduced time doing manual sourcing, writing emails, and reviewing resumes
- Multiple quality recruiters working simultaneously
- Streamlined communication through the platform
- Quick calibration and feedback loops
- Becoming less reliant on inbound
The platform's quality guarantee (a three-month payment delay to ensure new hires truly fit the role) also provides additional peace of mind for Aaron.
“All it takes to give it a shot is a listing fee. From what we were able to achieve, it seems more than worth it to me.”
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Speak with our team to learn more about how Paraform can help you fill your difficult positions