When Alex Edwards joined Evervault to lead engineering, product and design, one of his first jobs was to scale a small team that was already stretched by everything the business wanted to build. Evervault was around 20 people when he joined and has since grown to roughly 45, which makes every new hire consequential.
Alex had worked extensively with external hiring partners before, but at this stage of Evervault’s growth he wanted to stay close to the decisions himself. “Ultimately, I’m able to calibrate as a leader of the business,” he says. “I know what I’m looking for when it comes to each of those specialisms.”
That is what drew him to Jill. She let him stay close to the search and go deeper himself, with more information on each candidate and a denser pool of people worth considering. The result was fewer conversations with better candidates, and a hire he is not sure they would otherwise have found.
More context, while staying close to the search
For Alex, hiring exceptional people is largely a problem of signal. “Hiring is exceptionally difficult, and finding clear signals in candidate profiles is just as tough. You simply can’t talk to everybody.” When the company is small and every hire can change the team, he wants to be choosy about who enters the process at all.
Jill gave him a way to stay closely involved while making those decisions on much richer information. Alongside her summaries, scoring and matching against the brief, Alex could see what the candidates themselves were looking for. Candidates in the Jack & Jill network have already spoken to Jack about their careers: what they want next, the problems they care about, and the kinds of companies that genuinely interest them.
“I get the summary from Jill, I get a much deeper selection of profiles, I get the scoring, and I get the high level: this is what they’re looking for. This is explicitly what they’ve said they’re looking for to Jack as well. When you’re hunting for the exceptional, you do want as much data and information upfront as possible.”
Alex Edwards, VP Engineering and Product, Evervault
That alignment matters for Evervault. Building developer-first security and payments infrastructure needs engineers who care about hard technical problems, not a generic startup role. Because Jill understands both sides of the match, she connects what a role actually needs to what a candidate has already said they want.
Alex also noticed something about the people who had chosen to speak to Jack in the first place. “The people who had spoken to Jack tended to be a little bit more open-minded, a little bit more bleeding edge, a little bit more of an early adopter, particularly in the engineering space,” he says. That gave him a pool who were strong on paper and had the curiosity Evervault was looking for.
Fewer conversations, higher-quality candidates
As Alex kept using Jill, another signal gave him confidence she had understood the brief: she began surfacing many of the same strong candidates Evervault had already identified independently through other routes. “There’d been enough dialogue that the search had actually found the right shape of individual,” he says. “That gives me a ton of confidence.”
The difference was density. Across Evervault’s broader engineering hiring, Alex says the team ran around 200 interviews to make 10 hires over roughly six months. For Jill’s first hire, they spoke to three or four candidates before finding the person they wanted.
“We actually spoke to fewer candidates of higher quality,” he says. For a small company where senior leaders are deeply involved in hiring, that matters. Staying close to the search gave Alex the control and the context to be selective, without working through a large volume of candidates to find the right person.
“I interviewed three or four candidates through Jill and hired one of them. I don’t think we would have found the person we hired had we not used Jack and Jill.”
Alex Edwards, VP Engineering and Product, Evervault