Mattijs De Paepe is co-founder and CTO of Penelope Health, which works in the US health insurance space helping providers get paid for the care they deliver. When he started building the team there was not really an old hiring process to replace. Most companies have a hiring process before they have a good one. Penelope did not have one at all. The company was two founders, moving quickly, and looking for its first engineers, so Mattijs started with Jill alongside his own network and developer communities.
Within a few days of briefing Jill, Penelope Health was requesting introductions. Around six weeks later the company had made two hires, doubling the team from two people to four. “Going from two to four people just allows us to create things that much more quickly,” Mattijs says. “Now that we have two engineers, more of the commercial work can also get the attention it needs.”
A few words of feedback, a much sharper search
One of Mattijs’s favourite parts of working with Jill was how quickly the search could evolve. Penelope Health started with a brief, but as Mattijs reviewed real candidates he could give Jill a few words on why someone was not quite right, and that feedback immediately became part of the search.
For Mattijs this captured something about early-stage hiring: what founders say they want in a brief and what they discover they actually value when looking at real people are not always the same thing.
“Once you actually go through applicants and see the more revealed preferences of what you’re actually looking for, that is quite an interesting signal. Literally three words here and there. It’s a simple idea maybe, but I think very powerful.”
Mattijs De Paepe, Co-founder and CTO, Penelope Health
The effect compounds. Quick, low-effort feedback surfaced preferences the founders had not fully articulated in their original brief, and each round of candidates got tighter as a result. Instead of repeatedly rebuilding a search as they learned, Jill learned with them, turning an initial brief into a much more precise picture of the people Penelope Health actually wanted to meet.
A daily shortlist instead of a pile of applications
For a two-person founding team the other constraint was time. Hiring still takes work, but Mattijs did not want that work to mean crawling through hundreds of profiles where the vast majority were obviously not right.
Jill gave Penelope Health a concise daily selection of around ten standout candidates, with a view on how well each person matched the brief. Instead of spending time finding the signal in a huge pool of applicants, the founders could put their attention on a small number of people Jill already thought were worth considering. “It’s a lot more efficient than crawling through 1,000 applicants, of which you probably know that 90% actually aren’t suitable at all,” Mattijs says.
That combination of a small, opinionated shortlist and rapid feedback meant Penelope Health got to relevant people quickly. Mattijs thinks the first person they interviewed may have been the very first candidate they met through Jill, and within a few days of starting the search they were already requesting introductions. The company had been open to making one or two hires depending on the quality it found. In the end it hired two.
In a month and a half, Jill helped Penelope Health double its founding team from two people to four. Going from two founders to an actual early team was a step change, bringing more engineering capacity, faster building and more room for the founders to focus on growing the business.