Toby Mather has hired around 150 people over his career. Now CEO and co-founder of Rig, an AI data platform for business teams, he wanted to approach hiring differently to the traditional process he had used while building his previous company.
Historically, hiring meant a huge top of funnel, manual review and a lot of first-round interviews. “You’re judging from a CV and a cover letter,” Toby says. “That leads to a very big top of funnel, and you spend a lot of time in first calls.” For a founder doing the hiring himself, that is an expensive use of time.
With Jill, Toby found he could run a much tighter process without giving up candidate quality. For one of Rig’s early hires he reviewed around 50 candidates, interviewed roughly 15, took three through to the final stage and made an offer. The whole thing took about a month.
Fewer interviews, much more signal
Toby describes hiring through the lens of the computer science secretary problem: you need to meet enough people to understand what good looks like, but you do not want to interview hundreds before you feel confident deciding. “You have to meet some candidates for every role, but you don’t want to meet 100 for the role, ideally, if you’re the founder or the CEO. You just don’t have time.”
What changed with Jill was the quality of that initial pool. Rather than spending first-round interviews discovering that candidates were not right, Toby felt the qualification had happened much earlier.
“With Jill, I liked that I could just meet a really high-quality batch and then hire from that batch and not have to deal with 100 first rounds.”
Toby Mather, CEO and co-founder, Rig
A big part of that signal comes from context Toby would not normally have before meeting someone. Candidates in the Jack & Jill network have already had real conversations with Jack about their careers: what they have done, what they want next, what they are moving away from and what actually matters to them. Jill can use that when matching them to a company, rather than relying on a CV or on what someone chooses to say once they have seen the role.
“Because they have talked to Jack, you have a sense before they ever hear about you of what they really want,” Toby says, “rather than just thinking that they’re shaping their application for the job because they want a job.”
That distinction matters. Toby gets to understand what a candidate was looking for before they knew Rig was an option, which is a much stronger signal that the match is genuine than anything he could read off an application.
“I just treat Jill like a recruiter”
The other difference for Toby is that Jill does not create another hiring workflow to manage. He works with her in Slack, much as he would with an in-house recruiter. “I just treat Jill like a recruiter,” he says. “We use Slack threads to communicate.”
He can ask follow-up questions about candidates, or ask Jill to go back to someone through Jack and find out something specific. When Toby told Jill he was not interested in candidates who had repeatedly spent less than a year in previous roles, the next batch changed immediately to reflect it. “There is an immediate feedback cycle,” he says.
Jill also keeps the process moving. If a candidate has been sitting at one stage for a couple of days, she nudges Toby to take action, which is how Rig avoids leaving people waiting or losing a strong candidate by accident.
The combination of better information and a tighter process is what took Rig from starting the search to making an offer in around a month. The early stages moved fastest; most of the remaining time went on the unavoidable logistics of later-stage interviews and trial days.
Toby is now bringing more of Rig’s early hiring to Jill. For someone who has already hired around 150 people, the appeal is straightforward.
“I put a very high value on my own time, so I’m happy to pay a fee if I’m going to get good candidates. That’s what the platform offers.”
Toby Mather, CEO and co-founder, Rig