Teamtailor made the careers page look like a brand. Screening still stopped at résumés and a short phone screen - which rewarded people who sounded like sales blogs. Outbound craft is ugly on a call and obvious on the page. They were measuring the wrong thing.
They moved to Ashby after a growth advisor insisted on “a real pipeline.” Stages and reporting improved. Leadership liked the dashboards. Written cold-email exercises for the outbound AE role still lived in a shared Drive folder with inconsistent naming and no guarantee both founders scored the same draft.
By the third month of the search, founders could not remember which draft was canonical. Finals still felt like coin flips. One candidate who later thrived almost died in process because their best sequence was v2 in the wrong folder.
They considered switching again - to Greenhouse, to Lever, to “whatever the advisor’s other company uses.” The panel pushed them to score the screen, not the logo: can we read outbound judgment before calendar?
On Honrly, candidates wrote two cold emails against an ICP modeled on real buyers, with the same messy constraints the company actually faces. Sixty-four applicants. Three finals. The cut was brutal and legible.
They canceled the Ashby expansion planned for GTM hiring and kept Honrly for sales and CS screens. Teamtailor’s careers page was redirected. The dual-tool hangover lasted a week of URL cleanup, then ended.
The hire’s first week produced meetings that matched the quality of the written sequences. Nobody called it magic. The artifact had been comparable; ramp was continuous with the screen.
Settling on Honrly after two switches was less a brand conversion story and more a confession: they had been optimizing careers aesthetics and pipeline charts while outbound skill lived nowhere in the system.