From Gut Feel to Evidence-Based Hiring at Yotpo

At a Glance

• 100% of candidates hired through Alex still with Yotpo. 
• 50% reduction in time to hire.
• 100% of open go-to-market roles now open on Alex for the first-round interview.
• 0 new systems to replace. Alex runs inside the team's existing Greenhouse workflow.

The Customer

Yotpo is an e-commerce marketing platform that powers reviews, user-generated content, loyalty, and referrals for online brands, and recently brought an AI-native product, Discover, to market. Its talent team runs globally, with offices in North America, Sofia, UK, AU, and Tel Aviv.

Sabrina Puggelli owns the go-to-market function across Yotpo's North American offices: sales, customer success, sales engineering, revenue operations, and implementation. Sales and customer success are evergreen, hiring upwards of ten new reps a year. What she cares about is not just filling roles quickly, but filling them with people who work out long-term.

"As someone who's done many weeks of 30-plus interviews, I'll tell you, you have very little time for all the other pieces of the life cycle we're influencing at every moment." - Sabrina Puggelli, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, Yotpo

The Problem

Early hiring decisions were being made on instinct. A recruiter runs a first interview, forms an impression, writes a summary, and a hiring manager makes a call largely on that read. At the volume Yotpo hires, a subjective first read doesn't scale. Two "good gut reads" can look identical on paper with no way to tell which candidate is actually stronger, and the cost of guessing wrong doesn't show up until months later. As Sabrina put it,"We were working off vibes or feelings versus actual concrete evidence or data that we were able to put into the hiring process."

Even careful notes have limits. As Sabrina shared, "As much as I want to say my notes are awesome and everything I've shared is exactly correct, there are sometimes areas where any human can miss the mark."

None of what came next was about handing the decision to a machine, "AI is not going to take over our roles. It is really going to help us be more consultative, more effective. It's about leaning in."

The Shift

Yotpo moved the first interview onto Alex so every candidate is evaluated against the same defined criteria, not to replace a hiring manager's judgment, but to give it something firmer to stand on. The team tuned each role's questions and scoring until it reflected what a strong hire actually looked like, then let that consistency carry across the whole go-to-market function. "It's so clear where they were successful based on the parameters we set, and then how quickly they were able to move throughout the process." - Sabrina Puggelli

The clearest sign the evidence had earned trust: hiring managers started asking for it unprompted. For example, Sabrina shared, "I opened a role the other day and I was asked by the hiring manager, are we using Alex? Now they're coming to me saying, we're putting Alex on this too."

The Outcome

With a consistent first read in place, Yotpo could move qualified candidates through the process faster, without the tradeoff Sabrina expected going in, "The candidate experience was not impacted, and if anything was improved. Are we still going to be able to convert the same quality of candidate? I have found that to be absolutely not a blocker for us."

And on the question that matters most to a recruiter, whether the people who get hired actually work out, Sabrina's own read on Alex-assisted hires has been consistently strong, "I don't believe we have made a negative hiring decision through Alex. Anyone we've hired through Alex is still here and doing well."

The Proof

What’s Next

For Sabrina, the most telling part of the partnership isn't any single feature, it's the pace and deep understanding of what the industry needs. New capabilities tend to arrive before she's thought to ask for them, and that momentum keeps pushing her team to raise their own bar and think bigger.

"The sky's the limit. The advances Alex continues to make are coming before we're even asking for them. In a fast moving industry like AI you want to be with the leader."
Sabrina Puggelli, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, Yotpo