How a Startup in London Hired 3 People in One Month Without Losing Their Mind

Three Roles. One Person. Sixty Days.

John runs a twelve-person fintech in London. In April, his company was at the point where three roles had become urgent at the same time: a product designer, a backend developer, and a customer success manager.

He had no HR team. He had himself, a co-founder who was focused on fundraising, and a WhatsApp group of former colleagues he could ask for referrals. That was the hiring department.

This is what happened.

Week One: The Old Way

John posted the roles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and a few local job boards. By Thursday of the first week, he had 94 applications for the designer role alone, spread across his email inbox and a Google Form that had already become confusing to navigate.

He built a spreadsheet. Column A for names. Column B for the role they applied for. Column C for a rating from one to five that he was assigning based on how quickly he could skim a CV before his next meeting. By Friday evening, the spreadsheet had 31 rows, three conflicting versions saved in different places, and no clear picture of who was actually worth calling.

A referral from a friend arrived on Saturday. John added them manually. Then he could not find them again on Monday.

Week Two: Switching to Juno

A founder he had met at a London tech event mentioned Juno. John signed up on a Tuesday evening, spent about twenty minutes exploring the platform, and uploaded all 94 designer CVs.

By the time he finished his glass of water, Juno had ranked them. The top fifteen were clearly identified. Each one had a score, a reason for the ranking, and the full CV available to read. Lanre spent forty-five minutes reviewing the top fifteen and selecting eight for screening calls.

He repeated the process for the developer and customer success roles the next morning. What had been three overwhelming piles of applications became three organised pipelines, each with a clear shortlist and a defined next step.

Week Three and Four: Moving Through the Process

John used Juno to schedule screening calls, collect structured feedback from his co-founder after their joint interviews, and keep every candidate updated on their status automatically.

No one chased him with a follow-up email. Every candidate knew where they stood. His co-founder could see the same notes and scores he could. The debrief conversations were short because the data was already in front of them.

The Result

Three hires, made within thirty days of switching to Juno. All three passed their probationary reviews. John estimated that the process saved him between fifteen and twenty hours of administrative work compared to what he had been doing manually in week one.

The time he got back went into actual conversations with candidates, into reference checks, and into preparing proper onboarding for the people he hired.

Hiring three people in a month with no HR team is still not easy. But it is a very different kind of hard when you have a system that handles the noise.

Start your free Juno trial at usejuno.io and see results in your first session.