How Fitbod Turned Recruiting Into Its Superpower with Paraform

“Working with Paraform feels like a superpower. They give us access to multiple recruiter networks who deliver high-quality candidates and save our team hundreds of hours.” ­– Jesse Venticinque, Co-founder and CPO at Fitbod

Fitbod is redefining strength training for today’s fitness consumers. The app uses AI and cutting-edge exercise science to design personalized strength workouts based on each user’s goals, experience, and available equipment - helping thousands of people build lasting fitness habits.

Founded by Allen Chen and Jesse Venticinque, Fitbod has grown into one of the top-ranked strength training apps in the App Store, with a decade of category leadership and a 40-person team.

Challenge: Limited bandwidth and expertise gaps slowed hiring for senior roles

To sustain growth and deepen user engagement, Fitbod needed to scale marketing, product management, and design. That meant bringing in senior talent - critical to improving conversion, retention, and acquisition.

While the team worked with a single contract recruiter for general hiring, these niche searches required more expertise.

Jesse often stepped in to ramp the recruiter up on role profiles, calibrate searches, evaluate portfolios, and guide candidate selection. Without access to the specialized networks or cold outreach skills needed for senior roles, the recruiter’s leverage was limited.

“Recruiting is so critical to get right. Without Paraform, it took a lot of my own time to ramp the process, which burned weeks of my time.”

The result was a hiring process bogged down by weekly team syncs, slow feedback, and a limited candidate flow, which stretched timelines out for months.

Fitbod needed a high-leverage path to top talent - ideally through recruiters who already understood the niche and could move quickly.

When Elaine Zelby, Co-founder and CRO of Tofu, introduced Jesse to Paraform, everything clicked. The platform spoke to the exact hiring challenges his team had been trying to solve.

“Finding candidates with niche skills is hard. You need the right network to reach the people who really fit, and we didn’t have that.”

Solution: Specialized recruiter networks deliver top candidates fast

Fitbod onboarded with Paraform in under two weeks. After sharing role details, company context, and candidate requirements, Jesse and his team got connected to specialized recruiters within a few days.

“Paraform does a great job of scaffolding the information they need from me. Their process helps me think deeply about candidate profiles and what matters most.”

Instead of relying on a single generalist recruiter, Fitbod now works with a network of specialists who know senior design and product roles inside out. Each recruiter brings relationships and insights that would have taken months to build internally.

“Being able to work with seven or ten recruiters who understand the roles really well and have networks in each niche felt like a 10x improvement over our prior capability.”

With Paraform, the team no longer needs to ramp up an internal recruiter or depend on cold outreach. Recruiters surface high-quality candidates faster, and Jesse’s team reviews profiles in real time to keep searches moving without weeks of delay.

“Candidates want timely information back, and the platform makes that way easier.”

Paraform also enables Fitbod to run multiple searches at once. The platform gives the team visibility and control while recruiters handle the heavy lifting - so leadership can scale hiring efficiently and stay focused on product growth.

“Not having to do all the outreach myself has saved so much time - time I can spend on product and strategy instead.”

Results: Fitbod makes 5 senior hires and saves hundreds of hours

Within weeks, senior-level searches that once stretched over months were moving smoothly and delivering results:

• 5 hires including Staff Product Managers, Growth Marketing Manager, and a Senior Machine Learning Engineering
• 100s of hours saved across the hiring process

Going forward, Fitbod plans to continue using Paraform to build their team, ensuring the company scales efficiently without compromising quality.

Jesse recommends Paraform to any other startup founders who want to solve complex hiring challenges and see faster results.

“Paraform has made hiring for senior roles so much easier, and I’ve already recommended them to other founders looking for the same kind of support.”