Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

Teresa Torres profiles Yury Oleynik, VP of Product Management at HiveMQ, and how his team automated recruiting for continuous customer interviews. Early manual outreach campaigns to thousands of free-plan users yielded only a handful of interviews, pushing the team toward Orbital, a recruiting tool that embeds interview invitations in the product. Initial success was followed by high no-show rates and non-target participants, which were fixed through better targeting, screeners, reminders, and personalization. The story also covers persistent difficulty reaching enterprise customers, where Customer Success protectiveness and multi-hop contact chains slow things down. The piece matters because it shows that recruiting, not interviewing skill alone, is often the bottleneck to continuous discovery.

01Key takeaways

• Automate recruitment before expecting continuous interviewing to stick; manual outreach rarely scales.
• Tighten targeting and add screener questions so interviews reach the users you actually need.
• Send email and SMS reminders and personalize the invite with the interviewer's name and role to cut no-shows.
• Shorten interviews and limit scheduling to a near-term window, since both appear to raise conversion and attendance.
• Build CS-approved rules that block sensitive accounts so outreach stays safe and doesn't require case-by-case permission.
• Use multiple channels, such as in-app and email, because no single channel reaches every target segment.

02Key sections

Early recruiting struggles

HiveMQ first tried piggybacking on support tickets and a large email campaign, which produced very few interviews. The team concluded that manual outreach had no repeatable path.

Adopting an automated in-app tool

Discovering Orbital while it was in early access, the team used its in-app intercept to get interviews scheduled quickly after launch. Early results were strong but accompanied by many no-shows and off-target participants.

Refining the recruiting flow

Adjustments to targeting, screening, reminders, and personalization produced a steady weekly flow of qualified interviews. Team members self-serve scheduling through individually connected calendars.

Enterprise segment challenges

Large enterprise customers are hard to reach in-app, and CS teams guard those relationships. The team is working on rule-based outreach limits and shareable links to automate what remains manual.

Key takeaways

Automating recruitment unlocked continuous discovery, while channel mix, shorter interviews, and shorter scheduling windows improved conversion and reduced no-shows.

03From the post

“If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery, you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. While many product teams want to talk to customers every week, they struggle to make this a reality. Whether they face”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.