Head of Talent

You’re a talent professional with exacting standards, who’s passionate about building extraordinary companies through people. You have an intuitive sense of what it takes to build a team with the capacity — and the chemistry — to achieve great things. You’re familiar with implementing and executing talent acquisition strategies, processes and procedures, and have a great eye for talent.

You have experience recruiting for a wide range of positions and know how to apply different strategies for different types of roles. You thrive in an innovative work environment and particularly love the challenge of recruiting for roles in emerging fields, where the candidate pool isn’t obvious. Quality matters to you. A lot. You won’t stop on your search for the right people, until you find the very best candidate for a role. You authentically share WaitWhat’s belief that diversity is a strategic advantage, and have specific practices and strategies for ensuring a diverse talent pool across all roles.

You also have the experience and ability to advise WaitWhat’s leadership on best practices — in talent acquisition, retention, and succession planning.

PLEASE SUBMIT BOTH A THOUGHTFUL COVER LETTER AND RESUME.

Responsibilities:

• Deliver on ambitious hiring targets in a rapidly changing, fast-moving startup environment
• Identify the organization’s needs and design, implement, and execute a high-performing talent acquisition strategy to successfully recruit the candidates needed to move WaitWhat’s business forward
• Design a holistic recruiting process that ensures a great cultural match, by building on the company’s existing hiring practices. These currently involve an intentional sequence of interviews (meeting a cross-section of future colleagues), combined with a short project and an in-person workshop
• Drive all recruiting operations — including development of hiring plans, creation of thoughtful job descriptions, management of all lead-generation efforts, oversight of our applicant tracking system and management of the applicants’ experience throughout the hiring process
• Apply winning strategies to attract diverse candidates — in all roles and all levels of seniority. For WaitWhat, diversity means many things: gender identification, ethnicity, language, religion, sexual orientation, age, nationality/regionality — as well as cognitive diversity. We’re looking for someone to both recruit great, diverse candidates and further our best practices for diversity and inclusion
• Report regularly to leadership team and stakeholders on ongoing progress for all roles
• Anticipate the organization’s future needs and work with leadership to advise on both recruiting tactics and recruitment timelines — to sustain the company’s success
• Train hiring managers — and all participating employees — on the most successful approaches to assessing and interviewing candidates: how to assess skills and personality fit, how to conduct interviews and how to close candidates
• Oversee multiple projects under tight deadlines while working alongside cross-functional teams
• Design and run multi-channel lead generation strategies informed by data
• Participate holistically in building the values and culture of WaitWhat
• Ensure every candidate for a role at WaitWhat has a delightful experience, regardless of outcome

Qualifications:

• You have 6 – 8 years of experience in full lifecycle recruiting with at least 2 years of experience leading talent teams in a high-growth early-stage organization
• You have successfully implemented talent acquisition strategies at a high-growth start-up
• You have expertise in the latest talent acquisition strategies, processes, and technologies
• You use data to analyze and improve your recruiting practices and strategies
• You have experience in — and a deep understanding of — building an employer brand and value proposition
• A high level of ownership, confidentiality and attention to detail
• You are capable of building strong business relationships across teams, departments, and the entire organization
• Exceptional organizational skills and great follow-through on tasks
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Benefits

This is a FT position, based in downtown Manhattan. We offer a benefits package that’s very generous and competitive with larger companies (We believe in taking care of our team.). We work long hours, but we also rest. (Our whole company closes for 2 weeks in the summer and the week between Christmas and the New Year, so we can recharge). We’re committed to diversity of all kinds — in our media properties, among our investors and on our team: women, minorities and anyone with an unconventional background are strongly encouraged to apply. And most importantly, we only hire extremely nice people.