Senior Recruiter

**January** Senior Recruiter; $140-$200k; New York - Hybrid

**About the Role** As Senior Recruiter at January, you'll bring operational precision and quality obsession to every search, executing at high velocity while maintaining an uncompromising hiring bar. Through your work, you'll help us attract exceptional talent across engineering, product, operations, and business functions that raises January's capabilities and accelerates our mission. This role is perfect for a recruiter who thrives in high-growth environments and treats recruiting as a science, not an art. You’ll need an exceptional eye for top-tier talent – someone who can spot world-class engineers, get them interested in January, and close them. You'll execute recruiting excellence from day one while contributing to infrastructure that continuously improves our hiring engine. With a data-driven approach and systematic experimentation, you'll surface insights that make our entire recruiting function better – spending 80%+ of your time on direct recruiting (activities that directly lead to more hires). You'll be operationally and data-minded, leveraging those skills to boost the success of your searches, but we aren't expecting you to double as Head of Talent. As January scales, your impact will grow as the talent you recruit defines our capabilities and the systems you build determine how we hire for years to come.

**Responsibilities** - Deliver Exceptional Hires at Velocity: Own 6-8 concurrent searches and ship hires that meet January's growth targets without compromising our hiring bar. Close candidates through compelling positioning and systematic objection handling. - Identify World-Class Talent Others Can't Reach: Source candidates from organizations with the highest talent bars. Build networks within elite companies. Evaluate candidate quality from limited signals and differentiate exceptional from merely good early in the funnel. - Build Recruiting Operations That Compound: Surface pipeline intelligence that drives systematic improvement. Run experiments that validate optimizations before scaling. Create playbooks and automation that make recruiting more efficient over time. - Transform Hiring Managers Into Recruiting Partners: Coach hiring managers to maintain quality bar independently and operate recruiting with urgency. Activate them as sourcing channels. Establish mutual accountability for outcomes. - Maintain Quality Under Pressure: Reject weak candidates even when pipelines are thin. Validate quality through evidence. Defend "no hire" decisions to senior stakeholders with specific gaps articulated. - Optimize Everything: Constantly ask "why not faster?" Treat every pipeline challenge as an opportunity to build a better system. Implement changes based on data and measure impact rigorously.

**Required Skills** A. 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience in tech companies (incl. some startup experience), with at least 3 years owning technical recruiting pipelines and demonstrated success across other functions. B. Track record recruiting from elite organizations: hired multiple candidates from companies with exceptional hiring bars. Can name specific hires and articulate what made them exceptional beyond credentials. C. Proven ability to scale recruiting while maintaining quality: hired 20+ people during company growth phase without lowering standards, with multiple hires still performing exceptionally. D. Systems builder: created recruiting infrastructure others could execute – playbooks, process improvements, optimization experiments. E. Data fluency: uses funnel analysis and conversion optimization to diagnose and solve recruiting problems systematically.

**Bonus Skills** - Strong stakeholder management: developed hiring managers from reactive to proactive recruiting partners with measurable behavior change. - Thrives in ambiguous, fast-paced environments. Built processes from scratch while maintaining execution velocity. - Exceptional communicator: translates recruiting challenges into actionable insights for diverse audiences. - High standards and accountability: comfortable pushing back on senior stakeholders when quality is at risk. - Grit and resilience: persistent through setbacks, energized by hard recruiting problems, maintains urgency without burnout.

**Ideal Background** - Collaborative Ownership beats Fiefdoms. You step into gaps without being asked, fix issues, and seek to bring in the right people. - Speed beats perfection. You make decisions with incomplete information, iterate quickly, and course-correct based on what you learn – fast loops beat slow ones. - Candor beats comfort. You give direct feedback because you care about growth; you'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes time. _Example: Last quarter, an engineer told our CEO his proposed timeline was unrealistic in a company-wide meeting – and was thanked for it._ - Inputs beat outcomes. You evaluate decisions by the thinking behind them, not just results – good process increases the odds, and bad outcomes don't always mean bad decisions. - Why beats what. You diagnose root causes before prescribing solutions, sharing context so others can decide well without you. - Writing beats meetings. You structure thinking on paper because clarity scales – a well-written doc often accomplishes more than an hour-long meeting.

**Green Flags** - Named funnel metrics (conversion %, time-in-stage) and a pipeline they diagnosed and rebuilt. - Held an evidence-based "no-hire" line against a senior stakeholder. - Identifies technical/elite hires (reads GitHub); builds reusable hiring infrastructure. - Startup / scrappy-stage pedigree with a standout; a specific, personal reason for January. **Red Flags** - No startup experience. - Intuition-driven ("I trust my gut") with no funnel metrics. - Advocacy-only — never held a no-hire line under pressure. - Below the tenure/level bar.

**Logistical Info** - Location: New York (hybrid, 3+ days per week in-office) - Compensation: $140K – $200K - **Other:** Open to relocation for strong non-NYC candidates (must relocate within 60 days); visa transfers by default (not new visas), case-by-case discussion

**Interview Process** 1. Recruiter Screen 2. Hiring Manager Screen 3. Technical Phone Screen 4. Case Study 5. Final Round (series) 6. Reference Check