Chief Talent Acquisition & Culture Officer
Department: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Jacksonville, Florida
Description
Most law firms protect what already works. We are building what does not exist yet. Jimerson Birr is rewriting what a commercial law firm can be, and talent is the engine that makes it run. If you want to disrupt a stale model, prove that ambition and craft can scale together, and be part of something bigger than your own re9sume9, this is your seat. Bring the nerve to break what should have changed years ago and the discipline to build what replaces it.
Key Responsibilities
Our Talent Acquisition Department exists for two reasons: so that talent never again limits Jimerson Birr's growth, and so that exceptional people choose JB, recommend JB, and do the best work of their careers here. We set the destination and the first version of the scoreboard. You own the route. How the work gets done belongs to you, and no ceiling on what you can build.
Recruit ahead of demand. Turn the firm's growth plans and workforce forecasts into talent supply plans, so priority seats carry qualified pipelines and warm benches before they open. When a critical role opens, JB should never be starting from zero.
Run recruiting like a sales business. Target, prospect, nurture, qualify, persuade, close, and learn. Every loss has a documented reason, and every source has to earn its keep.
Win Free Agency. Lead the pursuit of experienced attorneys, practice leaders, lateral teams, and specialized talent. Mobilize specialty recruiters, Talent Ambassadors, referrals, and your own credibility, and step in personally when the close matters most.
Build through the Draft. Turn law schools, universities, trade schools, clerkships, and veteran pathways into one firmwide early-talent system that converts promising people into JB professionals-not a calendar of disconnected events.
Select on evidence, and prove it at 90 days. Hold structured, job-related standards built on GWC and our Core Values. Hiring managers decide; you make sure they decide well. Every hire is validated at 90 days, because quality of hire, not volume, is how we learn what works.
Own the Employer of Choice story and make JB FOR ME real. Build one truthful, evidence-based employer proposition, proven by real employees. Lead JB FOR ME across Fulfilled, Opportunistic, Refreshed, Mindful, and Empowered with a rhythm people feel and follow-through they can see.
Build leverage, not bureaucracy. Eliminate, simplify, automate, then delegate. Your TA Operations & Systems Manager, AI, vendors, and offshore support handle the detail of a department that runs on systems, so you can stay on the big moves.
Keep score and win. One number defines the department: approved seats filled by a hire who starts on or before the planned date. You own the scoreboard, you are incentivized by the results, and you report straight to the CEO.
This mission rewards a particular wiring: a self-starter who sees the target before anyone else, competes to win, solves problems without waiting for permission, and finishes what they start.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
A builder with proof. You have built or materially reengineered a recruiting function from thin infrastructure-not merely managed the one you inherited. You create systems without waiting for someone to hand you a blueprint.
A self-starter who plays to win. You set targets others call aggressive, then hit them. You make sound calls with incomplete information, move before a vacancy becomes a crisis, and treat a lost candidate as a problem to solve, not an excuse.
A closer with credibility. Experienced attorneys, practice leaders, and senior executives take your call because you understand their motivations and the economics of a law firm. You persuade without politics, negotiate with discretion, and close.
A visionary who builds through others. You lead from the front, not the inbox. You direct recruiters, systems, vendors, and creative resources without doing every task yourself, and you build a team strong enough that results never depend on one person's heroics.
A strategist who finishes. Vision is half the job. You turn it into documented processes, Rocks, scorecards, and L10s, inspect quality, and deliver measurable outcomes.
A results hunter, not an activity tracker. You judge success by qualified talent supply, successful hires, and economic value, not activity volume or department size. You know the difference between a busy funnel and a productive one.
You bring substantial progressive talent acquisition leadership experience (typically 10+ years), a record of acquiring hard-to-recruit professionals, and proof that you have led teams and complex initiatives. Law firm or other sophisticated professional-services recruiting experience is strongly preferred, and credibility recruiting experienced attorneys is especially valuable. Experience with EOS, recruiting technology and analytics, AI-enabled process improvement, and behavioral and cognitive assessment tools is a plus. HR generalist experience is not a substitute for talent acquisition leadership.
Most companies promise you a blank canvas and hand you a mess. We did the opposite.
We believe the traditional approach to talent acquisition is broken. Organizations spend fortunes on recruiting departments that react to vacancies, rely on individual heroics, accumulate disconnected technologies, and confuse hiring activity with hiring success. We intend to build something radically different-an intelligent, proactive talent acquisition engine that combines exceptional human relationships, entrepreneurial thinking, artificial intelligence, automation, and institutional systems to outperform organizations many times our size.
And we aren't asking you to figure out where to begin.
We did the strategic heavy lifting before we hired you. We developed a comprehensive operating constitution that establishes the department's vision, strategic priorities, organizational architecture, decision rights, accountabilities, customer journeys, and standards of excellence. We've defined what winning looks like, removed organizational ambiguity, and aligned the opportunity with the firm's long-term vision. You inherit the clarity most executives spend their first year fighting to establish.
Then we deliberately left the most exciting part to you: HOW. We don't want someone to administer our ideas. We want someone brilliant enough to challenge them, inventive enough to improve them, and driven enough to turn them into something extraordinary. You'll have the authority to design processes, rethink conventional recruiting practices, deploy emerging technologies, build exceptional teams, and create capabilities that don't yet exist. We care about outcomes, not allegiance to traditional methods.
We've eliminated the distractions that bury most talent executives. Payroll, benefits, HR administration, onboarding, formal training, and employee relations belong to other departments. Your mandate is unapologetically focused: build the talent supply, win exceptional people, create an Employer of Choice, and engineer an acquisition system that compounds its advantage year after year.
You'll be building two competitive strategies simultaneously. Through Free Agency, we'll compete aggressively for exceptional established professionals, leaders, teams, and sometimes entire companies. Through the Draft, we'll create enduring relationships with the next generation of talent long before they're looking for jobs. You'll unite both through technology, data, remarkable candidate experiences, and a recruiting operation designed to scale without simply adding more people.
And you'll have a seat where it matters. You'll report directly to the CEO, serve on the Leadership Team, and help shape the future of a law firm determined to challenge how legal services are delivered. Our ambition extends beyond improving how one firm recruits. We want to demonstrate a model for talent acquisition that even much larger, better-resourced organizations will want to study and emulate.
We're not looking for someone who wants to run a department. We're looking for someone who wants to build something that changes the game. If that distinction excites you more than the title, we should talk.
In your interactions with us, tell us about a recruiting system you built or transformed, a hard-to-win talent acquisition you helped close, and an operating process you made materially better. We are most interested in evidence of initiative, judgment, relationships, and results.
Benefits
The legal industry has a problem. Too much tradition. Too much inefficiency. Too much reverence for the way things have always been done. We think that's an enormous opportunity.
Jimerson Birr was built by people who believed a law firm could be something more: more entrepreneurial, more accountable, more innovative, more valuable to its clients, and a hell of a lot more rewarding for the people who work there. We didn't build this firm to fit into the legal industry. We built it to challenge what the industry accepts as normal.
For more than 17 years, we've grown by questioning assumptions, refusing complacency, investing in exceptional people, and proving that a commercial law firm can compete with much larger institutions without inheriting their bureaucracy. And we're just getting started.
The next version of Jimerson Birr won't look much like the law firms of yesterday. We're reimagining how legal services are designed, delivered, priced, and experienced. We're combining sophisticated lawyers, exceptional business professionals, artificial intelligence, automation, and disciplined operating systems to build something fundamentally different. A firm that prizes results over hours, ingenuity over convention, and value creation over unnecessary complexity.
Our goal is ambitious: By 2035, at least 10,000 small and midsize businesses will have left the old way of working with lawyers behind. We're not interested in simply talking about what's wrong with the legal industry. We're building a better alternative, one that changes what businesses expect from their lawyers and what great legal service should look like. Building that kind of firm requires a different kind of workplace and a different kind of people.
We don't believe great people want to spend their careers asking permission, navigating politics, protecting silos, or waiting for someone else to make things happen.We believe they want ownership. Hard problems worth solving. Smart people who challenge them. Leaders who trust them. Room to experiment. Permission to question sacred cows. The tools to do extraordinary work. And the satisfaction of seeing their fingerprints on something that matters.
That's the culture we're building. It isn't a place to coast. We set high standards, expect people to honor their commitments, and care deeply about service, quality, and results. We value people who think for themselves, challenge conventional wisdom, take intelligent risks, and make everyone around them better.
We don't confuse being professional with being conventional. We don't confuse being busy with being valuable. And we don't believe the best ideas have to come from the people with the most fancy titles. Our purpose is simple: Proving how valuable and impactful we can be. That applies as much to the people building this firm as it does to the businesses we serve.
The opportunity here isn't just to have a successful career. It's to help create a company, a culture, and a way of doing business that didn't exist before, and to be proud of the mark you left on all three. Some people are looking for a place to fit in. Others are looking for a place to make their mark. Jimerson Birr is being built for the latter.
Our core values are simple: Commitment to service; Commitment to quality; Commitment to results. We live our core values, and we welcome you to live themwith us.
