Founding Recruiter

Clark

$80K — $95K *
Staffing
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 2-5 years of recruiting, sourcing, or talent acquisition experience
  • Fast-paced work ethic; able to move quickly and autonomously
  • High ownership mentality; proactive in identifying and solving problems
  • Strong outbound instincts for cold outreach and candidate engagement
  • Excellent written communication skills to set the tone for candidate experience
  • Highly organized and able to manage multiple roles and stakeholders under pressure
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and building processes from the ground up
  • Ambitious and willing to invest time for rapid career growth

Responsibilities

  • Own and manage Clark's recruiting pipeline for active roles
  • Source candidates directly for engineering, AI, GTM, CS, infrastructure, and audit-domain positions
  • Build and maintain hiring trackers, recruiting cadence, and weekly reports for founders
  • Design and refine the interview process including scorecards and feedback loops
  • Manage external recruiting firms, ensuring quality and efficiency
  • Coordinate candidate interviews, feedback, and communication from start to finish
  • Create sourcing strategies for challenging technical and domain-specific roles
  • Track hiring metrics such as conversion rates and bottlenecks in the hiring funnel

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and meaningful early-stage equity
  • Comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision coverage
  • Unlimited PTO with an emphasis on actually taking time off
  • Wellhub Platinum membership for gym and wellness access
  • Daily dinner provided for onsite employees
  • Access to high-quality equipment and tools to enhance productivity
  • Opportunity for direct involvement in defining a new category and clear career progression towards leading talent acquisition
Full Job Description
The Role

We're hiring our Founding Recruiter - Clark's first dedicated recruiting owner.

You'll land early, run every hiring wave, and protect hiring velocity from day one. There is no process to inherit: you'll build the tracker, the cadence, the sourcing motion, and the candidate experience from scratch, and you'll own them.

This is deliberately a role for someone early in their career who wants far more scope than their years of experience would normally get them. You will not be scheduling interviews for someone else's pipeline. You will be sitting with our founders and hiring managers, deciding how Clark hires, and closing candidates yourself.

If you do this well, you grow into leading the talent function. That's the intended path, not a vague possibility.

Why This Role Matters

Hiring is one of Clark's most important priorities. We're entering a phase where engineering, customer success, sales, infrastructure, and domain expertise all need to scale in parallel. Every week of hiring slippage is a week of product and revenue slippage.

Your job is to turn hiring from a scramble into a repeatable operating system.

What You'll Do
  • Own Clark's recruiting pipeline across all active roles
  • Source candidates directly across engineering, AI, GTM, CS, infrastructure, and audit-domain roles
  • Build and run the hiring tracker, recruiting cadence, and weekly reporting to the founders
  • Design and improve our interview process - scorecards, loops, feedback discipline
  • Manage external recruiting firms and hold them to quality and velocity
  • Coordinate interviews, feedback loops, and candidate communications end to end
  • Build sourcing strategies for hard-to-fill technical and domain roles
  • Track conversion, bottlenecks, and hiring risk across the funnel
  • Help close exceptional candidates by tailoring the Clark narrative to what actually motivates them


Who You Are
  • 2-5 years of recruiting, sourcing, or talent acquisition experience - in-house or agency
  • Genuinely fast. You move in hours, not days, and you don't need to be chased
  • High ownership. When something is broken you fix it or flag it, you don't route around it
  • Strong outbound instincts - you're comfortable cold-reaching senior people and writing outreach that gets replies
  • Excellent written communication. You'll be the first human a candidate meets and you'll set the bar for how Clark reads
  • Organized under pressure - many roles, many stakeholders, nothing dropped
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and building from zero. There is no playbook here yet; you're writing it
  • Ambitious about growing quickly, and willing to put in the hours to earn it
  • Build AI Agents to help you do your job better


How We Work - Read This Part

We want to be straightforward about the environment so you can decide if it's for you:
  • Fully onsite. Five days a week, in person. This is not a hybrid or remote role and we won't make an exception. We think the speed we're moving at requires being in the same room.
  • High intensity. We work long hours, including some evenings. Not as performance - because there's more to do than there is time, and we care about winning. If you want a predictable 9-to-5, this will make you miserable, and we'd rather tell you now.
  • Flat and fast. You'll have direct access to the founders and almost no layers between you and a decision.
  • Real ownership, early. Which also means real accountability. The results are yours.


Compensation & Benefits
  • Competitive salary and meaningful early-stage equity
  • Comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision
  • Unlimited PTO - and we mean it; you're expected to actually take time off
  • Wellhub Platinum membership (gyms, studios, wellness apps)
  • Dinner covered every night you're in the office
  • Top-tier equipment and whatever tooling makes you faster
  • A front-row seat at a company defining a new category - and a clear path into leading talent at Clark


Bonus, Not Required
  • Experience recruiting engineering, AI, infrastructure, or platform talent
  • Experience recruiting GTM or customer success roles
  • Experience at an early-stage startup
  • Experience working with or managing recruiting agencies
  • Experience recruiting hybrid domain/product roles

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