The Role
Why This Role Exists

Joyful Health is entering its next phase of growth. We've closed our funding round, our product is in market, and the hiring roadmap is aggressive, 10+ roles open and accelerating. Today, each team hires for their own function, and that scrappiness has built a strong foundation. But to move at the pace we need, we need someone whose entire focus is building and scaling the talent acquisition engine.

The Founding Recruiter is the person who builds Joyful Health's talent engine from scratch. You'll own the entire recruiting function - sourcing, closing, employer brand, systems, and process - and do it at the speed and scrappiness of an early-stage startup while laying the foundation for a world-class team. Within 12 months, you'll grow this into a recruiting team of your own.

This is not a role where you'll inherit a playbook. You'll write it. At Joyful Health, every team already runs on AI tooling and automations - it's in our DNA. We're looking for a recruiter who matches that energy and takes it even further. The right person will show us what's possible when deep recruiting expertise meets AI-native workflows, and will thrive in a culture where everyone is constantly raising the bar on what it means to work smarter.

This role is full-time. We're looking for someone NYC-based who is open to coming into the office 3 days a week.

What Makes This Different

Two principles define how we think about recruiting at Joyful Health:

Speed is a competitive advantage, and AI is how you get it. Every team at Joyful Health already leverages AI to move faster. We're looking for someone who brings that same mindset to recruiting - someone deeply fluent in AI-powered sourcing, outreach automation, candidate evaluation, and pipeline analytics. You should be the person who's always one step ahead, showing the team what's newly possible.

Recruiting is a strategic function, not a service desk. The Founding Recruiter has a seat at the table. You'll shape our hiring philosophy, influence org design conversations, and build the employer brand that attracts people who want to fix healthcare's hardest problems. Every hire you make directly shapes the DNA of this company.

What you'll do...

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the company: Run 10+ concurrent searches spanning engineering, product, operations, sales, marketing, and RCM. You'll lean technical but be capable across every function.
• Build & optimize our recruiting infrastructure: Optimize our ATS (we like Ashby), design interview loops, create scorecards, build sourcing playbooks, and establish the metrics and reporting that let leadership see exactly where we stand on every role.
• Be the most AI-forward recruiter we've ever met: Use AI tooling and automations across every stage of the funnel - sourcing, outreach personalization, screening, scheduling, pipeline analytics, and market intelligence. You should be building workflows that make a one-person recruiting team perform like a three-person one.
• Build and own the employer brand: Tell Joyful Health's story in a way that makes exceptional people want to join. Own our careers page, LinkedIn presence, and candidate experience end-to-end.
• Partner deeply with hiring managers: Coach founders and department leads on how to interview well, how to sell candidates, and how to close. Be the person who raises the bar on hiring quality across the company.
• Grow this into a team: Within 12 months, hire and manage additional recruiters as the company scales. You're building a function, not just filling roles.

What Success Looks Like

In 30 days:

• Deep understanding of every open role, the team, the product, and the competitive landscape for talent
• ATS automated and optimized with structured interview loops for priority roles
• Sourcing pipelines live for the highest-priority searches
• Clear point of view on Joyful Health's employer brand positioning and a 90-day recruiting roadmap

In 90 days:

• Multiple hires closed across technical and non-technical roles
• Recruiting metrics baselined and reported to leadership (time-to-fill, pipeline velocity, source mix, offer acceptance rate)
• AI-powered workflows demonstrably improving speed and quality vs. manual approaches
• Interview training rolled out to all hiring managers
• First version of the employer brand playbook live (careers page, LinkedIn content, candidate nurture sequences)

In 6 months:

• Recruiting function operating as a strategic advantage - leadership sees talent acquisition as a core strength, not a bottleneck
• Hiring plan on track or ahead of schedule
• A recruiting team in place and ramping
• Joyful Health known in the healthcare tech talent market as a destination employer
• A measurable, data-driven case that your AI-forward approach made this team faster and leaner than the industry norm

We'd love to hear from you if...

• You're deeply aligned with Joyful Health's mission - You're motivated by fixing broken systems in healthcare and believe that the financial side of care delivery deserves the same innovation as the clinical side.
• You've built recruiting from scratch before - 5+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup where you owned the function or were one of the first recruiting hires. You've set up an ATS, designed interview processes, and personally closed hard-to-land candidates.
• You lean technical but can recruit across the board - Your strongest muscle is engineering, product, and data hiring, but you've successfully filled go-to-market, operations, and business roles too.
• You're AI-native and can prove it - You don't just "use AI tools." You build automations, design AI-powered sourcing workflows, and can articulate exactly how your approach makes you 3x more productive than a traditional recruiter.
• You have healthcare or healthtech recruiting experience - You understand the talent landscape, the language, and what motivates people who work in this space. Not required, but a strong plus.
• You're a closer with startup DNA - You thrive in ambiguity, move fast, take ownership, and know how to sell a vision to candidates who have multiple options. You're low-ego, high-output, and energized by building something from nothing.

Compensation: $140,000-$160,000 base + meaningful early-stage equity

If you're passionate about empowering practices and excited to tackle one of the most important (& challenging!) problems in healthcare, we'd love to meet you.

Please apply even if you don't meet 100% of the criteria. Nobody checks every box every time and we'd love to talk to you about how and why you can see yourself growing into this role. We're also very open to candidates with non-traditional experience.