The role

The one thing: build the team that builds Wispr.

We're around 80 people today, growing to 250 by the end of the year. The people you hire this year will outnumber everyone currently here two to one. The 250-person Wispr does not exist yet (i.e. you are making it).

You'll come in as a hands-on player and coach: sourcing and closing candidates yourself from the beginning, while hiring your own recruiting team, and you'll be in the room for every leadership hire. You'll report directly to the founders and work daily with hiring managers across ML research, product engineering, sales, marketing, and G&A.

What's fun is...your job is made of the thing we sell. A talent leader's day is conversations: pitches, screens, debriefs, follow-ups, notes. Our product turns speech into finished work. You'll run your craft on Wispr, your feedback will shape our roadmap, and every candidate will watch you use the product they're being recruited to build.

What the role looks like in practice

• Personally source, pitch, and close senior candidates, including people who have no business looking: a researcher at a frontier lab, a former founder, a staff engineer with four competing offers
• Build the talent org itself from first principles, pairing a small senior team with real AI leverage, much of it built down the hall
• Hire and lead an exceptional recruiting team, holding your own hires to the same bar you hold candidates
• Instrument the pipeline like an operator: pass-through rates, source effectiveness, time to offer, offer accept. You find the bottleneck before it finds you
• Coach hiring managers to be great interviewers and closers, and push back, on them and on the founders, when a candidate isn't exceptional
• Craft the candidate experience the way our designers craft the first five minutes of Flow: people should feel understood, and even the ones we don't hire should tell their friends about the process
• Partner with the exec team on employer brand: how the world sees Wispr as the place to do the best work of your life, and how that story reaches people before we ever reach out
• Design creative, competitive offers and navigate the hard closes: unvested equity, competing offers, non-standard structures

What you won't be doing

• Installing the playbook from your last company - we can do better
• Managing a vendor bench that is "ok"
• Waiting for reqs to move through three layers of approval - we move with rigor and intensity to get to an answer in days not weeks
• When our process is broken, you'll say so, and you'll be thanked for it

The bar

We hire people their former employers are still trying to get back. That's the standard for everyone we bring in, it's the standard for this role, and once you're here, it's the standard you'll hold for the whole company.

Who you are

• You can articulate the difference between a strong hire and an exceptional one, and you can tell them apart in a 45-minute conversation
• Candidates trust you. You're perceptive about what people actually want, not what they say in a screening call, and candidates you didn't close still send you referrals
• You sell with empathy. You can pitch a frontier-lab researcher and a first sales hire with equal credibility because you understood them first
• You have stories about improbable closes and the creativity behind them
• Great recruiters want to work for you, and some would follow you here
• You think in systems and data. You've scaled hiring through hypergrowth and know exactly where funnels break between 100 and 1000 people
• You make hiring managers better, and you tell founders hard truths about their own process
• You see employer brand as a compounding asset and want a seat in shaping it, not just amplifying it
• You'll be a genuine power user of Flow. A head of talent who doesn't love the product shows it to every candidate

Why this role, why now?

Many head of talent roles hand you a system someone else built and ask you to keep it running. This one asks you to architect the human operating system of a company that triples this year, at one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, at the exact moment every hire compounds. It's probably the most important role we hire for this year.