Head of Talent

ABOUT WISPR We're building the first voice interface a billion people use every day. Our first product, Flow, lets you talk instead of type anywhere on your computer or phone, and turns messy speech into polished text that is ready to send. It's scaled from $2M → $50M in ARR in under 12 months with millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers. How we think → https://wisprflow.ai/post/the-master-plan The team is still small enough that every person shapes what gets built. The role This is a player-coach role from day one. You'll build the talent infrastructure from the ground up while personally sourcing and closing candidates yourself. You'll report to the founders, sit in on every leadership hire, and hire your own recruiting team as you go. Your own work is also made of the thing we sell. A recruiter's day is conversations: pitches, screens, debriefs, follow-ups, notes. Wispr Flow turns all of that into finished work. You'll use the product on the job every day, your feedback will shape the roadmap, and every candidate will watch you use the thing they're being recruited to build. In practice, you'll: - Personally source and close top talent: a researcher happy at a frontier lab, a former founder, the first sales leader you'll pull out of a company where they're already winning. You'll also build the sourcing engine that finds people like them at scale. - Build a phenomenal recruiting infrastructure. Create a workflow where decisions happen on the call or within a day, so no candidate gets dropped and no req stalls. Run it like an operator, tracking pass-through by stage, source mix, time to offer, offer-accept, and forecasting so you catch bottlenecks before they become problems. - Stand up interviewer and hiring-manager training, real scorecards, and calibrated bars across ML research, product engineering, sales, marketing, and G&A, so the loop holds up whether it's your 50th hire or your 200th. Coach hiring managers to interview well, and give the founders the hard truths about their own process when they need to hear them. - Design a seven-star candidate experience, built with the same care our designers put into the first five minutes of Wispr Flow. People should feel understood, and even those we turn down should tell their friends how it felt. - Hire recruiters to your own bar. Build a team that’s a force multiplier of the Wispr talent flywheel. - Build and design real automation. Bring efficiencies into how the team works, much of it with our engineers down the hall: agents and tooling on top of our tech stack that let a small senior team do the work of a much bigger one. - Own our employer brand. Shape how the best people in the world first hear about Wispr, well before we ever reach out to them. What you won't be doing - Installing the playbook from your last company. We want first-principled thinkers who will think through the business problem first. - Managing a vendor bench that's "fine." - Playing telephone, where a hiring manager asks a recruiter who asks an agent and back again. People run their own pipelines here, and you're the one who makes that easy. - Waiting on three layers of approval. We get to an answer in days, not weeks. - Staying quiet when something's broken. You'll say so, and we'll fix it. The bar We hire people whose former employers are still trying to win back. That's the bar for everyone we bring in, including this role, and it's the bar you'll hold the whole company to once you're here. Who you are - You’ve built and scaled recruiting through hypergrowth, so you know firsthand where funnels break as a company grows from 100 to 1,000 people. - You can tell an exceptional hire from a merely strong one, and you can do it inside a 45-minute conversation. - Candidates you didn't close still send you referrals. You're good at reading what people actually want. - You have real stories about improbable closes, the kind where you found a warm path in after the front door was locked. - Y…