The Role
You’ll own the recruitment function end-to-end — not a team, but the system that several teams run inside. The hard part isn’t volume; it’s making delivery predictable. You’re accountable for conversion at every stage of the funnel, for variance that doesn’t swing week to week, and for the speed at which an open role becomes a candidate who actually starts and stays. You manage leaders, not individual recruiters, which means your leverage is in how well you calibrate, coach, and hold a quality bar — not in how much you personally execute.
About the Operation
This is an AI-native recruitment operation inside a global IT staff augmentation business — one of the few players running production AI tooling in the actual hiring workflow, not as a demo. Recruitment here is a revenue engine, not a back-office cost center, which is why the role carries function-level ownership rather than middle-management scope. The operation is mid-transformation: real teams are already delivering for real clients, and the work is scaling what already runs rather than building from zero.
The tooling environment: You’ll work with a production AI layer built into the recruitment workflow and a modern Ashby ATS. You don’t need to build the tech — you need to be a fluent consumer of it: comfortable enough with AI-augmented tooling to see when the tech layer is under-delivering and say so. Process design, conversion engineering, and capacity modeling at the function level are part of the daily reporting fluency expected here.
What You’ll Be Doing
Own function-level conversion across the full funnel — sourcing, screening, presentation, offer, start — and build performance management around ratios, predictability, and time-to-quality-delivery rather than raw activity counts
Set the strategy for the client portfolio: which relationships to deepen, how to develop them, and the single quality bar every client interaction is held to across teams
Take escalations on high-stakes client situations and lead renewal and expansion conversations with key accounts — team leads run the day-to-day touchpoints, you set direction and step in when stakes are high
Manage several team leads plus a specialized capability function — performance, calibration, and growth of leaders, not direct oversight of every recruiter beneath them
Make the capacity calls: team sizing, hiring approvals, how the client portfolio is distributed across teams, and when to scale
Run quality supervision across every layer of delivery — candidate experience, screening conduct, presentation quality — through calibration standards and post-mortem discipline
Own function-level KPI reporting to leadership and maintain the governance protocols (quality framework, escalation paths, performance reviews) the function operates under
What We Expect
Must-have
8+ years in tech recruitment / talent acquisition on a senior leadership track.
Multi-team management experience — you’ve managed 3+ team-lead-level reports plus a specialty function. This is management of leaders, not direct management of 10+ recruiters
A conversion and funnel mindset: throughput thinking, bottleneck analysis, leading indicators. If your instinct is volume-first, this isn’t the role
Strategic capacity management — team sizing, hiring approvals, scaling decisions made under real constraints
Strong governance discipline — calibration, post-mortems, quality frameworks that hold across teams
English at C1+ for senior client and leadership situations
Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish for internal team communication (the team is international)
Leadership style we’re hiring for
Collaborative and explicitly anti-toxic — cultural fit is non-negotiable here
Autonomy-oriented: you grow the independence of your team leads and capability leads rather than routing every decision through yourself
Owner mentality — you arrive with a diagnosis and an action plan, not a list of problems
Comfortable making decisions under ambig
