Technical sourcer

We’re a very different brand of technical recruiting agency, and we’re looking for a technical sourcer familiar with the landscape of Bay Area startups in particular. TLDR: We have a highly predictive screen, a reasonable trickle of clients, plenty of (profitable) revenue, and a decent existing candidate pool, but we simply need more candidates in the door. See our company profile for a lot more on what we do and why, we’re very different from most startups.

This is an atypical sourcer role in a number of ways:

• We don’t do spammy tactics. Not because they don’t work, but because we don’t make a world we don’t want to live in. We’ll ask you to find a smaller number of relevant candidates, not maximize volume.
• We’re open to a range of atypical backgrounds, provided you can make a case for how you would actually do the work. You do need to know what you’re doing without being taught, though. The YOE range on the posting is soft, the point is something like “you need to not be totally new at this but we don’t really care beyond that”.
• Similarly, while we do want you to focus primarily on somewhat “pitchable” candidates (e.g. people with some startup experience), we deemphasize background with our clients. If you think someone is probably great, we want you to take a bet on them.
• We’re open to highly flexible work arrangements, because pay for this role is (at least at first) commission-based. If you’re getting the work done, we don’t care (much) when or how much you do it.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Understands startup culture in particular. We are not looking for Very Senior Engineers who build Scalable Enterprise Software, we’re looking for people who want the activity, instability, low structure, and general lack of corporate artifice that characterizes startup jobs.
• Can actively identify new channels to find candidates. If we had a checklist of “here’s how to find the candidates we need”, we wouldn’t need you! This is the core of the job.
• Balances openness and compassion with realism. The fact that we’re a very anti-techbro internal culture, and trying to create a less “ingroupy” hiring process, doesn’t mean we don’t need to be realistic in our operations. There are many people worthy of human dignity who are nevertheless not people we can realistically place, and you need to be able to make that distinction.
• [Optional] Is located in SF. The company is fully remote, but since we are specifically trying to add candidates in SF, it helps to be able to go talk to them.
• [Optionally] Is at least somewhat technical. The more credibly you can speak to engineers in their language, and the less you sound like the recruiters they mostly hate, the better. Former engineers who want to do something different are very welcome!

Pay for this role would start commission-based and transition into a salaried role down the line. The range listed on the posting – since Wellfound only allows simple salary ranges – assumes you can find approximately two candidates who pass our interview per day if working full-time; whether that’s reasonable or not is anyone’s guess (there’s not really a reference value for how we do recruiting).

We’re a small company, and we’re more than happy to negotiate on a per-person basis if you’d prefer to lean one way or the other, negotiate rates, etc. We are not a typical VC-backed startup, and we don’t do equity grants; negotiate what you’re worth in good old USD, not in definitely-worth-something-in-five-years bucks.