Founding Head of Talent

Qualitate•New York, NY

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers, automating the entire primary research workflow from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis. This replaces weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output. The expert research industry is currently dominated by expensive, manual, and slow legacy incumbents. Qualitate transforms this by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI, with its AI Moderator interviewing thousands of experts simultaneously each month to capture forward-looking data. The platform converts these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, instantly queryable in natural language. Qualitate's customers include large enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms, and the company is growing fast. This role is the first dedicated recruiting hire. The Founding Head of Talent will own the entire hiring engine from day one, responsible for finding candidates, running processes, and scaling the company from approximately 25 people to over 50 by the end of 2026. The role involves building the recruiting engine from scratch, hiring across all functions including engineering, go-to-market, and operations, sourcing both individual contributors and managers. The ideal candidate can context-switch across diverse candidate profiles while maintaining the urgency of an early-stage company.

Requirements

At least 3–7+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience. You’ve sourced, screened, closed, and done it at volume.
Startup or high-growth company background required. You’ve recruited in environments where there’s no playbook, no employer brand, and no admin support – and you thrived in it.
Cross-functional range. You can recruit for a VP of Sales on Monday and a backend engineer on Wednesday. You may lean toward one area, but can adapt and learn other areas.
Sourcing as a craft. You take pride in creative recruiting outbound. You don’t wait for inbound flow. You know how to write messages that actually get responses.
Operator mindset. You think about recruiting as a system, not just a set of conversations. You’ll want to build dashboards, track conversion rates, and know your pipeline metrics cold.
High ownership, low ego. You’ll have a lot of autonomy, but you need to be someone who communicates proactively, flags problems early, and doesn’t need to be managed closely.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience recruiting for a technology startup.
You’ve been early on the recruiting team at a company and helped build the function.
Experience building out an ATS, building structured interview processes, and establishing recruiting metrics from scratch.
Bonus if you have existing relationships with strong candidates in engineering, sales, or operations roles in NYC.
Bonus if you have experience using Ashby ATS

Responsibilities

Sourcing. You’ll spend nearly half your time building candidate pipeline from scratch. You’ll use AI tools, LinkedIn Recruiter, your network, niche communities, and creative outbound channels.
Candidate engagement. Screening calls, managing interview loops, selling candidates on Qualitate, and converting offers to close. You’ll be the face of the company for every candidate who enters the funnel.
Recruiting operations. You’ll own and refine our ATS (Ashby), build candidate scorecards, establish reporting cadences, and create the infrastructure needed to hire at pace without chaos.
Stakeholder partnership. Feed hiring insights back to leadership. Your market signal directly shapes our compensation strategy, employer brand, and organizational design.
Build the playbook. Help build the recruiting playbook. As part of our founding operations team, you’ll define the interview process, offer frameworks, and onboarding workflow for every function.