Founding Recruiter

Joyful Health•New York, NY

3d•$140,000 - $160,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Building the financial operating system for healthcare, and bringing the joy back to healthcare by fixing the financial chaos behind it. The healthcare payment system is a complex and inefficient maze - healthcare practices leave $125 billion in revenue uncollected each year, lost in the chaos of fragmented financial data, manual workflows, and opaque payer systems. This financial uncertainty leaves practices struggling to stay afloat, while valuable revenue slips through the cracks. Joyful Health is building the AI-powered financial operating system for healthcare practices. Our mission is to bring the joy back to running a private practice by simplifying financial operations so providers can focus on patient care. We spent 10 months working as fractional CFOs for a dozen practices, doing this work side by side with providers as we developed our product. We just closed a funding round led by world-class investors and angels including the founders of MongoDB & KAYAK. 🚀 We have an enormous opportunity in front of us. The broken healthcare payment ecosystem impacts practices of all sizes, and the opportunity to make a real difference is massive. If you're passionate about empowering medical practices and excited to tackle one of the most important (& challenging!) problems in healthcare, we'd love to meet you. Why This Role Exists Joyful Health is entering its next phase of growth. We've closed our funding round, our product is in market, and the hiring roadmap is aggressive, 10+ roles open and accelerating. Today, each team hires for their own function, and that scrappiness has built a strong foundation. But to move at the pace we need, we need someone whose entire focus is building and scaling the talent acquisition engine. The Founding Recruiter is the person who builds Joyful Health's talent engine from scratch. You'll own the entire recruiting function - sourcing, closing, employer brand, systems, and process - and do it at the speed and scrappiness of an early-stage startup while laying the foundation for a world-class team. Within 12 months, you'll grow this into a recruiting team of your own. This is not a role where you'll inherit a playbook. You'll write it. At Joyful Health, every team already runs on AI tooling and automations - it's in our DNA. We're looking for a recruiter who matches that energy and takes it even further. The right person will show us what's possible when deep recruiting expertise meets AI-native workflows, and will thrive in a culture where everyone is constantly raising the bar on what it means to work smarter. This role is full-time. We’re looking for someone NYC-based who is open to coming into the office 3 days a week. What Makes This Different Two principles define how we think about recruiting at Joyful Health: Speed is a competitive advantage, and AI is how you get it. Every team at Joyful Health already leverages AI to move faster. We're looking for someone who brings that same mindset to recruiting - someone deeply fluent in AI-powered sourcing, outreach automation, candidate evaluation, and pipeline analytics. You should be the person who's always one step ahead, showing the team what's newly possible. Recruiting is a strategic function, not a service desk. The Founding Recruiter has a seat at the table. You'll shape our hiring philosophy, influence org design conversations, and build the employer brand that attracts people who want to fix healthcare's hardest problems. Every hire you make directly shapes the DNA of this company.

Requirements

You're deeply aligned with Joyful Health's mission — You're motivated by fixing broken systems in healthcare and believe that the financial side of care delivery deserves the same innovation as the clinical side.
You've built recruiting from scratch before — 5+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup where you owned the function or were one of the first recruiting hires. You've set up an ATS, designed interview processes, and personally closed hard-to-land candidates.
You lean technical but can recruit across the board — Your strongest muscle is engineering, product, and data hiring, but you've successfully filled go-to-market, operations, and business roles too.
You're AI-native and can prove it — You don't just "use AI tools." You build automations, design AI-powered sourcing workflows, and can articulate exactly how your approach makes you 3x more productive than a traditional recruiter.
You're a closer with startup DNA — You thrive in ambiguity, move fast, take ownership, and know how to sell a vision to candidates who have multiple options. You're low-ego, high-output, and energized by building something from nothing.

Nice To Haves

You have healthcare or healthtech recruiting experience — You understand the talent landscape, the language, and what motivates people who work in this space. Not required, but a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Own full-cycle recruiting across the company: Run 10+ concurrent searches spanning engineering, product, operations, sales, marketing, and RCM. You'll lean technical but be capable across every function.
Build & optimize our recruiting infrastructure: Optimize our ATS (we like Ashby), design interview loops, create scorecards, build sourcing playbooks, and establish the metrics and reporting that let leadership see exactly where we stand on every role.
Be the most AI-forward recruiter we've ever met: Use AI tooling and automations across every stage of the funnel — sourcing, outreach personalization, screening, scheduling, pipeline analytics, and market intelligence. You should be building workflows that make a one-person recruiting team perform like a three-person one.
Build and own the employer brand: Tell Joyful Health's story in a way that makes exceptional people want to join. Own our careers page, LinkedIn presence, and candidate experience end-to-end.
Partner deeply with hiring managers: Coach founders and department leads on how to interview well, how to sell candidates, and how to close. Be the person who raises the bar on hiring quality across the company.
Grow this into a team: Within 12 months, hire and manage additional recruiters as the company scales. You're building a function, not just filling roles.