Head of Talent

Hellyeah AI•San Francisco, CA

17h•Onsite

About The Position

Hellyeah AI is hiring a Head of Talent to own how the company identifies, attracts, evaluates, and closes candidates. The role is hands-on: the successful candidate will run searches from day one, define role requirements with hiring managers, build named candidate maps, and personally pursue strong candidates—often people who are not actively looking. The role reports to the CTO and works directly with the founders; hiring managers make hiring decisions, while the Head of Talent ensures decisions are based on good evidence and candidates are successfully closed. This is a technical recruiting role, not recruiting operations or people operations. The company already uses AI agents to support sourcing, outreach, candidate movement, and work-sample scoring. The Head of Talent will own the agents’ priorities and guardrails, debug failures by reading logs and code, and either make small changes with coding agents or specify larger changes with engineers. The role also owns hiring-process quality, interviewer training, candidate experience, recruiting visibility, and the company’s public-facing recruiting work with founders. Payroll, benefits, and HR policy are owned by someone else. The position is onsite five days a week. Long days may be expected while closing a candidate, and searches may last months without resulting in a hire. Founders remain deeply involved in hiring, and the Head of Talent will share the work with them, including when there are disagreements. The company’s process includes a paid work trial before an offer. In the first 90 days, the Head of Talent will scope the top five open roles and rewrite or close them, create named maps for the top three searches including teammate networks, get a sourcing agent to surface previously unknown candidates whom hiring managers want to meet, close a self-sourced hire through a designed process, improve a hiring agent with a measurable time-saving fix on a live search, and record sources and publish weekly search updates.

Requirements

A record of personally making hires, most of them senior hires in engineering, research, or AI.
Personal experience closing senior candidates who were not looking and had apparently stronger options, with the ability to explain the approach.
Experience mapping a market manually and showing how candidate names led to hires.
Experience scoping roles with hiring managers and changing what they were hiring for.
Experience putting recruiting automation into live use, either by building it or driving its development with engineers; must be able to run, explain, and change the automation.
Ability to finish work independently without being chased, with founders who can attest to this.
A strong network in San Francisco or Shanghai and a credible plan for reaching the other market.
Technical depth to read code and logs, debug a failed agent run with an engineer, and engage in substantive technical conversations with senior engineers.
Ability to write specifications that engineers or coding agents can build from and to test the resulting work.
Curiosity about the business and ability to explain how a particular hire affects company growth.
Offer-crafting ability, including understanding equity, competing offers, and market expectations.
Daily use of coding agents and clear principles about what agents should not do with candidates.
Confidence to tell a founder no and explain the reasoning.
Experience managing several live searches at once, recognizing when work is starting to slip, and continuing to treat candidates with care.
Written English suitable for daily work with teammates in the United States, China, and India.
Working Chinese for the Shanghai seat.

Nice To Haves

Built a recruiting function from scratch at a fast-growing startup.
Executive search experience.
Hired in both San Francisco and Shanghai.
Worked as an engineer or conducted technical screens.
Designed work samples or paid work trials.
Experience with Clay, ATS APIs, or similar tools that have been extended or customized.
Chinese language ability for the San Francisco seat.

Responsibilities

Agree with hiring managers on ranked skills and experience, role purpose, and success criteria before candidate conversations begin.
Challenge hiring managers or founders when a role is vague, mis-leveled, or not worth opening.
Decide which searches to run directly and which to assign to agencies or contractors.
Build named candidate maps for priority roles by researching public work, consulting trusted people, using personal networks, and identifying recurring candidates.
Regularly review teammates’ networks with them, follow up on potential referrals, and operate referrals as a system.
Pursue strong candidates through warm introductions and continued conversations, sometimes over weeks or months.
Design candidate-specific processes, including interview participants, work, and in-person meetings or meals.
Close candidates by understanding and addressing their motivations, handling competing offers, moving quickly when they are ready, and staying in touch until their first day.
Maintain positive relationships with candidates who are not hired so they remain willing to refer others.
Set hiring-agent responsibilities, measures, and limits on actions that require human approval.
Read agent logs and code, diagnose failed runs, and coordinate or implement fixes.
Build small agent changes with coding agents; write specifications with engineers for larger changes, test them on live searches, and maintain the resulting systems.
Use agents to map markets, trace professional connections, and prepare briefs explaining candidates’ relevance; assess agents based on hires rather than message volume.
Use agents to help earn candidate conversations while personally conducting those conversations.
Work with hiring managers on work samples, AI-open assessments, and paid work trials.
Validate agent scores against human assessments and actual outcomes.
Train interviewers and ensure hiring decisions are made within a day of the final interview.
Track the source of each hire and provide founders and hiring managers with a visible view of each search and its status.
Hold hiring managers accountable for their responsibilities in the hiring process.
Work with founders on public writing and events that attract relevant candidates.