Overview
You're building Cresta's talent acquisition function from the ground up as they scale. You'll hire and manage a team of recruiters, set up processes and tech stack, and personally handle executive and hard-to-fill searches. This is a player-coach role where you're both doing the work and building the machine.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Head of TA / Recruiting Leader |
| Sales Motion | N/A (Recruiting) |
| Deal Complexity | Strategic (building function) |
| Sales Cycle | N/A |
| Deal Size | N/A |
| Quota (est.) | Hiring velocity targets (X roles/quarter) |
Company Context
Stage: Series C+ (AI/Contact Center SaaS)
Size: ~200-400 employees (estimated based on growth trajectory)
Growth: Expanding go-to-market teams rapidly, likely 2-3x employee growth planned
Market Position: Well-funded player in hot AI contact center space, competing with established players and new AI entrants
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Hiring Recruiters (20%) | Executive Searches (30%) | Process/Systems (25%) | Stakeholder Management (25%)
Key Activities
- Building the Team: You'll hire 2-5 recruiters in your first year. This means sourcing, interviewing, selling candidates on Cresta, negotiating offers. You're being judged on whether your hires can actually fill roles.
- Executive Searches: You personally run VP and C-level searches. This is networking, cold outreach to passive candidates, selling the vision, coordinating 6-8 interview loops, and negotiating comp packages that often go to the board.
- Process Design: You pick the ATS, design interview formats, create scorecards, write hiring manager training. Most of this doesn't exist yet or is informal. You're deciding what good looks like.
- Firefighting: When a critical GTM role is open for 90 days, you jump in. When a hiring manager complains about candidate quality, you debug it. When the CEO wants weekly updates on VP of Sales search, you deliver them.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- You're doing two jobs: Building the function AND filling hard roles yourself. Executive searches take 3-6 months and you might have 3-4 running simultaneously while also managing your team and fixing broken processes.
- Competing for talent: Cresta is well-funded but not a household name. You're competing with OpenAI, Salesforce, and dozens of other AI companies for the same senior GTM and engineering talent. Most candidates are talking to 5+ companies.
- Unclear scope at first: In fast-growing startups, TA priorities shift every quarter. That VP Sales search becomes urgent, then gets paused. Hiring plans change. You need to stay flexible and not get precious about your perfect process.
- Metrics pressure: You'll be measured on time-to-fill, but also blamed when hiring managers reject your candidates. You're balancing speed vs. quality, and everyone has opinions on where that bar should be.
What Success Looks Like
- Hiring targets met: You hit quarterly hiring goals (likely 15-30 hires/quarter across all teams) without major misses or late starts
- Team built: You hire 3-4 recruiters who can operate independently and hiring managers trust them
- Executive searches closed: You personally close 2-3 VP+ hires per year who are still there 18 months later
- Process exists: New recruiters can onboard in 2 weeks instead of 2 months because you documented everything
Who You're Selling To
Primary Stakeholders:
- CPO (your boss) - wants metrics, no surprises, and confidence the function can scale
- CRO/VP Sales - wants GTM roles filled fast, needs to trust your recruiters understand sales
- VPE/Engineering Leaders - wants technical recruiters who can evaluate engineers, not just move paper
- CEO/Founders - want executive hires they're excited about, visibility into searches
What They Care About:
- Speed: Can you fill a VP Sales role in 60 days, not 6 months?
- Quality: Are candidates better than the last batch? Do they pass the "would I want to work with them?" test?
- Partnership: Do you push back when a job description is unrealistic? Do you educate them on market realities?
- Scalability: Will this process work when we're hiring 50 people per quarter?
Requirements
- 8+ years in talent acquisition with at least 3 years leading recruiting teams (5+ people)
- Experience building TA functions from early stage (Series A/B) through hypergrowth (Series C+)
- Track record filling executive searches (VP+) and GTM roles (AEs, SDRs, CSMs) at B2B SaaS companies
- Hands-on with recruiting tools (Greenhouse/Lever, LinkedIn Recruiter, sourcing tools) and can evaluate/implement new ones
- Comfortable being player-coach: you'll hire AND do the work yourself for the first 6-12 months
- Experience at a startup that scaled 2-3x in a year - you know what breaks and how to fix it
- Strong opinions on what good recruiting looks like, but flexible enough to adapt to Cresta's specific needs
- Comfortable reporting to senior leadership (CPO/COO level) and presenting metrics to exec team/board