Founders' Associate

The Opportunity

This role requires in-office attendance 5 days a week (Gramercy).

The Challenge: How do you systematically win the top 1% of talent in the most competitive markets when they're not looking for jobs?

• Traditional companies outsource this problem to expensive recruiters or post jobs and pray.
• We're building something different - an internal talent acquisition engine that operates like the best sales organizations: data-driven, experimental, relentlessly optimized, and executed at scale.
• The reality: A lot of great hires come from proactive outbound outreach, not inbound applications. The candidates we need - top-tier marketers, operators, strategists - aren't scrolling job boards. This is a sales and operations problem disguised as a talent problem.

What You'll Do

• Build & Execute the Talent Acquisition Engine
• Run sophisticated Boolean searches in tools such LinkedIn Recruiter to identify high-potential candidates across different functions
• Review hundreds of profiles daily, assess fit against strategic Ideal Candidate Profiles you've built
• Manage multi-touch outreach sequences across dozens of candidates simultaneously
• Conduct quick screening calls with interested candidates to assess fit and maintain pipeline velocity
• Experiment with creative sourcing beyond LinkedIn - targeted email, Twitter/X, Slack communities, Reddit, conference lists
• Create messaging frameworks optimized for different personas - test hooks, value props, personalization approaches
• Run structured experiments: A/B test subject lines, try different outreach sequences, measure everything
• Optimize & Scale
• Build dashboards tracking the metrics that matter: response rates by message type, conversion through each funnel stage, time-to-engagement, source effectiveness
• Analyze what's working and what's not - which companies yield the best candidates? Which messages get responses? Where are bottlenecks?
• Document winning strategies into repeatable playbooks that can eventually scale beyond you
• Conduct market intelligence: where does top talent congregate? What are competitive comp packages? Who's hiring and who's laying off?
• Present insights and recommendations to leadership on talent market dynamics and acquisition strategy
• Optimize workflows and build automation where it makes sense (but know when personal touch matters more)
• Partner & Collaborate
• Work closely with the founders to understand what they need and ensure seamless candidate handoffs
• Collaborate with hiring managers to truly understand roles beyond the job description
• Train and leverage offshore sourcing support for high-volume, lower-touch searches
• Share learnings across the team and continuously raise the bar on candidate quality

What We're Looking For

• Required:
• 1-3 years in management consulting (MBB strongly preferred), strategy consulting, or top-tier strategy & operations
• Builder mentality: You're energized by creating something from scratch, even if it means doing unglamorous work initially
• Analytical + scrappy: You think in frameworks and optimize based on data, but you're also willing to hustle and do what it takes
• Exceptional written communication: You can write dozens of compelling, personalized messages daily that actually get responses
• Intellectual honesty: You're clear-eyed about trading some prestige for ownership, impact, and accelerated learning
• Resilience: Low response rates don't discourage you - they make you curious about how to improve
• Strongly Preferred:
• Experience with high-volume outbound work (sales development, growth marketing, bizdev) - you've done the grind before
• Natural curiosity about people, what motivates them, and how to craft compelling narratives
• Competitive drive - you want to win talent away from top companies
• Systems thinking - you document and systematize as you go, building toward scale
• Genuine interest in how great companies are built, organizational design, or talent strategy