Founding Head of Talent

London | Office-based, 5 days per week

The Mandate

Over the next 12 months, Searchable needs to make somewhere in the region of 25–40 critical hires across Engineering, AI, Product, GTM, and Leadership. The quality of those hires will determine whether we become the category-defining company in AI search visibility or one of several also-rans. You will own that outcome.

Searchable is building the operating system for AI search visibility, helping brands understand and influence how they appear across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and the next generation of AI-driven discovery platforms.

This is not a coordination role. You will own the strategy, you will own the sourcing, and you will own the close. You are an expert headhunter. We’re hiring the person who builds the function, sets the bar, and delivers the hires.

How You’ll Operate

This is an AI-native talent function. We expect you to operate AI at two distinct layers — and the difference between them matters.

The first layer is scale. AI does the volume work that a traditional recruiting team would hire three coordinators and a resourcer to do: candidate identification across LinkedIn, GitHub, X, podcasts, and writing; enrichment pipelines that pull every public signal on a target into a single dossier; sequence personalisation at volume via Clay plus Claude; pipeline analytics that surface bottlenecks in real time; and market mapping that lets us answer “show me every Staff-level engineer in London who has worked at a tier-1 AI company” in minutes rather than weeks. For high-volume roles, AI also runs first-stage screening, structured intake, and scheduling.

The second layer is craft. For senior hires — Staff-plus engineers, executive-level GTM, and leadership — AI deepens the human work rather than replacing it. That means per-candidate research dossiers that go beyond a CV into how the person thinks, what they’ve built, and what they care about. It means pre-outreach briefs that articulate why this person, why Searchable, and why now. It means conversation memory that lets you track every meaningful interaction with a target over months. It means bespoke first-touch outreach that reads like it took an hour to write — because it did — with AI doing the research and the writing being yours.

We want AI to handle the volume work so the human work can be obsessive. Automation is the means. Craft at the top of the funnel is the goal. If your instinct is to automate senior outbound or first-stage interviews for critical hires, you are not the right person. If your instinct is to automate every form of waste so you can spend three hours personally crafting outreach to a Principal Engineer at Anthropic, you are.

Who You Are

You’re a specialist at both ends of the talent stack. You can stand up a recruiting function from zero, design an interview process that doesn’t let mediocrity through, and run a hiring operating cadence with founders. You can also personally source, work, and close a Staff Engineer or VP-level hire without briefing an agency.

You treat hiring as a craft. You have opinions on scorecards, structured interviews, work tasks, and reference calls. You’ve been part of offer debriefs where the hiring manager wanted to extend and you’ve been the one to say no. You’ve also been the one to personally chase candidates everyone else said were un-hireable.

You believe most companies hire badly. You have a thesis on why, and you’ve spent your career proving the alternative.

What You’ll Own

• Hiring strategy and execution Translate company goals into a hiring plan, sequence roles by criticality, and run the weekly operating cadence with founders and hiring managers. Track time-to-hire, source-of-hire, conversion, and quality-of-hire with the discipline of a growth lead tracking CAC.
• Outbound and headhunting Personally source and close the hardest hires. Build campaigns, write sequences, and run pipelines that get responses from passive candidates. Develop networks across SaaS, AI, Product, Engineering, and Growth in London and internationally.
• Systems and process from zero Design scorecards, interview loops, work tasks, and assessment frameworks for every function. Select and implement the ATS, sourcing tools, AI workflows, and ops stack. Build the playbook every future hire in your function will run.
• Bar-raising Act as the final filter on every hire. Calibrate hiring managers, run debriefs, and own the recommendation at offer stage. The bar moves up over time. It never moves down.
• Employer brand and candidate experience Make Searchable a place top operators want to work, and make every candidate interaction something people talk about positively whether they get the job or not.
• Team building As we scale, hire and lead the internal talent function. Coach future recruiters to the standard you’ve set.

Must-Haves

• Six to ten or more years in recruitment or talent acquisition, with meaningful in-house experience at a high-growth SaaS, AI, or venture-backed startup.
• Demonstrable track record of personally closing senior hires from elite companies. We want to see specific names and roles, not vague claims.
• Experience building or substantially rebuilding a recruiting function from scratch or near-scratch.
• Strong outbound sourcing skills, with evidence of replies and closes from passive candidates. You can talk us through your sequences, your hit rates, and your closes.
• Comfortable hiring across the stack: Engineering, AI/ML, Product, GTM, and Leadership.
• High agency, high urgency, and complete ownership of outcomes.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience hiring for AI, ML, infrastructure, developer tooling, or technical SaaS companies.
• Existing networks across London’s AI, SaaS, Product, Engineering, and Growth ecosystems.
• Experience using AI-native recruiting workflows, enrichment tools, automation, or Clay-style outbound systems.
• Prior experience as the first talent hire in a venture-backed company.
• Experience hiring internationally or building distributed talent pipelines.

You’re Probably Not the Right Fit If

• You’re an agency recruiter who’s never operated in-house.
• You’re a coordinator who relies on agencies, inbound applications, or LinkedIn Recruiter to do the work.
• You’ve never personally written a sourcing sequence, run a debrief, or made the call on a candidate at offer stage.
• You need a fully built process to operate inside.
• You’re more comfortable managing recruiters than hiring people yourself.
• You see AI as a coordinator’s tool rather than the engine of how a modern talent function operates.

Compensation

£120k + bonus + plus meaningful equity.

Why This Role Matters

The next 12 months decide whether Searchable becomes the category-defining company in AI search visibility. The single biggest input into that outcome is who joins the team.

This is the role that decides it.