Founding Recruiter

Job description

You own hiring at Swans. We are a dozen people today and need to be thirty-plus by the end of 2027, across nearly every function we have. You will not be handed a pipeline or a playbook. Both are yours to build. - Compensation: €65,000 base, plus a performance bonus of up to €20,000, plus stock options on a 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff. Same band wherever you live. - Location: fully remote, with your day overlapping European hours enough to work closely with the team, with quarterly in-person team meetups. - Reports to: Max, our CEO. No layer in between. - Process: five stages, and we move fast. First call to offer inside two weeks. ABOUT SWANS Swans is turning a law firm from a firm that uses software into a firm whose operations run themselves. Not software people use to do the work: software that does the work. We sell to US personal-injury firms, the plaintiff side, representing people who have been injured. The work is high-volume, admin-heavy and almost entirely mechanical, and today it is done by hand at every firm in the country. A claim that stalls for four months is a real person not being paid. Two things make it hard. First, running a firm's daily operations means surviving messy data, disconnected legacy systems, cases that run for months waiting on hospitals, insurers and government offices, and actions that cannot be undone. That is where most enterprise AI fails. Second, making it work at every firm rather than one. Every firm does the same work differently, and the industry's only answer is to embed a forward-deployed engineer inside the customer to map it by hand. Palantir invented the role, and the frontier labs are now betting billions on it. We do that work by hand inside some of the largest PI firms in the US, and we are building the platform that makes it repeatable. Our custom work is already in production. At one client firm, our workflows now run the whole claims department, taking out an estimated 30-50% of its workload. We work with US personal-injury firms of 500+ staff, we are closing seven-figure contracts, and we are profitable inside our first two years. We are also investor-backed. Founders: Max Stulz (CEO), previously COO of a law firm he took from near-bankrupt to 15% profitability, and Martin Kravchenko (CTO), previously CTO and equity partner at a law firm now on track for a nine-figure exit in under three years. The business already works. What does not exist yet is the team that builds and delivers the product, and that is what you are here to hire. THE ROLE Roughly twenty hires over the next eighteen months, across profiles that have almost nothing in common: - Product engineers. Senior, AI-native, building the platform from an empty repo. - Legal engineers. Our client-facing engineers, embedded inside law firms doing the mapping by hand. Technical and genuinely sociable, a rare combination that is mostly not sitting on a job board. - Onboarding and delivery. The people who get a new firm live and make the change stick. - Client success, consultants and support. The layer that keeps firms successful once they are live. - The company backbone. Marketing, an executive assistant, event planning, and in time recruiters working for you. You report to Max, our CEO, and you build the recruiting function from nothing: process, tooling, and in time your own team. WHAT THE WORK ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE So you can judge this now rather than in week two. On the high-inbound roles: - Roughly 100 CVs on a heavy screening day, at about 90 seconds each. That is two and a half hours. - Up to 10 intro calls in a day when a funnel is running hot. - Roughly 1 in 10 of those calls advances, with a written read attached: name, comp expectations, availability, location, the call recording, and your point of view. - Then the second and third interviews on the ones that advance, which are yours to run. Product engineering inverts all of it. Almost nothing useful arrives on its own, the pool is small, and one strong candidate can take weeks of outbound and several conversations. You will be doing both in the same week and the balance shifts constantly. Sourcing is mostly outbound and mostly yours. You will have LinkedIn Recruiter, Wellfound, and budget for wherever else a profile lives. Ashby is our ATS and you own it. Every week you collect feedback, calibrate against it, and get sharper. You own the outcome, not the activity. THE HARDEST PART: FINDING ENGINEERS NOBODY ELSE CAN FIND Our one non-negotiable technical screen is AI-nativeness, and it is not "uses Claude Code daily". It means an engineer who builds the system that builds the product: what they know goes into the codebase as the infrastructure their AI agents run inside, so a class of mistake gets retired once instead of corrected every time it reappears. The people who genuinely work this way have artifacts to show for it. The people who do not are often the most fluent talkers about it, and have nothing to show. Fluency is the false signal, which is exactly why this cannot be screened off a CV. You do not need to be technical for this, and assessing candidates' code is not part of the job. That said, if you come from an engineering background and want to bring it to bear, there is room for that. What you will do is find these people in a small pool, mostly not looking, and get them to take a call with a company they have never heard of. That is the hardest single thing in this job and it is nearly all outbound. Being credible for the ten minutes it takes to get a reply means learning enough of the vocabulary to sound like someone worth answering. WHAT WE NEED - End-to-end ownership. You have run hiring loops yourself, from sourcing to offer, without a big team holding your hand. Ideally at a startup where you juggled multiple profiles and five or six open roles at once. - Outbound sourcing that works. You have gone after people who were not looking and got them to reply. Volume alone is not the skill: the message is. - Speed and a trial-and-error instinct. You move fast, test approaches, and do not get precious about process. - Sharp judgment on people. You can read a CV and a fifteen-minute call and form a defensible point of view. You are comfortable making the call and standing behind it. - Strong written and spoken English. Your write-ups have to be crisp and synthesized, and you have to run interviews smoothly and confidently. - Startup DNA. You thrive in ambiguity, you are flexible, and shifting priorities energize you rather than rattle you. - Ambition and trajectory. You have grown fast so far and you are hungry to keep doing it. IDEAL BACKGROUND - At least 3 years of recruiting or talent experience, preferably at a startup. How fast you have grown matters more than how long you have been doing it. - Evidence of going well beyond what anyone asked of you. Excelling at university while running five things on the side counts. So does anything else that shows real agency: something you built, ran, fixed or sold that nobody told you to. - Hiring across a range of roles rather than one narrow function. We are not looking for the specialist who spent eight years recruiting one type of engineer. We want a generalist athlete. THIS ROLE WILL NOT BE A FIT IF - You want a typical 9/5 job. In this role you are NOT assessed on "doing work" and killing time, but rather on driving real results and doing whatever it takes. - You want a slow, low-volume desk. Read the numbers above again. - You need a playbook handed to you, or you only recruit one function. You will build the process as you go, and hire engineers one week and an executive assistant the next. - You avoid making calls. Your entire value is your judgment and your willingness to put a stake in the ground on a candidate. - You only want to source. Handing off every candidate at the intro call is not this job. You run full loops, and over time that includes the engineering ones. WHAT YOU GET - Stock options, 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. - A bonus you help design. The scorecard behind the €20,000 does not exist yet. You build it with Max in your first month, which means you are not being measured against a target somebody set without you. - Fully remote, same band wherever you live, with quarterly in-person team meetups. Recently Barcelona and Lisbon, next Tokyo and London. - Direct partnership with the founders. You shape every key hire and build the recruiting function from the ground up. - A clear path to Head of Talent as Swans scales and you build your own team. - Real money on getting better: executive coaching, conferences, certifications and training. Over $200,000 across the team last year. - Whatever hardware and tooling you need, AI usage included and uncapped. OUR MISSION The legal industry is outdated, overpriced, and structurally closed to innovation. Low-income Americans get no legal help, or not enough, for 92% of the civil legal problems that substantially affect them, and reform is blocked by laws that prohibit non-lawyers from owning or operating law firms. By equipping law firms with cutting-edge technology and world-class operations, we intend to push the industry ten years forward and deliver faster, better and more affordable legal services at scale. OUR VALUES Value alignment is not negotiable here, because you work closely with the founding team and your hires shape everything we build: - Relentless Excellence: we pursue mastery in every detail, not for perfection's sake, but because success with our clients and our mission requires it. - Radical Integrity: we choose transparency, honesty and accountability, not for virtue's sake, but because trust is the only way our work succeeds. - Sincere Care: we care enough to anticipate needs and act with empathy and intention, because genuine connection drives everything we build. Our standards are high. On our hardest roles, historically fewer than 0.5% of the candidates we see clear the bar. Holding that while filling twenty seats is the actual job. INTERVIEW PROCESS 1. Screening call, 15 minutes, with Ana, our Founder's Associate. The basics: can we communicate, and is this worth both our time. 2. Intro call, 30 minutes, with Max (CEO). Fit, compensation, location, timing. Straight answers both ways. 3. Working session, 60 minutes, with Max and Martin (CTO). We send you a real stack of CVs and the brief for one of our open roles in advance. You bring your shortlist and your written reads, we go through them together, and you run a mock intro call on us. This stage carries the most weight, because it is the job rather than a proxy for it. 4. Team conversations. Two or three short, casual chats with the people you would be hiring for. 5. Founders conversation with Max and Martin. Less an interview than a decision: where the company is going, what you want, and whether the offer works for both sides. Five stages sounds like a lot. We compress them: first call to offer inside two weeks, and you will not be waiting a week between conversations.