Head of Talent

Job description

ABOUT WISPR We're building the first voice interface a billion people use every day. Our first product, Flow, lets you talk instead of type anywhere on your computer or phone, and turns messy speech into polished text that is ready to send. It's scaled from $2M → $50M in ARR in under 12 months with millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers. How we think → https://wisprflow.ai/post/the-master-plan The team is still small enough that every person shapes what gets built. The role You'll build the talent infrastructure from the ground up while personally sourcing and closing candidates yourself. You'll report to the founders, sit in on every leadership hire, and hire your own recruiting team as you go. In practice, you'll: - Source and close top talent: a researcher happy at a frontier lab, a former founder, the first sales leader at a winning team. - Design a seven-star candidate experience, built with the same care our designers put into the first five minutes of Wispr Flow. People should feel understood, and even those we turn down should tell their friends how it felt. - Improve our hiring process across every function so our loops hold up as we scale. You’ll coach hiring managers and give our founders the hard truths when they need to hear them. - Hire world-class recruiters. Build a team that’s a force multiplier of the Wispr talent flywheel. - Build compounding automation. Bring efficiencies into how the team works: we firmly believe that agents and internal tooling can provide a small, experienced team an incredible amount of leverage. - Own our employer brand. Shape how the best people in the world first hear about Wispr, well before we ever reach out to them. What you won't be doing - Installing the playbook from your last company. We want first-principled thinkers who will think through the business problem first. - Playing telephone, where a hiring manager asks a recruiter who asks an interviewer and back again. We hire for agency across the board. - Waiting on three layers of approval. We get to decisions in hours, not weeks. Who you are - You’ve built and scaled recruiting through hypergrowth. You’ve seen where funnels break as a company grows from 100 to 1,000 people. - You can tell an exceptional hire from a strong one and you can do it in a quick chat. - You have stories about improbable closes where most folks would have given up. - You sell by understanding people first. You can pitch a frontier-lab researcher and a first sales hire with equal credibility because you took the time to learn what each of them actually wants. - Candidates you didn't close still send you referrals. Some try to hire you at their next role. - Great recruiters want to work for you. Some would follow you here. - You make founders better, and you tell them the truth. - You’re willing to try and kill experiments, and you have a bias for simple processes that work. - You're an active user of Wispr Flow. It’ll be clear to candidates if you do not love the product and mission yourself. Why now Most Head of Talent roles hand you a system someone else built and ask you to keep it running. We want you to build this system from first principles at a company that will triple in size this year. You'll work directly with our founders and a team that's already excellent at what they do, with equity in a company that's growing fast. You’ll be the most important hire we make this year, everything stands on the team we put together as we scale. LOGISTICS Location. About 60% of the team is in San Francisco and the rest are remote, mostly US-based. - If you're in SF: you'll be in the office most days. We think the best work happens in person. Most of the team is here five days a week, and a few do three or four days depending on family or long commutes. - If you're remote: we're open to remote for some roles. We fly remote teammates to SF for three to four days a month. Visa sponsorship. We sponsor visas: H1B, O1, EB1, L1, STEM + OPT, and more. We can't successfully sponsor for every role and every candidate, but if we make you an offer we'll make every reasonable effort, and we retain an immigration law firm to help. WHAT WE OFFER We're a small, focused team that cares deeply about the quality of our work and the people we do it with. Here's what you can expect: - Equity on employee-friendly terms, including extended exercise windows and a combination of ISOs and RSUs. Ask us for more details! - Health, dental and vision. We cover 100% of the premium on the Anthem Blue Cross Gold PPO, and 75% of premiums for dependents. (US only) - 401(k) with up to a 4% match. (US only) - Flexible time off and company holidays. - All meals in the office, plus commuter benefits and relocation reimbursement if you’re moving to San Francisco. - A high-spec laptop, monitor, and a whisper-friendly microphone. - Regular team events and off-sites. - 16 weeks of paid parental leave (12 weeks for non-birthing parent). The early days with a new baby matter more than anything we're doing here, and we want you to be present for them. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We’re designing how humans interact with AI, which makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team. We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know.