Description
Every company faces hiring challenges that never get resolved. The role requiring six distinct competencies in a single individual, located in a remote geography. The opportunity with competitive compensation, yet insufficient to outbid other offers. The on-site mandate that eliminates most otherwise-qualified candidates. Most organizations allow these requisitions to remain open indefinitely or assign additional recruiters. This position was designed to resolve them.
You will own these challenges directly. No direct reports, no established methodology to follow. These searches prove difficult because candidate availability is severely limited, work arrangements eliminate otherwise-interested talent, or compensation packages are competitive but not market-leading. Your responsibility is identifying the approach others overlooked. Most stakeholders are senior executives holding firm preferences and incompatible requirements; some have entirely abandoned confidence in skills-based hiring. You maintain your position with both groups and substantiate decisions through rigorous documentation.
The remainder of the role involves preventing problem recurrence. You will apply AI daily and develop custom solutions when encountering repeated obstacles, completing them within hours rather than submitting tickets that take weeks. Anything with broad applicability transfers to engineering for production hardening. Few talent acquisition positions allow you to implement solutions directly. This role requires it.
We prefer to be direct now rather than waste your time. This position is not appropriate if:
- You require established processes before taking action.
- Being well-regarded matters more to you than delivering results.
- Extensive stakeholder documentation depletes your energy.
- You expect complete requests on arrival, with external systems tracking outstanding items.
If that description sounds like your ideal environment, continue reading. By year-end, you will have closed searches others considered impossible, earned direct requests from executives, and deployed tools you built rapidly that remain operational across the organization.
Our application process demands genuine effort, reflecting the work itself. If this description increased your interest, submit your application.
What you will be doing
- Resolving the organization's most difficult requisitions: limited candidate markets, process deviations, previously unsuccessful searches, and stakeholders with divergent objectives.
- Bringing executive stakeholders with incompatible criteria to unified decisions, and restoring confidence with those who have lost trust, calibrated with leadership guidance.
- Correcting the underlying system failures: assessments no longer differentiating strong from weak candidates, AI evaluation criteria that have degraded, or job descriptions attracting inappropriate audiences.
- Creating targeted solutions within hours using Claude Code, Skills, Lovable, and MCPs (Model Context Protocol servers), then transferring anything with broad application to engineering for production hardening.
- Delivering pipeline diagnostics, compensation benchmarking, and market analysis that executives can implement immediately.
- Resolving inquiries that arrive incomplete: a first name only, no role specified, a partially recalled candidate. You determine the intended subject and maintain accountability for all outstanding commitments on both sides until resolution.
What you will NOT be doing
- Conducting resume screening or initial candidate interviews
- Waiting for stakeholders to initiate status inquiries
- Leading a team, conducting performance evaluations, or managing headcount allocation
- Recreating the same temporary solution for each new requisition
- Permitting hiring requests that violate compliance or introduce risk to proceed without challenge
- Operating under close supervision or following detailed procedural instructions
Key responsibilities
Close searches that no other member of the organization can successfully complete.
Candidate requirements
- 8+ years in recruiting, talent acquisition, or executive search, with recent years focused primarily on difficult-to-fill or executive-level requisitions.
- Difficult-to-fill searches have constituted your standard workload, managed end-to-end from intake through closure, not occasional exceptions.
- Successfully closed searches that another recruiter or external firm had previously failed to fill, where you developed the strategy rather than executing an existing methodology.
- Engaged directly with executive decision-makers as the accountable owner, and maintained a documented position when facing disagreement.
- Designed or modified a hiring assessment based on outcome data, not merely administered one created by others.
- Apply AI tools daily and can identify a deliverable you created with them within the past three months. Building custom solutions with Claude Code, low-code platforms, or agentic workflows carries more weight than using finished products.
- Generated compensation benchmarking or market-sizing analysis for executive consumption.
- Directly accountable for identifying US hiring compliance risks: pay bands, worker classification, or pay transparency regulations.
- Authored documentation that others utilized: an SOP, process document, or post-mortem analysis.
- At least 6 hours per weekday overlapping US business hours.
Nice to have
- Refined a system through multiple iterations based on actual performance or retention data, not a single development cycle.
- Talent acquisition or executive search experience within a private equity or venture-backed operator, or a multi-business holding company.
- Served as the escalation point for other recruiters' stalled searches.
Applying for a role? Here’s what to expect.
Crossover's skill assessment process combines innovative AI power with decades of human research, to take the guesswork, human bias, and pointless filters out of recruiting high-performing teams.
Chat-style screening interview.
Cognitive aptitude test.
Prove real-world job skills.
Interview with the hiring manager.
Pass proctored test.
Accept job offer.
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Shortlist by skills, not bias
We don’t care where you went to school, what color your hair is, or whether we can pronounce your name. Just prove you’ve got the skills.
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