Head of Talent

Head of Talent

Location: New York, NY, onsite 5 days per week

Role type: Full time

Reports to: President

Why this role exists now

Flowcode builds the infrastructure that turns real world touchpoints into measurable, actionable first party IDs, enabling F500 brands to personalize consumer experiences at scale.

One of Flowcode’s founding principles is “the product is the team, and the team is the product.” We treat hiring with the same level of rigor we apply to product development. We have an extremely high hiring bar (the “pinhole process”), which to date we have applied by brute force. Our CEO, President and our executive team each personally read resumes, sit on interview loops, and close candidates. It works. But it also means our hiring speed is capped by the calendars of the ten busiest people in the company, and our pipeline stops the moment one promising candidate appears. The same principle applies after someone signs. The people we fight to hire need to be onboarded, developed, managed well and retained. Today those systems are spread across too many owners. This role brings them under one leader.

We are not hiring a coordinator, a req-filler, or an HR generalist who also does some recruiting. We are hiring the person who owns the talent bar, the pipeline and the close, and who owns the People foundation that makes great hires stay great. You are relentless in your proactive pursuit of top 1% talent, and you never consider the pipeline “good enough.” You are just as relentless about making Flowcode a place where exceptional people do their best work and grow.

What you own

Talent Acquisition

• The talent bar: You define, in writing, what "top 1%" means for each function at Flowcode, with calibrated scorecards and interview questions - and you hold the line when a hiring manager, or anyone else at the company, including the executive team, wants an exception.
• An always-on pipeline: You do not just open requisitions when a seat empties. You have named, warm, mapped talent for our most critical roles at all times, including seats that are currently filled.
• Outbound and referral as the default: Job boards produce volume; direct sourcing and referrals produce our best people. You flip the mix and you own the referral engine.
• Velocity: You compress the distance between "we met someone exceptional" and "they signed" from weeks to days.
• Data enablement: You own every metric and SLA in the recruiting funnel, including time to hire, time to fill and offer acceptance rate.
• The close: You personally run the final mile on every senior hire: comp framing, competing offers, partner and relocation objections, start dates.
• Agency strategy and spend: You minimize agency spend where possible, run the search-firm bench, and drive blended cost per hire down.
• A defensible process: Pay ranges in every posting, structured and consistent interviews, clean records in Greenhouse, and hiring decisions we can stand behind.

People Operations

• Employee lifecycle: You own and continuously improve the processes and systems that support employees from offer through offboarding.
• Onboarding through to productivity: Your scoreboard does not stop at signature. You run a consistent, organized onboarding and offboarding experience and work cross functionally to ensure a fast ramp to productivity.
• PEO and HRIS: You own day-to-day administration, data accuracy and optimization of our HR systems and PEO relationship.
• Benefits: You run benefits administration, annual enrollment, vendor relationships, employee communications and day-to-day benefits questions.
• Performance reviews: You plan and run company-wide review cycles, including timelines, systems, communications, manager support and completion tracking.
• People data: You track and analyze People metrics (retention, regretted attrition, eNPS, time to productivity) and bring the trends to leadership with a point of view.
• People, board and executive communications: You own internal communications for People programs, policies, benefits, performance cycles and organizational updates, and you support People-related board reporting and executive initiatives.

Employee Experience and Internal Operations

• Office Manager leadership: You will manage and develop Flowcode’s Office Manager, setting priorities and giving them the room to own day-to-day operations and the experience of our Soho office.
• Employee listening: You own our employee feedback strategy, including eNPS and other surveys, and you lead the eNPS working group to turn themes into owners and action.
• All Hands: You own the planning and execution of company-wide All Hands meetings, including agenda, stakeholder coordination, communications and logistics.
• Company offsites: You lead the strategy, planning and execution of company offsites and team-building experiences that strengthen alignment, culture and connection.
• Recognition and appreciation: You build programs that recognize employees and strengthen the Flowcode experience, including recognition initiatives, swag and celebrations.
• Cross-functional initiatives: You partner with Finance, Legal, IT and leadership on company-wide initiatives that affect our people and organization.

Your first-year scorecard

This is what we will grade you on at your first annual review.

Area

Outcome

Target

Deadline

Talent Acquisition

Hires landed against plan

100% of committed seats filled, with zero bar exceptions granted without written Trident sign-off

Month 12

Talent Acquisition

New-hire success

≥ 95% of your hires rated "would hire again" by their manager at 90 days

Ongoing

Talent Acquisition

Role open → signed offer

≤ 30 days GTM and ops; ≤ 45 days engineering; ≤ 45 days executive

By month 6

Talent Acquisition

Offer acceptance rate

≥ 95%

By month 6

Talent Acquisition

Sourced + referred share of hires

≥ 60% by month 6, ≥ 75% by month 12

Month 6 / 12

Talent Acquisition

Referral engine

≥ 25% of hires come from employee referrals, with ≥ 30% of employees submitting at least one

Month 9

Talent Acquisition

Agency dependency

External agency fees down 50% year over year at equal or better hire quality

Month 12

Talent Acquisition

Executive time per hire

Executive hours per hire cut in half, with no drop in quality of hire

Month 6

Talent Acquisition

Warm bench

Ten named, warm candidates for each of our ten most critical seats, refreshed monthly

Month 3

People Operations

Payroll and benefits accuracy

Zero missed or late payroll runs; open enrollment completed on time with 100% participation or documented waiver

Ongoing

People Operations

Performance review cycle

100% of reviews completed on schedule, with calibrated ratings delivered to leadership

Each cycle

People Operations

Onboarding

Documented onboarding plan for every function; every new hire fully set up (systems, equipment, 30/60/90 plan) on day one

Month 3

People Operations

Policies and SOPs

Core People policies and SOPs documented, current and published in one place

Month 6

Employee Experience

Engagement

eNPS measured at least twice a year, with a published action plan and named owners after each survey

Month 6

Employee Experience

Retention

Regretted attrition tracked monthly and reported to leadership with root causes

Month 3

What we are looking for

Must have:

• 7+ years in People & Talent, including at least two years leading talent at a company between 50 and 500 people. You have recruited into both go-to-market and engineering.
• Hands-on ownership of People operations at a growing company: PEO and HRIS administration, payroll, benefits and performance review cycles. You have run these yourself, not only overseen them.
• You have personally closed senior hires that other good companies also wanted. Not "managed a process" - personally closed.
• You run your funnel like a revenue pipeline - stage conversion, coverage ratios, source yield, cost per hire - and you can defend those numbers to an executive team that will read every one of them.
• You have been a trusted partner to managers on performance issues and difficult conversations, with the judgment to know when to bring in Legal.
• You are AI-native in practice, not in vocabulary. You have built sourcing, screening, research or People-ops workflows with AI tooling, and you can show us what they produced.
• You write and communicate clearly and effectively.
• You will be in our New York office. This is an in-person job at an in-person company.

Strong fit signals:

• You have competed against Google, Meta, OpenAI or a well-funded Series C for the same person and won on mission and slope rather than on cash.
• You have told a hiring manager “no” on their favorite candidate, stood by it, and been proven right.
• You have built a referral program that produced a quarter or more of total hires, rather than one that produced a Slack channel.
• You have recruited inside a company where the executive team is deeply involved in hiring and made that an advantage instead of a bottleneck.
• You have hired ahead of need - mapped and warmed a market months before the req existed.
• You have managed an office or workplace function, or led a direct report who did.
• You have planned company offsites or All Hands that people still talk about.

Please do not apply if:

• Your strongest work product is a process diagram rather than a list of people you hired.
• You need a built-out employer brand function, a content team and a six-person pod before you can produce hires.
• You see payroll, benefits and office operations as beneath the role. At our stage they are part of it.
• You are looking for remote or hybrid.
• You measure yourself in reqs closed rather than in who is still excellent and growing two years later.

Three things you should know

• Our executive team is intensely involved in hiring and is going to stay that way. You need to be the person who makes that a weapon rather than a constraint.
• You will be hands-on for at least two quarters - sourcing, screening, backup scheduling, running payroll and benefits - with the Office Manager as your only direct report before you get any additional headcount. The team comes after proof, and all leaders at Flowcode are expected to be player coaches.
• You are inheriting real gaps: scheduling drag, uneven scorecard discipline, a pipeline that pauses when one candidate looks promising, and People processes that have grown up piecemeal. You are responsible for closing those gaps and building a world class Talent & People function.

Compensation

• Compensation: $200,000 - $225,000 base salary, plus performance bonus and equity.