Head of Talent

About Hellyeah AI
Hellyeah is the agentic operating system for distribution. AI agents plan, execute and optimize growth work, and humans approve it. A small team runs several live products, with coding agents as part of how we ship.

The role
You'll own how Hellyeah finds and wins people. The strongest candidates rarely apply, so you start each important search by naming who could do the job, then you go and get them. Agents do much of the legwork, and you own those agents too. Build them yourself or drive them with our engineers. Either way, this is a technical job.

You'll run searches yourself from day one, report to our CTO and work directly with our founders.

This role is onsite five days a week. Expect long days while a close is live, and searches that take months and still end in a no. Our founders stay deep in hiring, so you'll share the work with them and hear it when they disagree. Hiring managers make the hiring decision. You make sure they decide on good evidence, and you make sure the person says yes.

Why this role: You'll set how this company hires. Agents already help us source, draft outreach, move candidates and score work samples, and you'll decide what they do next. Our process already ends in a paid work trial.

This role isn't recruiting ops, an agency desk or a people-ops job. Someone else owns payroll, benefits and HR policy. If you want to run a funnel and report pass-through rates, look elsewhere. If you'd rather name the 50 people who could do a job and spend months winning one of them, keep reading.

What you'll do

Scope the search

• Set the bar first. Before anyone talks to a candidate, agree a ranked list of skills and experience with the hiring manager. Agree why the role matters and what success looks like. Company logos don't count. That document drives the sourcing, the pitch, the interviews and the close.

• Push back. Tell a hiring manager or founder when a role is vague, mis-leveled or not worth opening.

• Split the work. Decide which searches you run yourself and which go to agencies or contractors, so open roles keep moving.

Map the market

• Name the people. Build the list of people who could do each priority role. Ask people with good taste precise questions, check public work, and use your own network until the same names come back.

• Work our networks. Sit with teammates on a regular schedule, go through who they've worked with, and follow up until the note goes out. Run referrals as a system.

Win them

• Stay with the right person. Find the right warm intro and the next conversation, and keep going for weeks, months or longer.

• Build each process around the person. Choose who they meet, what they work on and where you share a meal. Once they're ready, move within hours.

• Close. Learn what motivates them early and sell to it throughout, so the offer feels like the obvious next step. Handle competing offers, and stay in touch until their first day.

• Look after the people we don't hire. They should still send us their friends.

Own the hiring agents

• Set the rules. Decide what each agent does, how we measure it and what it may never do without a person.

• Debug them. Read logs and code, find out why a run failed, and get it fixed.

• Build it or drive the build. Ship small changes yourself with coding agents. For bigger work, write the spec with an engineer, test the result on a live search and keep it running.

• Point them at the best people. Use agents to map markets, trace who worked with whom and brief you on why each person matters. Measure them on the hires they produce, and ignore send counts. Use agents to earn the conversation, and have the conversation yourself.

Run the system

• Keep evaluation honest. Work with hiring managers on work samples, AI-open assessments and paid work trials. Check agent scores against human calls and real outcomes. Train interviewers, and get a decision within a day of the last interview.

• Make hiring visible. Record where each hire came from. Give founders and hiring managers a view of each search, so they don't have to ask you for status. Hold hiring managers to their part.

• Make us worth talking to. Work with founders on the public writing and events that make the right people curious.

Your first 90 days

• Scope our top five open roles with their hiring managers, and rewrite or close each one.

• Build a named map for our top three searches, including our teammates' networks.

• Get a sourcing agent to surface people a hiring manager wants to meet and hadn't heard of.

• Close one hire you found, through a process you designed.

• Take over our hiring agents: read their failures, set their priorities, and ship one fix that saves measurable time on a live search.

• Record a source for each new hire, and publish a weekly view of each search.

What you'll bring

• A record of your own hires, most of them senior and in engineering, research or AI

• You've personally closed senior people who weren't looking and had stronger-looking options, and you can walk us through how

• You've mapped a market by hand and can show how a list of names turned into hires

• You've scoped roles with hiring managers and changed what they were hiring for

• You've put recruiting automation into live use, either by building it yourself or by driving it with engineers. We'll ask you to run it, explain how it works and change it

• You finish what you start without being chased, and the founders you've worked with will say so

You'll also need

• A strong network in San Francisco or Shanghai, and a real plan for reaching the other market

• Technical depth: you can read code and logs, debug a failed agent run with an engineer, and hold a conversation a senior engineer enjoys

• Specs that engineers or coding agents can build from, and the habit of testing what comes back

• Curiosity about the business: you can explain how a given hire changes our growth

• Offer craft: equity, competing offers, and what people in your market expect

• Daily use of coding agents, plus clear views on what agents should not do to candidates

• The confidence to tell a founder no and explain why

• Experience carrying several live searches at once, knowing where your work starts to slip, and still treating candidates with care

• Written English for daily work with teammates in the US, China and India. Working Chinese for the Shanghai seat

Nice to have

• You've built a recruiting function from scratch at a fast-growing startup

• Executive search experience

• You've hired in both San Francisco and Shanghai

• You've worked as an engineer or run technical screens

• You've designed work samples or paid work trials

• Clay, ATS APIs or similar tools you've extended

• Chinese, for the San Francisco seat

How we hire
You'll start with an application that takes about 30 minutes, then a conversation with our CTO. If one of us reached out to you first, you skip the application. Next comes a take-home of up to 3 hours on a search we've already closed, so you aren't doing free work for us. It includes a failed run to debug. Then we spend 30 minutes live, going through your work and changing your automation together. We finish with reference calls that include someone you didn't hire, then a paid work trial before any offer. You'll see how we work and we'll see how you work.