Head Of Talent
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. Read the master plan
The team is still small enough that every person shapes what gets built.
The role
We're around 80 people today, growing to 250 by the end of the year. You'll own building the talent team that builds Wispr
The people you hire this year will outnumber everyone currently here two to one. The 250-person Wispr does not exist yet (i.e. you are making it).
You'll come in as a hands-on player and coach: sourcing and closing candidates yourself from the beginning, while hiring your own recruiting team, and you'll be in the room for every leadership hire. You'll report directly to the founders and work daily with hiring managers across ML research, product engineering, sales, marketing, and G&A.
What’s fun is…your job is made of the thing we sell. A talent leader's day is conversations: pitches, screens, debriefs, follow-ups, notes. Our product turns speech into finished work. You'll run your craft on Wispr, your feedback will shape our roadmap, and every candidate will watch you use the product they're being recruited to build.
What the role looks like in practice
Personally source, pitch, and close senior candidates, including people who have no business looking: a researcher at a frontier lab, a former founder, a staff engineer with four competing offers
Build the talent org itself from first principles, pairing a small senior team with real AI leverage, much of it built down the hall
Hire and lead an exceptional recruiting team, holding your own hires to the same bar you hold candidates
Instrument the pipeline like an operator: pass-through rates, source effectiveness, time to offer, offer accept. You find the bottleneck before it finds you
Coach hiring managers to be great interviewers and closers, and push back, on them and on the founders, when a candidate isn't exceptional
Craft the candidate experience the way our designers craft the first five minutes of Flow: people should feel understood, and even the ones we don't hire should tell their friends about the process
Partner with the exec team on employer brand: how the world sees Wispr as the place to do the best work of your life, and how that story reaches people before we ever reach out
Design creative, competitive offers and navigate the hard closes: unvested equity, competing offers, non-standard structures
What you won't be doing
Installing the playbook from your last company - we can do better
Managing a vendor bench that is “ok”
Waiting for reqs to move through three layers of approval - we move with rigor and intensity to get to an answer in days not weeks
When our process is broken, you'll say so, and you'll be thanked for it
The bar
We hire people their former employers are still trying to get back. That's the standard for everyone we bring in, it's the standard for this role, and once you're here, it's the standard you'll hold for the whole company.
Who you are
You can articulate the difference between a strong hire and an exceptional one, and you can tell them apart in a 45-minute conversation
Candidates trust you. You're perceptive about what people actually want, not what they say in a screening call, and candidates you didn't close still send you referrals
You sell with empathy. You can pitch a frontier-lab researcher and a first sales hire with equal credibility because you understood them first
You have stories about improbable closes and the creativity behind them
Great recruiters want to work for you, and some would follow you here
You think in systems and data. You've scaled hiring through hypergrowth and know exactly where funnels break between 100 and 1000 people
You make hiring managers better, and you tell founders hard truths about their own process
You see employer brand as a compounding asset and want a seat in shaping it, not just amplifying it
You'll be a genuine power user of Flow. A head of talent who doesn't love the product shows it to every candidate
Why this role, why now?
Many head of talent roles hand you a system someone else built and ask you to keep it running. This one asks you to architect the human operating system of a company that triples this year, at one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, at the exact moment every hire compounds. It’s probably the most important role we hire for this year.
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 most roles. We fly remote teammates to SF for three to four days a month and coordinate those weeks so everyone overlaps. Flights and accommodation covered.
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 early exercise and extended exercise windows with 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)
401(k) with up to a 4% match. (US)
16 weeks of paid parental leave (12 weeks for non-birthing parent).
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.
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.
