Description
Every organization struggles with requisitions that never close. The role requiring six distinct skills in a single candidate located in a specific geography. The search with competitive pay that still falls short of competing offers. The onsite mandate that eliminates most qualified candidates. Most firms either ignore these challenges or add more recruiters. This role exists to solve them.
You will own these searches directly. No direct reports, no established methodology. These requisitions are difficult because talent pools are minimal, work arrangements exclude otherwise viable candidates, or compensation is competitive but not market-leading. Your mandate is to identify solutions others missed. Most stakeholders are senior executives with firm convictions and competing requirements; some have abandoned confidence in skills-based hiring entirely. You maintain your position with both groups and support it with evidence.
The broader scope involves preventing recurrence. AI will be central to your daily work, and you will create custom tools when you encounter repeated obstacles—in hours rather than waiting weeks for technical support. Anything scalable moves to engineering for productization. Few talent acquisition positions allow you to implement solutions directly. This one requires it.
We prefer to be direct now rather than waste your time. This role is not suitable if:
- You require established processes before taking action.
- Being well-regarded matters more to you than achieving results.
- Extensive stakeholder documentation feels burdensome.
- You expect requests to arrive fully formed, with external systems tracking outstanding items.
If that description sounds like your ideal work environment, continue reading. By year-end, you will have closed searches others deemed impossible, earned direct requests from executives, and deployed tools you built rapidly that remain in active use.
Our selection process is demanding, reflecting the nature of the work. If this description increased your interest, we encourage you to apply.
What you will be doing
- Closing the most challenging requisitions across the organization: limited talent markets, process deviations, previously unsuccessful searches, and stakeholders with divergent priorities.
- Bringing executive stakeholders with competing criteria to consensus on hiring decisions, and restoring confidence with those who have lost trust in the process, coordinated with senior leadership.
- Addressing root causes of recruiting failures: assessments that no longer differentiate candidate quality, AI evaluation logic that has become misaligned, or position descriptions attracting unsuitable applicants.
- Creating tactical solutions rapidly using Claude Code, Skills, Lovable, and MCPs (Model Context Protocol servers), then transitioning scalable components to engineering for production deployment.
- Delivering pipeline assessments, compensation market data, and talent availability analyses that enable executive action immediately.
- Responding to incomplete inquiries: a partial name, missing role information, a vaguely recalled candidate. You determine the correct referent and track all outstanding commitments on both sides through resolution.
What you will NOT be doing
- Conducting resume reviews or initial candidate screening conversations
- Waiting for stakeholders to request progress updates
- Leading a team, conducting performance evaluations, or managing headcount budgets
- Re-creating the same temporary solution for each new search
- Permitting non-compliant or high-risk hiring practices to proceed without challenge
- Operating in a setting with detailed oversight or prescriptive guidance
Key responsibilities
Close the requisitions no one else in the organization can successfully fill.
Candidate requirements
- 8+ years in recruiting, talent acquisition, or executive search, with recent experience focused on difficult-to-fill or executive-level requisitions.
- Difficult-to-fill searches have constituted your standard workload, managed end-to-end from intake to close, not occasional outliers.
- Successfully closed searches where another recruiter or firm had previously failed, developing your own approach rather than executing an existing methodology.
- Worked directly with executive decision-makers as the responsible party, and maintained your position with supporting documentation when facing disagreement.
- Designed or modified a hiring assessment based on performance data, not merely administered one created by others.
- Use AI tools daily and can identify a specific deliverable you created with them in the past three months. Creating your own using Claude Code, low-code platforms, or agentic workflows is valued more highly than using finished products.
- Created compensation benchmarking or market-sizing analyses for executive consumption.
- Directly accountable for identifying US hiring compliance risks: compensation bands, worker classification, or pay transparency regulations.
- Authored documentation that others relied upon: standard operating procedures, process documentation, or retrospective analyses.
- Available for at least 6 hours per weekday overlapping with US business hours.
Nice to have
- Refined a system across multiple iterations using actual performance or retention data, not a single implementation.
- Talent acquisition or executive search experience within a private equity or venture-backed portfolio company, or a multi-entity 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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