Head of Talent

About Gushwork.ai

Backed by Lightspeed, B Capital & Beenext (Raised over $10M), Gushwork.ai, based out of New York and Benglauru, is building AI agents that help small and medium businesses around the world grow their business by getting recommended by AI search engines when a potential customer is looking for a product or service. We enable businesses turn AI search engines like Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Perplxity into a reliable & consistent marketing channel to get new customers. We are currently focussed on non-tech industries like manufacturing, industrial distributors and home services.

We are backed by some of the top tier VCs of the world and are one of the fastest growing AI companies being built out of India. We work with over 200+ customers and building a team to 10x this in the next 12 months.We are a team of 60 hungry, ambitious & hard working individuals and are adding more people to the team who share our desire to leave a lasting impact on humanity.

The Role

We are looking for a Talent Acquisition Lead (5–10 years experience) who thinks like a Growth Marketer. You won’t just be "filling roles"; you will be designing and operating the talent acquisition funnel that will fuel our 2.5x headcount growth.

This is a Player-Coach role. You will personally drive high-impact senior hires across Growth, Sales, and Product Engineering, while simultaneously managing and mentoring a team of 2–3 TA Executives.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Talent Funnel: Execute the end-to-end recruitment lifecycle for critical roles across Growth, Marketing, Sales, Product, and Engineering.
• Lead the Pod: Manage, mentor, and audit the output of 2–3 Talent Acquisition Executives, ensuring the team meets aggressive weekly and monthly hiring quotas.
• Manage the "Supply Chain": Build and maintain a high-performing network of external recruitment agencies. You will manage their incentives and ensure they are delivering high-signal candidates.
• Metrics-Driven Recruitment: Treat TA like a unit-economics problem. You will track conversion rates at every stage of the funnel (Sourcing → Screen → Interview → Offer) and optimize for "Speed to Hire" without compromising quality.
• Partner with Leadership: Work directly with the Founder/CEO and Department Heads to translate business goals into headcount plans and job architectures.
• Incentive Design: Work on compensation structures that include both fixed and performance-linked incentives for the TA team and external partners.

Who You Are

• The Experience: 5–10 years in recruitment, specifically within high-growth tech startups. You’ve personally seen the scale-up from 50 to 200+ people.
• Full-Stack Hiring: You have a proven track record of hiring across the board—Sales, Growth, Marketing, Product, and Engineering. You can switch context between a technical screen and a GTM interview seamlessly.
• Player-Coach: You are comfortable doing the heavy lifting yourself on senior IC roles while simultaneously managing and coaching a small team of 2–3 TA Executives.
• Metrics-Driven: You treat recruitment like a sales funnel. You are obsessed with conversion rates, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire. You understand the unit economics of a "talent assembly line."
• Agency Management: You have an existing network of reliable recruitment agencies and the experience to manage their performance and incentives effectively.
• Incentive-Oriented: You are motivated by a compensation structure that rewards high-quality, high-speed output.

Why Join Gushwork?

• Hyper-Growth: You are joining at the most exciting phase of a startup—post-seed, scaling from $1M to $10M+ ARR.
• Build the Blueprint: You aren’t following a HR handbook; you are helping the company build the talent assembly line for a new category of AI company.
• Top-Tier Backing: Work with a company supported by the world’s best VCs (Lightspeed, SIG).
• High Leverage: This role has a massive impact on our unit economics. Your ability to hire the right people directly dictates our ability to scale.

Compensation

• Competitive Fixed Salary + Performance-Linked Incentives (we reward output and quality).
• Equity options in a fast-growing, venture-backed leader in the AI space.