About First Round

First Round is an early-stage venture capital firm on a mission to build and serve the world's strongest community of entrepreneurs.

We help startups like Notion, Uber, Roblox, Square, and hundreds more tackle company building firsts. We connect entrepreneurs with the knowledge, people, and companies they need for maximum impact.

Whether it’s pre-seed, seed or Series A, we’re building the world’s best product for founders who are just getting started.

About the Talent Researcher Role

We’re looking to add a Talent Researcher to our Enablement team, where our mission is to welcome incredible people into First Round and create the conditions for First Rounders to have the most impact.

Key Responsibilities:

Talent Research & Sourcing

• Research and identify the very best talent to bring into First Round as team members, partners, future founders, and/or broader community members. This will encompass technical and non-technical profiles (from EAs to GTM leaders to experts in AI/ML) and various seniority levels (from IC to C-Suite).

• Cultivate a deep understanding of the tech ecosystem to discern the highest quality individuals based on their experience, expertise, and network.

• Ideate new ways to expand quality and quantity of top-of-funnel sourcing pipelines, and execute strategies to build new relationships between top talent and First Round team members.

Recruitment & Hiring Operations

• Oversee internal recruitment & hiring of First Round employees, including building hiring funnels, launching new roles, reviewing resumes and applications, managing take home activities, scheduling interviews and communications for hiring managers, conducting initial screens, making rejection calls, preparing hiring offers, shutting down roles when filled, and initiating onboarding.

• Create and maintain automations, integrations, and communication templates in our HRIS and other systems to ensure efficiency, consistency, and a fantastic experience for candidates and hiring managers alike.

• Report on and drive the progress of open roles for First Round’s internal hires. This includes prompting hiring managers to take action where needed (or taking care of it for them where possible), leveraging external recruitment agencies, and proposing solutions and new sourcing avenues for roles where we’d like to see more candidates.

• Track your sourcing metrics and use data to inform your decisions. Analyze key performance indicators such as response rates, conversion rates, and time-to-fill to identify trends and areas for optimization.

Ecosystem Expansion

• Conduct special projects to strategically expand our ecosystem. This will compose the remainder of your time each week, and will frequently include working with teams across the firm to define avatars for sourcing, researching ideal guests to invite to events and build relationships with, market mapping to identify individuals that meet specific profiles, and setting systematic alerts to be notified as individuals meet our search criteria.

You could be a great Talent Researcher at First Round if:

• You genuinely love conducting talent research, and are creative and gritty. Tough searches don't faze you. Instead, they fuel your drive to think outside the box and uncover every possible way to find that needle in a haystack.

• You move quickly and proactively. You're quick to recognize when things aren't on track and seamlessly transition into problem-solving mode. When you're tasked with something, it's done with the utmost thought, care, and urgency.

• You’re obsessed with delivering a fantastic experience to candidates and hiring managers alike. Nothing delights you more than designing a process and experience that feels seamless and efficient to everyone involved.

• You are highly organized and skilled at balancing multiple priorities at a time. In a single day, you might design a hiring funnel and launch a new role, screen applicants for another existing role, conduct research on ideal candidates to invite to an upcoming event, and ideate ways to drive faster results for current role openings. You recognize the importance of staying on top of things and aren't afraid to seek help when needed.

• People, career trajectories, and tech companies fascinate you. You don’t need existing knowledge of the tech industry for this role, but you should be excited to learn it fast. You will need to cultivate deep discernment of people and quality of experience in order to succeed in this role.

Note: This role focuses on internal hiring, event attendee sourcing, and operations. If you are more interested in high volume sourcing and recruitment for First Round’s founders and portfolio companies, see our Recruiter and Senior Recruiter role openings.