VP of Talent Operations; Remote

Every hiring organization has a pile it cannot clear. The role that needs six specific skills in one person, in one small town. The search where the pay is good, but not the best offer on the table. The onsite requirement that rules out most of the interested talent pool. Most companies let the pile sit or throw more recruiters  built this seat to clear it.

You will carry that pile yourself. No team under you, no playbook waiting for you. These searches are hard because the pool is tiny, the work arrangement rules out people who would otherwise say yes, or the comp is good, but not great. Your job is to find the angle nobody else found. Most of your stakeholders are executives with strong opinions and conflicting criteria;

a few have stopped trusting a skills-first hiring process altogether. You hold firm with both and correct the record with documentation.

The rest of the job is making sure a problem does not come back. You will use AI every day and build your own tools when you hit a recurring problem, in hours, instead of waiting weeks on a ticket. Whatever generalizes goes to engineering to harden. Few talent acquisition roles let you ship the fix yourself. This one expects it.

• You need a playbook before you move.
• You want to be liked more than you want to be effective.
• Documentation-heavy stakeholder management drains you.
• You need requests to arrive complete, and something other than yourself holding the open threads.

If that list reads like your best week, keep going. You will finish the year with searches nobody believed were closable, executives who ask for you by name, and tools you built in an afternoon still running in the portfolio.

• Closing the hardest requisitions in the portfolio: scarce talent pools, process exceptions, previously failed searches, and stakeholders who want different things.
• Aligning executive stakeholders with conflicting criteria on one decision, and rebuilding trust with the few who have lost it, calibrated with leadership.
• Fixing the system behind the failure: assessments that no longer separate strong candidates from weak ones, AI grading rules that have drifted, or job postings pulling the wrong audience.
• Building point solutions in hours with Claude Code, Skills, Lovable, and MCPs (Model Context Protocol servers), then handing off whatever generalizes for engineering to harden.
• Producing pipeline diagnoses, compensation benchmarking, and market-sizing analysis an executive can act on the same day.
• Answering questions that arrive with half the information: a first name, no role, a half-remembered candidate. You work out who they mean, and you hold every open commitment on both sides until it closes.

• Taking on resume reviews or first-round screening interviews
• Waiting for stakeholders to ask for status updates
• Managing a team, running performance reviews, or owning headcount
• Rebuilding the same workaround for every new requisition
• Allowing non-compliant or risky hiring requests to pass unchallenged
• Working in an environment with close supervision or step-by-step instructions

Close the searches nobody else in the organization can close.

• 8+ years in recruiting, talent acquisition, or executive search, with recent years concentrated in hard-to-fill or executive-level searches.
• Hard-to-fill searches have been your normal book of work, end-to-end from intake through close, not the occasional exception.
• Closed searches another recruiter or firm had already failed to fill, where you built the approach rather than running an existing playbook.
• Worked directly with executive decision-makers as the accountable owner, and held a firm position with documentation when one disagreed.
• Built or revised a hiring assessment using outcome data, not just administered one somebody else designed.
• Use AI tools daily and can name a work product you made with them in the last three months. Building your own with Claude Code, low-code platforms, or agentic workflows counts for more than using a finished product.
• Produced compensation benchmarking or market-sizing analysis for an executive audience.
• Personally responsible for spotting US hiring compliance risk: pay bands, worker classification, or pay transparency rules.
• Have written artifacts that others used: an SOP, process document, or post-mortem.
• At least 6 hours per weekday overlapping US…