Head of Recruitment Operations

The Role

You’ll own the recruitment function end-to-end — not a team, but the system that several teams run inside. The hard part isn’t volume; it’s making delivery predictable. You’re accountable for conversion at every stage of the funnel, for variance that doesn’t swing week to week, and for the speed at which an open role becomes a candidate who actually starts and stays. You manage leaders, not individual recruiters, which means your leverage is in how well you calibrate, coach, and hold a quality bar — not in how much you personally execute.

About the Operation

This is an AI-native recruitment operation inside a global IT staff augmentation business — one of the few players running production AI tooling in the actual hiring workflow, not as a demo. Recruitment here is a revenue engine, not a back-office cost center, which is why the role carries function-level ownership rather than middle-management scope. The operation is mid-transformation: real teams are already delivering for real clients, and the work is scaling what already runs rather than building from zero.

The tooling environment: You’ll work with a production AI layer built into the recruitment workflow and a modern Ashby ATS. You don’t need to build the tech — you need to be a fluent consumer of it: comfortable enough with AI-augmented tooling to see when the tech layer is under-delivering and say so. Process design, conversion engineering, and capacity modeling at the function level are part of the daily reporting fluency expected here.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own function-level conversion across the full funnel — sourcing, screening, presentation, offer, start — and build performance management around ratios, predictability, and time-to-quality-delivery rather than raw activity counts

• Set the strategy for the client portfolio: which relationships to deepen, how to develop them, and the single quality bar every client interaction is held to across teams

• Take escalations on high-stakes client situations and lead renewal and expansion conversations with key accounts — team leads run the day-to-day touchpoints, you set direction and step in when stakes are high

• Manage several team leads plus a specialized capability function — performance, calibration, and growth of leaders, not direct oversight of every recruiter beneath them

• Make the capacity calls: team sizing, hiring approvals, how the client portfolio is distributed across teams, and when to scale

• Run quality supervision across every layer of delivery — candidate experience, screening conduct, presentation quality — through calibration standards and post-mortem discipline

• Own function-level KPI reporting to leadership and maintain the governance protocols (quality framework, escalation paths, performance reviews) the function operates under

What We Expect

Must-have

• 8+ years in tech recruitment / talent acquisition on a senior leadership track.

• Multi-team management experience — you’ve managed 3+ team-lead-level reports plus a specialty function. This is management of leaders, not direct management of 10+ recruiters

• A conversion and funnel mindset: throughput thinking, bottleneck analysis, leading indicators. If your instinct is volume-first, this isn’t the role

• Strategic capacity management — team sizing, hiring approvals, scaling decisions made under real constraints

• Strong governance discipline — calibration, post-mortems, quality frameworks that hold across teams

• English at C1+ for senior client and leadership situations

• Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish for internal team communication (the team is international)

Leadership style we’re hiring for

• Collaborative and explicitly anti-toxic — cultural fit is non-negotiable here

• Autonomy-oriented: you grow the independence of your team leads and capability leads rather than routing every decision through yourself

• Owner mentality — you arrive with a diagnosis and an action plan, not a list of problems

• Comfortable making decisions under ambiguity. This is a transformation stage; resilience matters more than a clean playbook

Nice to have

• Experience with AI-augmented recruitment workflows — LLM-assisted sourcing, ICP automation

• A track record scaling distributed teams across Europe

• Multi-client / multi-portfolio background

• Familiarity with BOT / EOR business models

Why This Role Is Worth Your Time

• You own outcomes at the level of the entire function — not one of ten middle managers fighting for scope

• The AI tooling is real and in production, not a roadmap slide. You’re working with a stack that few recruitment operations actually have running

• Leadership is directly involved in the transformation — regular syncs, no distant mandate, no vague direction to interpret on your own

• There’s a genuine scaling runway. The teams already deliver for real clients, so you’re building on something that works rather than proving the concept first

• Full remote across Europe / CIS timezones, with equipment and tooling covered