Early Career & University Recruiter

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is assembling a high-impact Early Career & University Recruiting team. You will own the strategy for identifying, attracting, and hiring exceptional emerging talent across engineering, machine learning, and business functions. From partnerships to nontraditional sourcing, you will build the next generation of Mercor’s talent and scale programs that deliver impact. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role with strategic vision and independent execution.

Qualifications

• Experience leading university, early-career, or internship recruiting.
• Proven track record building impactful recruiting programs.
• Strong sourcing creativity beyond traditional channels.
• Ability to influence hiring managers and drive accountability.
• Data-driven approach to measure recruiting effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Own the university recruiting strategy, develop partnerships, and set hiring plans.
• Identify high-potential students and early-career professionals using creative sourcing.
• Lead full-cycle recruiting for interns and new-grad roles across eng, ML, and business.
• Build scalable internship programs with strong return-offer strategies.
• Create new talent pipelines through hackathons, fellowships, and partnerships.
• Collaborate with leadership to define early-career talent needs and standards.
• Establish metrics to evaluate program effectiveness and conversion outcomes.

Skills

University recruiting

Early-career recruiting

Sourcing creativity

Stakeholder management

Data-driven recruiting

Job description

About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.

Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

About the Role

We're looking for an Early Career & University Recruiter to build Mercor's university recruiting, early-career hiring, and internship programs from the ground up.

You’ll own the strategy for how we identify, attract, and hire exceptional emerging talent across engineering, machine learning, and business functions. From developing university partnerships to creating new ways of finding talent beyond traditional recruiting channels, you’ll help build the next generation of Mercor.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who can think strategically, execute independently, and build programs that scale.

What You'll Do

• Build our early-career recruiting strategy: Develop and execute Mercor's approach to university recruiting, new-grad hiring, and internships, including target talent pools, recruiting calendars, and hiring plans.

• Find exceptional emerging talent: Identify and engage high-potential students and early-career professionals through creative sourcing strategies that go beyond traditional campus recruiting and established university pipelines.

• Own full-cycle recruiting: Drive sourcing, assessment, candidate engagement, and closing for intern and new-grad roles across engineering, ML, and business functions.

• Build and scale our internship program: Establish the recruiting framework, selection process, and return-offer strategy, partnering with hiring managers and People to create a strong intern experience.

• Create new talent pipelines: Develop initiatives such as hackathons, fellowships, student partnerships, and ambassador programs where they can meaningfully improve our ability to attract exceptional talent.

• Partner with leadership: Work closely with hiring managers and functional leaders to define early-career talent needs, establish hiring standards, and align recruiting plans with business priorities.

• Measure and improve outcomes: Establish the metrics and operating processes needed to evaluate program effectiveness, candidate quality, offer acceptance, and intern-to-full-time conversion.

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of recruiting experience, including meaningful ownership of university, early-career, or internship recruiting.

• Demonstrated experience building or significantly transforming an early-career recruiting program, with clear ownership and measurable results.

• Strong technical recruiting experience, particularly with engineering, computer science, or machine learning talent.

• Exceptional sourcing creativity and the ability to identify high-potential candidates beyond traditional credentials, universities, and employer brands.

• Ability to develop a strategy and independently translate it into execution without relying on established infrastructure.

• Strong stakeholder management, including the ability to influence hiring managers, challenge assumptions, and drive accountability.

• A data-driven approach to measuring recruiting effectiveness, improving processes, and making prioritization decisions.

• Willingness to travel for university partnerships, recruiting events, and other high-impact opportunities.

Nice to Haves

• Experience building early-career or university recruiting programs in a high-growth startup environment.

• Experience developing nontraditional talent pipelines, technical student communities, hackathons, or fellowship programs.

• Experience designing internship recruiting programs that have delivered strong intern-to-full-time conversion.

Ideal Qualities

• Agility / Adaptability - ability to move fast, pivot with business shifts, and maintain best-in-class outcomes

• Operational Rigor - ability to bring order to an unstructured environment

• Growth Mindset - You don’t need to be an expert on AI, but you do need to have a strong desire to learn and continue learning in a rapidly evolving, frontier industry

• Commitment to the Outcome - Ownership mentality; will hold themselves accountable to an extremely high standard of work

• Love for the Craft - we are building a zero to one motion; this hire will bring a low ego attitude to the table with a genuine love for building a best-in-class talent acquisition organization