Founding Recruiter

Joyful Health; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Healthcare benefits

Unlimited PTO

Professional development stipend

Job summary

Joyful Health is seeking a Founding Recruiter to build and scale the recruiting function from scratch in NYC. You will own sourcing, screening, and closing, while shaping employer brand and interview processes. The role requires AI-native workflows and fast-paced startup mindset.

You'll collaborate with founders and department leads to raise hiring quality, design ATS processes (Ashby), and grow the team within a year. This is a high-visibility, impact-driven position.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building recruiting functions, ideally in startups.
• Experience with AI-driven sourcing, outreach, and analytics.
• Proven ability to design processes and scale teams.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the company for multiple functions.
• Build and optimize recruiting infrastructure, scorecards, and playbooks.
• Lead AI-forward workflows across sourcing, screening, and scheduling.
• Develop and manage employer brand and candidate experience end-to-end.
• Coach founders and leaders on interviewing and closing candidates.
• Grow recruiting team as the company scales within 12 months.

Skills

AI-forward recruiting

Sourcing

Outreach automation

Pipeline analytics

Interview loops design

Employer branding

Coaching hiring managers

Startup recruiting

Data-driven hiring

Tools

Ashby ATS

Job description

About Joyful Health

Building the financial operating system for healthcare, and bringing the joy back to healthcare by fixing the financial chaos behind it.

The healthcare payment system is a complex and inefficient maze - healthcare practices leave $125 billion in revenue uncollected each year, lost in the chaos of fragmented financial data, manual workflows, and opaque payer systems. This financial uncertainty leaves practices struggling to stay afloat, while valuable revenue slips through the cracks.

Joyful Health is building the AI-powered financial operating system for healthcare practices. Our mission is to bring the joy back to running a private practice by simplifying financial operations so providers can focus on patient care. We spent 10 months working as fractional CFOs for a dozen practices, doing this work side by side with providers as we developed our product.

We just announced our $22M Series A led by CRV and world-class investors including the founders of MongoDB & KAYAK.

We have an enormous opportunity in front of us. The broken healthcare payment ecosystem impacts practices of all sizes, and the opportunity to make a real difference is massive.

If you're passionate about empowering medical practices and excited to tackle one of the most important (& challenging!) problems in healthcare, we'd love to meet you.

The Role

Why This Role Exists

Joyful Health is entering its next phase of growth. We've closed our funding round, our product is in market, and the hiring roadmap is aggressive, 10+ roles open and accelerating. Today, each team hires for their own function, and that scrappiness has built a strong foundation. But to move at the pace we need, we need someone whose entire focus is building and scaling the talent acquisition engine.

The Founding Recruiter is the person who builds Joyful Health's talent engine from scratch. You'll own the entire recruiting function - sourcing, closing, employer brand, systems, and process - and do it at the speed and scrappiness of an early-stage startup while laying the foundation for a world-class team. Within 12 months, you'll grow this into a recruiting team of your own.

This is not a role where you'll inherit a playbook. You'll write it. At Joyful Health, every team already runs on AI tooling and automations - it's in our DNA. We're looking for a recruiter who matches that energy and takes it even further. The right person will show us what's possible when deep recruiting expertise meets AI-native workflows, and will thrive in a culture where everyone is constantly raising the bar on what it means to work smarter.

This role is full-time. We’re looking for someone NYC-based who is open to coming into the office 3 days a week.

What Makes This Different

Two principles define how we think about recruiting at Joyful Health:

Speed is a competitive advantage, and AI is how you get it. Every team at Joyful Health already leverages AI to move faster. We're looking for someone who brings that same mindset to recruiting - someone deeply fluent in AI-powered sourcing, outreach automation, candidate evaluation, and pipeline analytics. You should be the person who's always one step ahead, showing the team what's newly possible.

Recruiting is a strategic function, not a service desk. The Founding Recruiter has a seat at the table. You'll shape our hiring philosophy, influence org design conversations, and build the employer brand that attracts people who want to fix healthcare's hardest problems. Every hire you make directly shapes the DNA of this company.

What you'll do…

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the company: Run 10+ concurrent searches spanning engineering, product, operations, sales, marketing, and RCM. You'll lean technical but be capable across every function.

• Build & optimize our recruiting infrastructure: Optimize our ATS (we like Ashby), design interview loops, create scorecards, build sourcing playbooks, and establish the metrics and reporting that let leadership see exactly where we stand on every role.

• Be the most AI-forward recruiter we've ever met: Use AI tooling and automations across every stage of the funnel — sourcing, outreach personalization, screening, scheduling, pipeline analytics, and market intelligence. You should be building workflows that make a one-person recruiting team perform like a three-person one.

• Build and own the employer brand: Tell Joyful Health's story in a way that makes exceptional people want to join. Own our careers page, LinkedIn presence, and candidate experience end-to-end.

• Partner deeply with hiring managers: Coach founders and department leads on how to interview well, how to sell candidates, and how to close. Be the person who raises the bar on hiring quality across the company.

• Grow this into a team: Within 12 months, hire and manage additional recruiters as the company scales. You're building a function, not just filling roles.

What Success Looks Like

In 30 days:

• Deep understanding of every open role, the team, the product, and the competitive landscape for talent

• ATS automated and optimized with structured interview loops for priority roles

• Sourcing pipelines live for the highest-priority searches

• Clear point of view on Joyful Health's employer brand positioning and a 90-day recruiting roadmap

In 90 days:

• Multiple hires closed across technical and non-technical roles

• Recruiting metrics baselined and reported to leadership (time-to-fill, pipeline velocity, source mix, offer acceptance rate)

• AI-powered workflows demonstrably improving speed and quality vs. manual approaches

• Interview training rolled out to all hiring managers

• First version of the employer brand playbook live (careers page, LinkedIn content, candidate nurture sequences)

In 6 months:

• Recruiting function operating as a strategic advantage - leadership sees talent acquisition as a core strength, not a bottleneck

• Hiring plan on track or ahead of schedule

• A recruiting team in place and ramping

• Joyful Health known in the healthcare tech talent market as a destination employer

• A measurable, data-driven case that your AI-forward approach made this team faster and leaner than the industry norm

We'd love to hear from you if…

• You're deeply aligned with Joyful Health's mission — You're motivated by fixing broken systems in healthcare and believe that the financial side of care delivery deserves the same innovation as the clinical side.

• You've built recruiting from scratch before — 5+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup where you owned the function or were one of the first recruiting hires. You've set up an ATS, designed interview processes, and personally closed hard-to-land candidates.

• You lean technical but can recruit across the board — Your strongest muscle is engineering, product, and data hiring, but you've successfully filled go-to-market, operations, and business roles too.

• You're AI-native and can prove it — You don't just "use AI tools." You build automations, design AI-powered sourcing workflows, and can articulate exactly how your approach makes you 3x more productive than a traditional recruiter.

• You have healthcare or healthtech recruiting experience — You understand the talent landscape, the language, and what motivates people who work in this space. Not required, but a strong plus.

• You're a closer with startup DNA — You thrive in ambiguity, move fast, take ownership, and know how to sell a vision to candidates who have multiple options. You're low-ego, high-output, and energized by building something from nothing.

Compensation: $140,000–$160,000 base + meaningful early-stage equity

Our Value Prop to You

At Joyful Health, we're on a mission to fix one of the most broken systems in healthcare. Joining us means having the opportunity to make a direct, meaningful impact on the lives of clinicians and the financial health of their practices. Here's what you can expect from working with us:

Meaningful Impact

You will be tackling one of the most complex challenges in healthcare—helping practices thrive in a chaotic financial landscape. Your work will directly contribute to solving one of the most crucial challenges for providers, ensuring that they can focus on what they do best: caring for patients.

Autonomy & Ownership

As an early team member, you'll have significant autonomy and the chance to shape our company from the ground up. You'll have ownership over your work and the freedom to challenge the status quo in an environment that values initiative and creativity.

Growth & Learning

We're a small, ambitious team with big goals, which means you'll be constantly learning and growing. You'll take on new challenges, expand your skill set, and have direct access to experienced founders and advisors who are invested in your development. We also offer stipends for professional development courses & books (that we often will partake in together!) so we can all continuously grow.

Competitive Compensation & Equity

We believe that our team is our most valuable asset. We offer competitive compensation packages, strong equity, and the opportunity to share in the success of Joyful Health. We want you to feel supported, both financially and professionally, as we grow together.

Be Your Best Self

We provide the benefits you need to stay happy and healthy, including comprehensive healthcare benefits, unlimited PTO (with a minimum of 10 days off a year), and flexibility so you can take care of yourself. We also organize regular team off‑sites and events to ensure that even as we tackle big problems we enjoy the journey.

If you're passionate about empowering practices and excited to tackle one of the most important (& challenging!) problems in healthcare, we'd love to meet you.

Please apply even if you don't meet 100% of the criteria. Nobody checks every box every time and we'd love to talk to you about how and why you can see yourself growing into this role. We're also very open to candidates with non-traditional experience.