Founding Recruiter

Joyfulhealth; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Joyful Health, NYC-based, is hiring a Founding Recruiter to own the entire recruiting function from day one. You’ll source, close, and scale the team with a strong emphasis on AI-native workflows, automation, and analytics.

You’ll shape the employer brand and partner closely with founders to build a world-class talent engine. You’ll lead 10+ concurrent searches across engineering, product, operations, sales, and marketing, and plan to grow a recruiting team within 12 months.

Qualifications

• Experience building recruiting function in an early-stage startup.
• Proven ability to implement AI-native workflows in recruiting.
• Ability to scale recruiting team and processes as company grows.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the company and multiple functions.
• Design and optimize recruiting infrastructure and interview loops.
• Lead AI-forward sourcing, outreach automation, and pipeline analytics.

Skills

Full-cycle recruiting

AI-powered sourcing

Stakeholder management

Employer branding

Tools

Ashby ATS

LinkedIn Recruiter

Sourcing tooling

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