Associate Technical Recruiter

About First Round

First Round is a venture capital firm that works with founders exclusively at the earliest stages of company building, often when all they have is an “imagine if.” We fill in where we can until the team is filled out, tackling crucial early hiring and equipping those who are great at building product with the skills to sell it, too. By getting the foundational firsts right, we increase the odds of finding extreme product-market fit. Our founders’ “imagine ifs” have turned into companies like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square.

About First Round's Founder Success Team

At First Round, we invest in founders who possess not just strengths, but areas of true genius, whether it’s technical skill, product judgement, industry expertise, or a deep understanding of their customer’s pain point. But on the other side of every spike in talent are a few areas that are still underdeveloped, parts of the business where a founder doesn't have the skills and expertise — yet.

Simply put, there are many gaps that have yet to be closed when you’re only a 3-person startup. On the path to building a company of consequence, the very best founders are able to level up, both in terms of their own capabilities (by developing new muscles) and in the team around the table (by bringing in complementary talent).

That’s where our Founder Success team comes in, during the pivotal early years of company building. We fill in where we can until there's genius up and down the org chart, closing gaps around existing strengths while helping in the key growth areas on the transition from founder to founder & CEO. This might involve teaching a technical founder how to sell and take their product to market, or guiding them through making their first key hires.

About the Associate Recruiter Role

Associate Recruiters on the Founder Success team have a mission critical role — to support founders in hiring their early team members. Founders need to move quickly in making those early technical, GTM, and operations hires and we’re searching for someone to work hand-in-hand with them to find exceptional candidates. As an Associate Recruiter, you will work with 5-6 Founders at a time, building quality candidate pipelines and doing sourcing outreach to help tee up candidate intro calls for our founders.

You’ll have exposure to some of the most exciting founders and companies on the planet, working side-by-side with the next Uber, Notion or Square founders in their very earliest days. You’ll have the opportunity to build strong relationships with exceptional people and may even join one of the companies you support at some point (we highly encourage that path).

Key Responsibilities

Sourcing, Outreach, and Coordination - 80%

• Engage in high-volume candidate sourcing for a wide range of roles, encompassing technical and non-technical positions (from founding IC to director-level).

• Continuously refine your sourcing strategies to increase candidate acceptance rate through iterative improvements

• Craft compelling outreach messages to engage candidates and get them excited about the opportunity

• Act as the liaison between candidates and founders, facilitating introductions by coordinating calls with founders, sending reminders, and gathering feedback — all while ensuring clear and timely communication throughout the process

Recruiting Advising - 10%

• Facilitate weekly check-ins with founders to review pipeline health, discuss successes and challenges, and collaborate on action plans.

• Partner closely with founders to refine hiring profiles, including scoping out job roles and designing interview loops

• Provide general recruiting guidance, from compensation/leveling to candidate closing strategies

Track and improve your metrics - 10%

• Track your sourcing metrics and use data to inform your decisions. Analyze key performance indicators such as response rates, conversion rates, and time-to-fill to identify trends and areas for optimization.

• Continuously iterate and refine messaging approaches based on data-driven insights. Test different messaging variations, subject lines, and calls-to-action to determine what resonates most with candidates, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

You could be a great Associate Recruiter at First Round if:

• You have 3+ years of primarily technical sourcing/recruiting experience in a fast-paced, tech environment.

• You have at least one experience recruiting for an early stage (<50 employees) company

• You possess impeccable attention to detail and excellent written and verbal communication. When it comes to representing First Round, your communications, both written and spoken, are top-notch and error-free.

• You are highly organized and skilled at juggling competing priorities. You recognize the importance of staying on top of things and aren't afraid to seek help when needed. You rarely drop a ball and have a tight system for managing multiple recs at one time

• You're a strong relationship builder, able to build rapport with people from all backgrounds and levels.

• You are creative and gritty. Tough searches don't faze you. Instead, they fuel your drive to think outside the box and uncover every possible way to find that needle in a haystack.

• You have a deep sense of ownership over your work. You care deeply about the people you’re working with and quality of the work you do. You're quick to recognize when things aren't on track and seamlessly transition into problem-solving mode.

• You are a fast learner and able context switch quickly from one thing to the next. You move with a sense of urgency. With constant change being the norm here, you hit the ground running every time- whether that’s sourcing on a new, unfamiliar profile or learning the latest recruiting tool.

Our Values

At First Round, we value resourcefulness, team-play, excellence and hustle. To give you a sense of what our team is all about, check out our values that guide our work:

• Try harder for founders. They’re our customers — LPs are our shareholders. We go to the ends of the earth for our founders. You might think our role as venture capitalists is to simply maximize returns. But at First Round, we believe when we put founders first, everything will follow — epic returns included. We fill in the gaps on a founder's team before they even have one and get to work on the unglamorous tasks that actually move companies forward. We'll know we've done our job when they're left feeling startled that an investor would go to these lengths for them.

• Take the wheel. Welcome to First Round. Everything is now your responsibility. Cartographers, not navigators, are the ones who tend to do well here. There are no career ladders to climb or boxes to check at First Round. If you find ways to do more for the business and our customers, your role will naturally expand alongside it. First Round is a haven for people who see themselves as architects of their reality, not casualties of circumstance. We know we have agency over our agency, and we make the conscious choice to exercise it every day.

• Treat the little things like big things. “Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” We’re all about the carefully crafted, the nitty-gritty, and the bespoke. Whether it’s hand cutting each nameplate, or debating the optimal shape of the dinner table, no detail is too small to sweat. This is decidedly not a "LGTM" culture. It is a culture where the little things are the big things.

• Give your unvarnished opinions and unwavering support. We strive to be kind, not nice. Being nice and being kind are not one and the same. In our view, kindness means being generous, helpful, and compassionate. Nice can be used as a convenient shortcut; kindness cultivates long-term excellence. One of the most (counterintuitively) compassionate things you can do is to offer your unvarnished opinion — along with your unwavering support. That willingness to risk a fleeting moment of discomfort in exchange for someone else’s growth is long-term kindness. So while we strive to be a founder’s coach in the corner, part of that responsibility requires being the kick in the ass when they need it most. We try to be as honest as possible in every encounter, whether that’s bluntly telling a founder how they can step up their game, or delivering radical candor in our feedback for teammates.

• Invent and wander. “Action produces information." We’re fans of starting small, shipping fast, and obsessively improving. The idea for the First Round Review wasn’t the product of a six-month strategy session — we wrote up a few blog posts and just shipped them. That’s because reality has a surprising amount of detail and edges that are difficult to anticipate. Each step — even the wrong one — reveals new information that improves your next move. We prefer to make the gap between having an idea and knowing if it works as small as possible.