Senior Recruiter
At January, we're transforming consumer finance by bringing humanity to collections. Our data-driven products help financial institutions streamline their recovery operations while offering borrowers straightforward and compassionate solutions to regain financial stability. We're not just expanding access to credit – we're restoring dignity and giving millions of people the chance to achieve financial freedom.
About the Role
As Senior Recruiter at January, you'll bring operational precision and quality obsession to every search, executing at high velocity while maintaining an uncompromising hiring bar. Through your work, you'll help us attract exceptional talent across engineering, product, operations, and business functions that raises January's capabilities and accelerates our mission.
This role is perfect for a recruiter who thrives in high-growth environments and treats recruiting as a science, not an art. You’ll need an exceptional eye for top-tier talent – someone who can spot world-class engineers, get them interested in January, and close them. You'll execute recruiting excellence from day one while contributing to infrastructure continuously improves our hiring engine. With a data-driven approach and systematic experimentation, you'll surface insights that make our entire recruiting function better. As January scales, your impact will grow as the talent you recruit defines our capabilities and the systems you build determine how we hire for years to come.
Your Impact
Deliver Exceptional Hires at Velocity: Own 6-8 concurrent searches and ship hires that meet January's growth targets without compromising our hiring bar. Close candidates through compelling positioning and systematic objection handling.
Identify World-Class Talent Others Can't Reach: Source candidates from organizations with the highest talent bars. Build networks within elite companies. Evaluate candidate quality from limited signals and differentiate exceptional from merely good early in the funnel.
Build Recruiting Operations That Compound: Surface pipeline intelligence that drives systematic improvement. Run experiments that validate optimizations before scaling. Create playbooks and automation that make recruiting more efficient over time.
Transform Hiring Managers Into Recruiting Partners: Coach hiring managers to maintain quality bar independently and operate recruiting with urgency. Activate them as sourcing channels. Establish mutual accountability for outcomes.
Maintain Quality Under Pressure: Reject weak candidates even when pipelines are thin. Validate quality through evidence. Defend "no hire" decisions to senior stakeholders with specific gaps articulated.
Optimize Everything: Constantly ask "why not faster?" Treat every pipeline challenge as an opportunity to build a better system. Implement changes based on data and measure impact rigorously.
Qualifications
5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience in high-growth startups or tech companies, with at least 3 years owning technical recruiting pipelines and demonstrated success across other functions.
Track record recruiting from elite organizations: hired multiple candidates from companies with exceptional hiring bars. Can name specific hires and articulate what made them exceptional beyond credentials.
Proven ability to scale recruiting while maintaining quality: hired 20+ people during company growth phase without lowering standards, with multiple hires still performing exceptionally.
Systems builder: created recruiting infrastructure others could execute – playbooks, process improvements, optimization experiments.
Data fluency: uses funnel analysis and conversion optimization to diagnose and solve recruiting problems systematically.
Strong stakeholder management: developed hiring managers from reactive to proactive recruiting partners with measurable behavior change.
Thrives in ambiguous, fast-paced environments. Built processes from scratch while maintaining execution velocity.
Exceptional communicator: translates recruiting challenges into actionable insights for diverse audiences.
High standards and accountability: comfortable pushing back on senior stakeholders when quality is at risk.
Grit and resilience: persistent through setbacks, energized by hard recruiting problems, maintains urgency without burnout.
We encourage you to apply if you value:
Collaborative Ownership beats Fiefdoms. You step into gaps without being asked. You fix issues. You seek to bring in the right people.
Speed beats perfection. You make decisions with incomplete information, iterate quickly, and course-correct based on what you learn. Fast loops beat slow ones.
Candor beats comfort. You give direct feedback because you care about people's growth. You'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes time. Example: Last quarter, an engineer told our CEO his proposed timeline was unrealistic in a company-wide meeting — and was thanked for it.
Inputs beat outcomes. You evaluate decisions by the thinking behind them, not just results. Good process increases the odds; bad outcomes don't always mean bad decisions.
Why beats what. You diagnose before prescribing. You're more interested in root causes than symptoms, and you share context so others can make good decisions without you.
Writing beats meetings. You structure your thinking on paper. You know that clarity scales and that a well-written doc often accomplishes more than an hour-long meeting.
We are currently hiring for this position in our New York office.
As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.