Lead Recruiter

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

Avante is on a mission to transform how self-funded employers manage their benefits and HR operations. Our AI-powered SaaS platform helps employers shift from reactive firefighting to strategic planning, while providing employees with the guidance they need to truly understand and maximize their benefits.

Employee benefits represent the second-largest expense for most businesses, yet the landscape is fragmented, complex, and difficult to navigate. Avante unifies fragmented benefits data and provides AI-driven insights that help employers control costs while delivering an exceptional employee experience.

We are based in Seattle with an in-office culture (4 days a week) to drive community, collaboration, and ideation.

The Role

We are hiring our first in-house recruiter at the inflection point where hiring stops being something that the founding team can absorb part-time. The next twelve months are the most active hiring stretch in Avante's history, and the person in this seat will set the bar for every hire that follows.

In any given month you will be running a variety of key searches across engineering, GTM, operations and customer-facing roles. None of these searches look the same. The expectation is that you can run all of them at once, either directly or via oversight of external recruiting partners.

This role owns the entire recruiting machine end-to-end. You will not be a coordinator with a sourcer title. You will sit in the room when we decide what bar we're hiring against, push back on hiring managers when their calibration drifts, and own the offer conversation when it's hard. Recruiting at Avante is a senior operator job, and we're going to treat it like one.

You will also be the first recruiter in the building who has to figure out what hiring looks like when the company is itself an AI agent platform. We expect you to use the same tools we build, push us on which steps of the funnel should be agents instead of people, and have an opinion about what changes when half the candidates you screen are also using AI to apply. 

Key Responsibilities

• Own the full recruiting funnel from intake through offer accept across every function. Build the pipeline, run the process, debrief the panels, close the candidates.

• Run, not just attend, the hiring process. Drive the program-management muscle that contract recruiters typically don't: weekly hiring manager reviews, scorecard discipline, calibration sessions, offer logistics, and clean handoffs to onboarding.

• Hold the bar on culture fit. Screen every finalist for low-drama, high-execution behavior. This is the core value-add over outsourced sourcing and is non-negotiable.

• Manage external partners. Coordinate with fractional recruiting partners and agencies on overflow and specialized searches; decide where to spend, where to pull back, and when to bring work in-house.

• Experiment with sourcing channels. Run the public-posting experiment on Lever, evaluate inbound vs. outbound conversion, and build a referral engine inside Avante.

• Be the data layer for hiring. Maintain accurate pipeline metrics (time-to-fill, pass-through rates, source mix, offer accept rate) and report them weekly to leadership.

• Set the standard for candidate experience. Every candidate, hired or not, leaves with a high opinion of Avante.

• Build the recruiting playbook. Write down what works. Codify interview guides, scorecards, and intake templates so future hires can plug in.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of in-house recruiting experience at a high-growth startup or adjacent recruiting agency, ideally one that scaled from under 50 to several hundred people. Bonus point if in enterprise Saas or AI-native product company. You have personally closed across engineering, GTM, and ops, not just one function.

• A program manager at heart. You build process, hold people to it, and keep things moving without being asked twice.

• Comfortable owning the whole problem. You source when sourcing is the bottleneck, coach hiring managers when calibration is the bottleneck, and write the offer letter when the offer is the bottleneck.

• Sharp judgment on people. You can spot a strong operator in a 20-minute screen and tell the difference between a talker and a doer.

• Low ego, high bias for action. You'd rather close a great candidate today than perfect a process for next quarter.

• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write a clean intake doc, sell the company to a skeptical senior candidate, and push back on a hiring manager who is grading on the wrong rubric.

• Based in (or willing to relocate to) the Seattle area; this role is on-site.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, and meaningful early-stage equity.

• Full benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).

• A seat at the table. You will work directly with the CEO and the executive team. Recruiting decisions are made in the room, not relayed through layers.

• Ownership of the function. You are not joining a team of recruiters; you are starting it. Eventually, you will help scope and hire the next people on it.

• Frontier work. Avante is building with AI agents that didn't exist three months ago. Your hiring process will use the same tools we build.

Our Values

Our four values aren't aspirational. They translate into concrete operating tenets that shape how we make decisions every day.

 

• Beat Yesterday. We re-evaluate our own toolkit every quarter, because the workflows that made you effective three months ago may already be outdated. We act on 70% of the information rather than waiting for certainty. We timebox, execute, and iterate, getting work in front of real people quickly instead of polishing in isolation. And we own our output regardless of how we produced it. AI can get you 80% of the way there. Everything that goes out with your name on it is your responsibility to review, refine, and stand behind.
• Embrace Type 2 Fun. We take on hard problems and find meaning in the work, even when it's uncomfortable. We assume good intent and follow up directly rather than venting in side channels. We celebrate wins loudly and specifically, naming the actual behavior so the whole team learns what great looks like. We are on by default, because we owe it to each other and to our customers to be available beyond what a regular corporate job would demand. And we do unscalable things today that build scalable advantages tomorrow. Every white-glove dinner, every hand-built territory map, every late-night booth setup earns us the right to scale later.
• Stay Hungry, Stay Curious. We expect everyone to be the expert on AI in their function before anyone asks them to be. The landscape changes weekly. When you learn something, teach it. Learn enough about adjacent functions to ask good questions, including what your AEs are saying on calls, how brokers actually make money, and why a benefits committee pushes back on a deal. Ask the question you think is too basic, because in complex domains like benefits, the cost of a wrong assumption can be a lost account. And remember: curiosity without urgency is a hobby. Learning has to translate into action on a timeline that matches the opportunity.
• Act Like an Owner. We say the uncomfortable thing early, raising missed commitments or quality gaps directly with the person within 48 hours. We surface problems when they're small, not the week they become a crisis. Customer-facing work gets priority, always. And we close the loop every time, because over-communication is a feature at our stage, not a bug.

Benefits include: stock options, medical/dental/vision, and 401k

We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion at our company.