Lead Recruiter

Check Technologies
San Francisco; New York, US
HybridCareer-pivot friendly

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior recruiters with AI fluency and startup experience who thrive in stakeholder-partnership roles across technical and non-technical hiring.

Best fit for

  • Recruiters who blend AI tool mastery with deep stakeholder collaboration instincts.
    — “AI fluency as a core competency — proven ability to leverage AI tools
  • Growth-stage veterans comfortable owning full-cycle recruiting without handholding.
    — “5+ years of in-house recruiting experience in a fast-paced startup
  • Visible operators who reject back-office anonymity in favor of leadership partnership.
    — “We don't need a quiet ops engine. We need someone visible, opinionated

Things to consider

  • Rapid headcount scaling from 85 to 150+ demands high-volume execution.
    — “Scale our recruiting function as we grow from 85 → 100 → 150 FTEs

How to stand out

  • Demonstrate Ashby platform proficiency or concrete plans to ramp immediately.
    — “Fluency with Ashby and LinkedIn Recruiter
  • Prepare examples of negotiating complex offers while maintaining candidate enthusiasm.
    — “helping us dodge negotiation traps
  • Showcase campaigns where quality outreach outperformed spray-and-pray sourcing.
    — “optimize for quality over quantity to keep efforts efficient
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · TeamLevel · Lead

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • successful hires
  • positive candidate feedback
  • high-quality talent pipeline
Typical background
recruitment experienceHR backgroundpeople operations

Skills & requirements

Required

RecruitmentTalent AcquisitionHiring ProcessCandidate ExperienceStakeholder Management

Preferred

Employer BrandingInterview Process OptimizationTeam Leadership

About the role

Original posting from Check Technologies via Ashby

BUILDING AT CHECK

At Check, we make paying people simple. In doing that, we’re not just building our own business— we’re building payroll businesses together with every one of our partners. As the inventors of embedded payroll, we’re redefining how people get paid and making it easier for payroll businesses to launch, grow, and thrive. Check out the full story https://www.generalist.com/briefing/check | Tune in https://open.spotify.com/episode/6qJMGPkqJVxEFPJRvnc9ml?si=6ea8c2b634374b18.

Check is far more than just API infrastructure. We’re a springboard for building and scaling payroll businesses.

OUR TEAM

Payroll is broken. Come fix it alongside a team that’s as passionate as you are! At Check, you'll use creative problem-solving, critical thinking, and grit to impact every business we build. We view problems to solve and jobs to be done as opportunities to contribute to the solution; we ignore conventional role boundaries in favor of the unique strengths and value each builder brings to our team and to our mission.

Join us if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and redefine payroll. Let’s simplify the complex, make a real impact, and create a better future for businesses of every size.

The People Team

At Check, Talent is our highest investment, and Checketeers are the ultimate driver of our long-term growth and success. The People team is dedicated to bringing together skilled and dedicated individuals that can bring our business vision to life, and to fostering an engaged, high-performing team. We aim to create a diverse and equitable workplace where everyone pitches in to achieve incredible things, and every Checketeer is celebrated, supported, and valued for their contributions.

Check is looking for a Lead Recruiter to drive our hiring efforts during a critical growth phase, partnering closely with people leaders across R&D, GTM, and G&A. This role sits at the center of how we build the company. It requires strong judgment, clear communication, deep ownership, and a genuine love for partnering with hiring managers and candidates alike.

You'll be responsible for bringing exceptional people into Check while building real partnership with hiring managers — shaping roles, calibrating bar, and running rigorous-but-human interview processes. To thrive in this role you must care deeply about candidate experience, hiring quality, and the daily business impact of your work, and you should be excited to be a public-facing partner across the leadership team, not a heads-down operations engine.

As you burn through our highest-priority reqs, your scope will broaden into deliberate optimization and infrastructure work: interviewer up-skilling, employer branding, debrief and calibration tooling, and hiring manager enablement at scale.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

  • Own full-cycle recruiting across Engineering, GTM, and G&A with an outcomes-focused mentality. You'll partner with hiring managers to define needs, clarify what great looks like, and engage with top talent to fill those seats.
  • Be a true partner to hiring managers from day one. You'll shape roles, drive intake conversations that draw out spicy takes, challenge assumptions, and align teams on Check's standards and needs. Stakeholder partnership is the primary mode of operation here, it’s not optional.
  • Run sourcing, outreach, and pipeline-building campaigns that keep candidate flow rich for our highest-priority roles. You'll optimize for quality over quantity to keep efforts efficient.
  • Drive recruiting operations within Ashby, leveraging the platform's AI-augmented sourcing, search, and pipeline tools to amplify your reach and impact. You’ll continually explore new ways to help our team make great hiring decisions quickly, while keeping candidates excited about Check.
  • Scale our recruiting function as we grow from 85 → 100 → 150 FTEs and beyond, always building with ROI and stakeholder experience in mind.
  • Set and maintain a high performance bar for talent while moving fast. You'll keep the big picture in mind, ensuring strong long-term staffing decisions and helping us dodge negotiation traps.
  • Work in the open. You'll be a public partner to hiring managers and an active voice in our recruiting channels. We don't need a quiet ops engine. We need someone visible, opinionated, and trusted.
  • Partner closely with the Head of People to build creative and engaging hiring loops, competitive compensation structures, effective training programs, and executive reporting capabilities - you’ll continually raise the visibility of the work you do and maximize its impact on every aspect of the business!

MANY BACKGROUNDS COULD FIT THIS ROLE, BUT IDEAL CANDIDATES WILL HAVE:

  • 5+ years of in-house recruiting experience across multiple disciplines (technical and non-technical), preferably in a fast-paced startup or growth-stage environment.
  • AI fluency as a core competency — proven ability to leverage AI tools to amplify sourcing, outreach, screening, and decision-making, while applying judgment about where AI helps and where it doesn't. We're hiring people who are strong in their domain and know how to scale that strength through AI.
  • Fluency with Ashby and LinkedIn Recruiter (or proven ability to ramp quickly on Ashby — we recently migrated and our system is in active use).
  • Proven ability to own full-cycle recruiting independently — sourcing through coordination, closing, and offer management, with a stakeholder-partnership-first orientation.
  • Strong sourcing capability, including outbound outreach and pipeline building for hard-to-fill roles.
  • Clear, direct communication and exceptional storytelling. You're equally adept at influencing senior stakeholders and selling candidates on a vision.
  • Strong judgment and the ability to maintain a high talent bar under time pressure — there's urgency, and then there's false urgency. You know the difference.
  • A bias toward visibility — working in the open, speaking up in cross-functional spaces, building hiring-manager confidence through engagement, not invisible reliability.
  • Comfort with ambiguity — you're comfortable laying the track when the train is already moving, and always helping our team move faster without sacrificing the integrity of our process.

WHAT WE OFFER:

For full-time employees, Check offers stock options, flexible PTO and sick leave, 9 annual holidays, generous paid parental leave for all new parents and flexible return-to-work, a 401k retirement plan, and a $100 monthly stipend for home internet and mobile phone expenses. We also provide high-quality medical, dental, vision, short-term/long-term disability, and basic life insurance coverage, effective on your first day of work.

At Check, transparency and fairness in compensation are our top priorities: our compensation bands are visible to all employees across all roles. The actual annual salary for this role is dependent on each candidate’s experience, qualifications, and work location:

  • The expected range in San Francisco, NYC, LA, and Seattle is between $172,000 and $185,000.
  • The expected range for all other locations is between $147,000 and $160,000.

We accept applications on an ongoing basis with no specified deadline.

Travel and Office Policy

This role can be remote, hybrid, or based in one of our offices in New York City or San Francisco. The Check team is distributed across the US! While we welcome remote work, personal time is valuable and important. We offer ample opportunities and encourage employees to attend team offsites, events, and hackathons a couple of times a year! All employees must be willing to attend our annual 3-day company offsite in the spring.

For our in-office and hybrid employees, our offices are open all week. We provide meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the team hosts regular happy hours, game nights, etc.

Remote work at Check requires the ability to perform all responsibilities without distraction

Source: Check Technologies careers (Ashby)

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