Head of People

About Us

There are 55 million Americans over 65 living at home, and their families are anxious in ways that go far beyond "I hope mom's alright." We built a phone that works out of the box, AI check-in calls that surface how she's really doing, and a family app that replaces daily dread with peace of mind. Families tell us they used to wake up with a knot in their stomach. They don't anymore.

We are customer-obsessed to an unusual degree. When we had a major network outage, everyone, including recruiters, engineers, and marketers, got on the phone with customers. That's not a policy. It's just who we are. It is working, with tens of thousands of families trusting us.

We are looking for an executive partner on people: a peer to the co-founders who owns talent, culture and recruiting across the company. There is plenty still to build here, but this is not an HR business partner role. You will co-author, with the co-founders, who we hire, who we keep and grow, who we part ways with, and what it feels like to work here. If building the team that brings peace of mind to millions of seniors and their families is how you want to spend the next few years, we'd love to talk.

What you'll own

Hire the top 1%

• You know what extraordinary looks like. You can explain why someone is exceptional rather than merely good, and hold every hiring manager, including the co-founders, to that bar.
• You'll build and lead the recruiting team: at least two recruiters, one for technical and senior roles and one for high-volume customer-facing roles. Initially you run searches yourself while you build out your team. Down the line, you may be hands on recruiting for executive roles.
• You'll grow us to about 150 to 160 people by the end of 2027, adding 12 to 20 non-rep roles and 25 to 30 reps. You'll run your recruiters to tight funnel metrics like pass-through rates and time to hire, and you'll also measure the quality of hires after they start: are the people your team hired still here and excelling a year later?
• You'll make sure we hire the right people at the right time, not just the roles hiring managers announce they need, and that the people we hire are connected to our mission and likely to grow and succeed here.
• You'll be well-networked and able to deliver world-class hiring, not just high-volume recruiting. You bring in people we couldn't otherwise reach, you know what sells the best people on Community Phone and what keeps them here, and you make sure every candidate hears it.

Keep extraordinary people, and only them

• You'll be the primary voice of culture alongside the co-founders. You'll make sure everyone understands the mission, what part of the system they're in, what their work feeds into, how their performance is evaluated, and why it matters.
• You'll make sure our most remarkable people stay: that they have the space, control and authority to do great work, that they feel pushed, capable and cared for, and that they get bigger scope before someone else offers it.
• You'll make sure we don't keep the people we shouldn't. You'll run a talent review with every leader each quarter (who is exceptional, who is solid, who should not be here in six months), track regretted and non-regretted attrition by team, and push managers to part ways when they need to, fairly and clearly, coaching them through direct feedback, clear expectations, performance plans and well-documented exits.
• You'll tell any leader, including the CEO, when they're hiring below the bar, protecting a weak performer, or avoiding a hard conversation.
• You'll ensure our culture scales as we scale globally. You believe in the value of international and remote work. Our team is distributed across 12+ countries.

Build the leadership bench and the systems behind it

• You'll partner with the executive team to build a bench of phenomenal leaders. We're building our leadership bench; your job is to make sure that in 18 months we have the leaders we need, whether we grow them or hire them.
• You'll keep the leadership team on the same page: what stage each department is in, what it needs most right now, and where we need to align.
• You'll make our four (typically international) offsites per year count. You'll understand why we're there, what each department would benefit most from, and how we make the most of our time together. The executive assistant, who reports to you, runs the logistics.
• You'll make onboarding phenomenal, especially for leaders, so new people are effective and feel the mission in their first weeks.
• You'll build the strategies and systems that let us do all of this at scale: how we level and compensate people, replacing case-by-case decisions; how we review performance; and how we part ways fairly, predictably and without delay. Our recruiters, our executive assistants, and our (now-fractional) HR Business Partner will report to you.

What we're looking for

• You have 8+ years in people leadership, including a seat at the executive table at a company of 250+ people, where you owned talent and culture rather than administered them.
• You can identify extraordinary talent and explain what makes it so. You've personally brought in people other companies couldn't get, you're well-networked enough to do it again, and you've hired and managed recruiters who could too.
• You're an author of culture, and you take that responsibility seriously. You know what a strong culture feels like from the inside, you can name the handful of things that make it so, and you hold the company to them. You're direct, firm and hard to talk out of a position, and you want to push and be pushed by the co-founders as a peer.
• You're a strategic, systematic executive, not an HR business partner. The ATS, HRIS and payroll are already running; your work is the thinking behind compensation, leadership, performance and retention, and the judgment to make clear calls and see them through. You've designed comp philosophies, grown first-time managers into real leaders, and made exits fair and fast.

How we work

We're a fast-growing, YC-backed company built on curiosity, a bias toward action, and a founder mindset. We'd rather ship something small and learn than debate it for a month. You'll report directly to Ellie Lasater-Guttmann, a cofounder. You will sit on the leadership team.

Originally posted on Himalayas