Founding Recruiter – Dili
Founding Recruiter · New York, NY (Union Square, hybrid)/Remote · Full-time salary + equity
About Dili
Dili builds software that helps construction and clean-energy companies manage complex prevailing wage, apprenticeship, and labor compliance requirements.
We started Dili because labor compliance is still handled through a mix of spreadsheets, PDFs, manual review, and institutional knowledge, despite determining whether some of the largest construction projects in the country are compliant.
Today, we’re a team of roughly 35 and growing quickly across all teams. We’re building the infrastructure to turn complex regulatory requirements into software that can be evaluated consistently, explained clearly, and audited.
The Role
We're a team of roughly 35, and we're about to grow quickly. We're hiring a Founding Recruiter to own hiring across every part of Dili: engineering, product, compliance, customer success, sales, and G&A.
This is the first dedicated recruiting hire at Dili. Today, hiring is run by the founders and hiring managers. Your job is to take that over, raise the bar, and build the recruiting function that will carry us through our next stage of growth.
This is a hands-on role. You'll run full-cycle searches yourself while designing the systems, processes, and standards that make hiring repeatable as we scale. Over time, as hiring volume grows, you'll help shape and lead the recruiting team.
You'll work directly with the CEO and CTO and partner closely with every hiring manager. We expect you to develop your own view of what Dili need to hire well, and to take ownership of making it happen.
What You'll Do
• Own full-cycle recruiting across all functions: intake, sourcing, screening, interview coordination, closing, and offer negotiation.
• Partner with the founders and leadership to build a quarterly hiring plan tied to company goals and headcount budget.
• Run intake meetings with hiring managers to define each role clearly, including scorecards, must-haves, and interview loops.
• Source senior and hard-to-find talent directly, including engineers, compliance experts with prevailing wage and labor-law backgrounds, and go-to-market leaders who sell into construction and energy.
• Select, implement, and own our recruiting stack, including the ATS, sourcing tools, scheduling, and offer workflows.
• Establish core best practices: structured interviews, calibrated scorecards, interviewer training, debrief standards, and consistent candidate communication.
• Build reporting on pipeline health, time-to-hire, conversion rates, offer acceptance, and source quality, and use it to improve how we hire.
• Define compensation bands and leveling with the founders, and manage offers within them.
• Create a candidate experience that reflects how we work: fast, direct, and respectful of people's time.
• Build Dili's employer brand and talent pipelines through referrals, communities, events, and outreach.
• Manage relationships with agencies and contract recruiters when we need extra capacity.
• As hiring volume grows, hire, onboard, and manage additional recruiters and coordinators.
What Success Looks Like
First 30 Days
Learn Dili's business, team, and current hiring process. Meet every hiring manager, audit open roles and active pipelines, and take ownership of the most urgent searches.
Identify the biggest gaps in our current process, tools, and data.
By 60 Days
Have an ATS and a consistent hiring process running for every open role, with intake docs, scorecards, and structured interview loops.
Close your first hires and deliver a hiring plan for the next two quarters that leadership agrees on.
By 90 Days
Run a predictable hiring engine with clear metrics on pipeline, speed, and quality. Hiring managers should know what to expect from the process and their role in it.
Present a recruiting roadmap covering team structure, tooling, employer brand, and when we'll need additional recruiting headcount.
Qualifications
• 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, including meaningful time in-house at a high-growth startup.
• A track record of hiring across multiple functions, ideally both technical (engineering, product) and non-technical (sales, operations, G&A) roles.
• Experience building recruiting from scratch or near-scratch: selecting and implementing an ATS, designing interview processes, and setting up reporting.
• Strong direct-sourcing skills and comfort recruiting senior, passive candidates.
• Experience running structured interview processes and coaching hiring managers to use them well.
• Comfort with compensation conversations, offer construction, and closing, including explaining startup equity.
• A data-driven approach: you track your funnel and use it to make decisions.
• Strong judgment, high integrity, and the ability to keep confidential information confidential.
• Able to manage many searches at once without dropping details.
• Clear, concise written and verbal communication.
Nice to Have
• Experience managing recruiters or recruiting coordinators.
• Experience as the first or second recruiter at a Seed to Series B company through a period of rapid growth.
• Experience hiring for B2B SaaS, regtech, fintech, payroll, construction tech, or climate/energy companies.
• Familiarity with modern recruiting tools such as Ashby, Greenhouse, or Lever, and LinkedIn Recruiter or Gem.
• An existing network in New York's startup or engineering community.