Recruiting Lead — Growth & Product
Location: Irvine, CA
Type: Full-time
About Bidbus
Bidbus is building a consumer marketplace that helps car owners auction their vehicles directly to licensed dealers.
We recently raised our Series A and have raised over $18M in total funding, backed by leading venture investors. We’re growing quickly across multiple markets and are now building out a world-class Growth and Product team.
We’re looking for a highly hands-on recruiter who can help us build our internal recruiting engine from the ground up.
This is not a traditional HR role. You’ll spend most of your time identifying exceptional talent, reaching out to passive candidates, partnering directly with hiring managers, and closing high-impact hires.
What You’ll Own
- Own full-cycle recruiting for key roles across Growth, Product, Design, Marketing, and other strategic functions
- Build talent maps across target companies and identify the best candidates before they enter the job market
- Proactively headhunt passive candidates through LinkedIn, referrals, communities, and creative outbound strategies
- Partner directly with founders and hiring managers to define what “great” looks like for each role
- Turn broad hiring needs into clear candidate profiles, target-company lists, and sourcing strategies
- Build personalized outreach that gets strong candidates to respond
- Manage candidates end-to-end from first outreach through interview, offer, negotiation, and close
- Build and maintain long-term candidate pipelines for roles we expect to hire in the future
- Develop recruiting systems, sourcing playbooks, interview processes, dashboards, and operating rhythms as we scale
- Use market data to challenge unrealistic hiring requirements and help the team make better talent decisions
- Eventually help hire, train, and manage additional recruiters as hiring volume grows
What We’re Looking For
- 5+ years of recruiting or talent acquisition experience
- Strong track record recruiting for consumer technology, marketplaces, fintech, e-commerce, or high-growth startups
- Experience recruiting roles such as:
- Growth Product Managers
- Consumer Product Managers
- Product Designers / Growth Designers
- Growth Marketing / Performance Marketing
- Head of Growth / Growth Leadership
- Exceptional outbound sourcing and passive-candidate recruiting skills
- Strong ability to build talent maps and identify high-potential candidates beyond obvious job titles
- Comfortable recruiting people who are currently successful and not actively looking for a new role
- Strong candidate judgment — you can distinguish between someone who has the right title and someone who has actually owned the right problems
- Able to work directly with founders and senior leaders and push back when necessary
- Highly resourceful, fast-moving, and comfortable operating without an established playbook
- Strong written communication and personalized outreach skills
- Data-driven approach to recruiting funnels, response rates, conversion, time-to-fill, and offer acceptance
Strong Plus
- Recruiting experience at or for companies such as Opendoor, Jerry, Rocket Money, Credit Karma, Chime, Robinhood, Hims, Lemonade, SoFi, or similar consumer companies
- Existing network across consumer Growth, Product, and Design talent
- Experience building an internal recruiting function from scratch
- Experience in both agency recruiting and in-house recruiting
- Experience with LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem, Ashby, Greenhouse, SeekOut, HireEZ, Findem, or similar tools
- Experience using AI and automation to improve sourcing, research, outreach, and recruiting operations
What Success Looks Like
In your first few months, you should be able to
- Build a clear talent map for Bidbus’s highest-priority roles
- Identify the top candidates across our target companies
- Create an outbound recruiting engine that consistently generates conversations with strong passive talent
- Improve the speed and quality of our hiring process
- Help hiring managers sharpen candidate profiles based on real market data
- Build a repeatable recruiting playbook that another recruiter can eventually follow
The Profile We Value
We care less about whether you’ve recruited a specific title before and more about whether you can quickly understand a business problem, identify where the best talent lives, and convince exceptional people to take a conversation.
You should think more like a talent hunter and builder than a traditional recruiter.