Entrepreneurs First
Talent Acquisition Specialist
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ABOUT EF
Entrepreneurs First invests in exceptional individuals to build startups from scratch. We bring together talented outliers to develop their most ambitious ideas and raise money from the world’s best investors.
Since pioneering Talent Investing in 2014, we have learned to recognise individuals with extraordinary futures before anyone else, embedding them in a community of ambitious peers and giving them the tools they need to succeed, fast. We back them before they have a company, a team, even before they have an idea, based purely on talent.
Our portfolio is now worth over $17 billion, up 8x in the last five years, and includes companies like Cleo, Aztec, Gensyn, PolyAI and many more.
EF is backed by some of the world’s leading founders and investors, including Patrick and John Collison (Stripe), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Sara Clemens (Whatnot and Twitch), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress). We exist to make great companies happen that otherwise wouldn’t.
THE ROLE: SUMMARY
EF is building a new category of early stage venture institution. Unlike traditional venture firms, we are deeply interested in scale; our bottleneck on growth is finding more great people who can be great Talent Investors. Talent Investors identify exceptional individuals before those individuals have a company, and help them build companies from scratch. The quality of every cohort, every Demo Day, and ultimately every company we help create flows from the calibre of the Talent Investors we hire.
We are hiring a Talent Acquisition Specialist to lead our sourcing and pipeline building for Talent Investor hires in the UK and Europe. The role is a rare seat with three threads. You will build a long-term community of Talent Investor candidates and put Talent Investing on the map as a known and attractive career path. You will run proactive sourcing and a tight hiring process when roles open. And you will apprentice on what “great” looks like from the people already hiring well, sharpening your own taste as you watch how candidates perform.
ROLE DETAILS
- Location: This is a London-based role, where you are expected to be in office at least 3-4 days/week.
- Travel: You may be required to travel within the UK and Europe.
- Compensation: £95,000-£105,000, depending on experience. Annual performance bonus up to £15,000.
- Equity participation: The opportunity to subscribe to equity units covering portfolio companies created across all the sites.
WHO YOU ARE
You likely have 4-7 years of experience hiring into Talent Investor-adjacent roles, and excel in the following areas:
- Practised at hiring without a playbook. Most of the people you will be looking at won't have done this job before. You know how to assess the signals that map onto the work: traits, judgment, and the right pattern of past experience and behaviour.
- Long-game relationship builder. You have a track record of building and maintaining talent communities and professional networks over years. People you have spoken to once still take your call eighteen months later. You enjoy running events, hosting dinners and being a connector.
- Developed views on talent, with an apprentice’s mindset to refine them. You have your own thesis on what “great” looks like in investor and founder-facing roles, and the confidence to defend it. You also know that hiring great Talent Investors is a specific, taste-led discipline that you will need to apprentice on, and you treat building that calibration over time, in dialogue with the people who already see it, as a core part of the job rather than a phase you grow out of.
- Outbound craft. You write the kind of message that earns a reply. You can turn a cold contact into a real conversation, and a real conversation into a hire.
- Operationally excellent. You can run multiple pipelines in parallel without ever dropping candidates.
- Commercially literate and curious. You can hold your own in conversations with investors, founders and operators. You are curious about Talent Investing as an emerging category in venture and want to learn the model from the inside.
- Thrives in ambiguity. Much of what makes a great Talent Investor is not fully codified. You are energised, not frustrated, by the work of helping us write that down.
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WHAT YOU’LL DO
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- Build a long-term community of Talent Investor candidates.
- Develop a deep understanding of where the strongest Talent Investor candidates sit today. Map the market, identify the people worth knowing, and become part of that world.
- Build long-term relationships with the people in it. The best Talent Investor candidates are rarely actively looking and may not move for another year or two. You will identify them now, stay close to them as a thought partner and sounding board, and help them think about where they can have the most impact, even when that is not yet at EF.
- Run a small number of high-signal events and gatherings. Dinners, partnerships or sponsorships of the right communities. The goal is to make EF the most credible place to talk about Talent Investing as a career, and to ensure the strongest people in the market know us before we know we need them.
- Make Talent Investing a credible and attractive career path.
- Talent Investing is a relatively new category, and we are still creating it. Many of the people who would make exceptional Talent Investors do not yet know the role exists, and default to VC, operating or other paths because those are the legible options. Part of your job is to change that.
- Build the case for Talent Investing as a career, and get it in front of the right audiences through content, online channels, talks and partnerships.
- Make the move into Talent Investing feel like an obvious next chapter for people from adjacent worlds. You will be one of a small group of people responsible for putting this category on the map.
- Feed market intelligence back into the team. As you talk to candidates, you will see on the ground what attracts and detracts people from the Talent Investor role, and how that varies across markets and levels. Share those insights internally so we can iterate on how we structure and position the role.
- Run proactive sourcing for our live hires.
- Translate the community into pipeline. When a role opens, you will know who the right people are, where they are in their thinking, and how to bring them to the table fast.
- Run targeted outbound for the candidates who are not yet in the community. Warm introductions, well-crafted messaging, and the kind of outreach that earns a reply.
- Build and own the systems that make this scale: a CRM of warm Talent Investor candidates, structured re-engagement, and a clear view of who is on our long-list at any moment.
- Run a tight hiring process from end to end.
- Manage candidate pipelines for our London and Paris-based Talent Investors. Over time, the role may extend to support hiring for our India and US-based roles.
- Conduct first-round screens and provide a calibrated point of view on who progresses.
- Hold the team accountable to a clean process and a high-quality candidate experience for every candidate.
- Help shape the ongoing evolution of our hiring processes, including understanding how we can use AI to supercharge what we do.
- Apprentice on taste, and continually refine your own mental models.
- Hiring great Talent Investors is a taste-led discipline that lives mostly in the heads of the people who already do it well. You will not arrive with that taste; you will build it. Spend serious time with the Talent Investors and senior Talent Investors already doing the work, watching them evaluate candidates and asking why they reach the calls they do.
- Use every screen, shortlist and hire as a feedback loop. Track how candidates perform at later stages, at offer, in the role itself, and over their first year on the job. Use what you learn to sharpen your benchmark continuously.
- Once your taste sharpens, help the team codify what “great” looks like, so we can evaluate candidates faster and more consistently as we scale.
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