Head of talent
Also called: head of talent acquisition, talent lead
What a head of talent owns
Six responsibilities, in decreasing order of how much time they take:
- Hiring throughput: open roles closing on time, every quarter.
- Recruiter performance: coaching the recruiting team, raising their hit rate.
- Hiring-bar discipline: making sure standards don’t drift quarter to quarter or team to team.
- Vendor and tool decisions: which ATS, which job boards, which agencies.
- Reporting: time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, quality-of-hire dashboards to leadership.
- Strategic projects: opening new markets, scaling engineering hires, launching a referral program.
In an SMB of 100-300 people, this is one person with 1-3 recruiters reporting in.
When SMBs hire one
The trigger is usually one of:
- More than 50 hires/year, sustained.
- Multiple recruiters who need someone to manage them.
- A specific strategic hire (head of engineering recruiting, head of GTM recruiting) that needs an owner.
Before that, the head of HR or COO holds the function.
Head of talent vs. head of HR
Different scopes:
- Head of talent: pre-hire. Owns getting the right people in.
- Head of HR / people: post-hire and pre-hire. Broader scope; includes onboarding, performance, engagement.
In small companies, one person does both. In larger ones, they’re separate, and the head of talent reports to the head of people.
Where Join fits
Heads of talent in Join see the cross-team dashboard view — funnel health, time-to-hire by team, cost-per-hire by channel. See the features page.
