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.