Head of Hiring in London

As Head of Hiring at GovAI, you'll lead our efforts to identify, assess, and recruit exceptional staff, fellows, and visiting researchers. You'll lead the hiring team, help shape our approach to finding and assessing talent, and build a hiring function that can support GovAI as it grows. This position plays a pivotal part in GovAI's future success — if we fail to identify the top talent for our positions, our impact as an organization suffers. You'll work with the executive team and function owners to make our hiring as successful as possible.

About GovAI: GovAI was founded to help humanity navigate the transition to a world with advanced AI, by producing rigorous research and fostering talent. Our researchers have published in top venues and work closely with decision-makers across government, industry, and civil society. Our alumni have gone on to influential roles in government, leading AI companies, top think tanks, and leading universities. Our team and affiliate community possess expertise across various fields related to AI governance.

Why You Might Be Interested in This Role:

• You'll lead the work on one of the highest-leverage problems GovAI faces.
• You'll be responsible for ensuring we consistently identify and attract exceptional talent.
• You'll lead both people and strategy through rapid scaling.
• You'll have a mandate to experiment and improve.
• You'll pioneer approaches that the entire AI governance ecosystem will learn from.
• You'll directly shape the next generation of AI governance leaders.

Role Description: The Head of Hiring leads GovAI's hiring team, oversees the delivery and continuous improvement of our hiring processes, and works with leadership and function owners to turn GovAI's plans into well-scoped roles and effective hiring strategies. This is an increasingly challenging task. Our seasonal fellowships attract thousands of applications, evaluating candidates takes up substantial time, and GovAI needs to recruit for an increasingly diverse range of roles. We're looking for someone who is excited to tackle these challenges, make thoughtful trade-offs between hiring quality, speed, and efficiency, and lead a team that delivers excellent results.

Core Responsibilities:

• Hiring planning and role scoping: Work closely with the executive team and function owners to understand their hiring needs, define the capabilities they're looking for, and translate these into well-scoped roles, scorecards, and assessment plans.
• Oversee the delivery of hiring rounds across GovAI's staff roles and fellowship programs.
• Ensure our hiring systems, processes, and resources can support a growing volume and variety of recruitment without compromising selection quality.
• Lead the ongoing evaluation and improvement of our hiring processes.
• Build GovAI's capacity to find candidates who don't apply.
• Lead a growing team and support team members' professional development.

Key Priorities in Your First Six Months:

• Take over the team and the hiring rounds already underway.
• Map GovAI’s hiring needs for the next 6–12 months with function owners.
• Identify the most important improvements and start testing the most promising ones with leadership.

Selection Criteria: We're looking for candidates who are excited by the opportunity to use their careers to positively influence the lasting impact of artificial intelligence. Candidates should have experience in AI safety or governance, strong selection design expertise, the ability to lead complex operations, experience leading and developing teams, and the capability to diagnose problems and improve processes.

Nice to Have: Familiarity with the AI safety and governance talent landscape, experience building or improving an operations function, and experience evaluating the effectiveness of selection methods.

Salary and Location: This position is full-time. We have offices in London, UK, and Washington, DC, and we strongly prefer team members to work from one of them. We are also open to candidates who would need to work remotely. The Head of Hiring will be compensated in line with our salary principles, with expected salaries ranging based on location and experience.