General Manager, AI Recruitment Venture

About the role: Lead a live voice AI recruitment venture inside a Series C health-tech scaleup. The product calls every applicant within five minutes, screens them against the hirer’s criteria, and books the qualified ones straight into the recruiter’s calendar. It has screened over 150,000 candidates, has paying external customers and a live sales pipeline, and the parent group has committed follow-on funding tied to commercial milestones.

About the venture: The product came out of the group’s own hiring problem. It recruits at volume in health and social care, and the same thing kept happening: good candidates applied, nobody called them back quickly enough, and they took jobs elsewhere. The venture built a voice agent that responds immediately and works evenings, weekends and bank holidays. In production it reaches a 78% contact rate against a 28% manual baseline, and time-to-offer has fallen from eight days to under three. Screening and booking is the starting point. The vision is to automate the whole recruitment and onboarding journey: every step between a candidate applying and a compliant first day at work. The GM shapes how far and how fast the venture goes after that. The same problem exists in every sector that runs on shift work. Health and social care is the hardest version of it (regulated, compliance-heavy, and very competitive on speed), which is why the venture sells there first. Light industrial, hospitality, construction and education all have milder versions of it.

Part of the job is deciding when to expand beyond care, and not trying to serve every market at once. The venture has got this far without a full-time commercial leader. Deals sit in the pipeline while selling happens as a side activity, revenue has grown anyway, and there is no written growth plan or support function around the team yet. A founding commercial hire is being recruited alongside you to work the pipeline; producing the growth plan is your first task.

What you do:

• Own the venture P&L, revenue and costs.
• Own the product. You set the roadmap and work directly with the engineering team, and voice quality, screening accuracy, latency, drop-off, escalation paths and auditability all sit with you.
• Own pricing and packaging, and change them when market evidence says they are wrong.
• Manage the founding commercial hire day to day. You set their pricing guardrails and pipeline priorities, and the revenue they close counts toward your P&L. The hire is shared with a second venture in the group, so part of their time will eventually move there.
• Sell directly. At this stage the GM carries deals: you run the strategic and first-of-their-kind deals yourself, close alongside the commercial hire until the pattern is established, and feed what buyers tell you back into pricing and product decisions.
• Find the repeatable sales motion in the deals closed so far and the live pipeline, and prove it before spending to scale it.
• Turn the internal deployment and the existing customers into case studies and reference material that persuade outside buyers.
• Hit the commercial milestones that release the follow-on funding.
• Grow the team from its current small base as revenue justifies it.
• Report to the group’s technology leadership and executive team in P&L terms: revenue, cost to serve, pipeline, and what has changed since the last update.
• If the evidence says the venture should stop, or should get more investment, make that case with the numbers.

What’s expected:

• Business orientation: Thinks in unit economics. Knows the venture’s cost to serve, price floor and break-even point, and plans the roadmap around them.
• Product judgment: Stays close to the product: listens to real calls, knows where the agent fails and why customers churn, and prioritises the roadmap on revenue and retention rather than on what is technically interesting.
• Pace and resilience: Ships pricing changes, packaging tests and product bets in weeks rather than quarters, and keeps momentum through lost deals, slipped milestones and setbacks.
• Ownership: Owns the growth targets within the funding envelope, and treats blockers as problems to work through.
• Communication: Simplifies complex situations honestly so leadership can make good decisions quickly, and keeps them informed without being chased, including when the news is bad.
• AI-native working: Uses AI heavily in their own work: analysis, reporting and admin are largely automated, and they expect the same from the team.
• Founder-led sales: Sells the product themselves: technical enough to demo it credibly, explain what it can and cannot do, and win the trust objection from buyers in regulated sectors.
• Structured in ambiguity: Turns an open mandate into a concrete plan with milestones and a decision cadence, and updates it as evidence comes in.
• Tactical and strategic: Does the work as well as directing it, including carrying deals, while still making time for where the product goes next.
• Low ego: Willing to recommend shrinking or stopping their own venture if the evidence points that way, and doesn’t take market feedback personally.

What you need coming in:

1. Experience building a venture inside a larger company. You have incubated a product or business unit inside an established organisation and taken it to real external revenue. You know how to negotiate for shared resources, how to stop the parent organisation slowing you down, and how to keep a venture commercially disciplined when it is spending a parent’s money and no runway pressure is forcing decisions.
2. P&L ownership with real numbers. You have owned both sides of a business’s economics and made the decisions that go with that: pricing, hiring, and stopping things that were not working.
3. Applied AI product judgment. This is a voice AI product sold into regulated sectors. You have shipped AI or conversational products that customers kept using, you know where these systems break and how to measure them, and you can argue a roadmap with engineers and packaging with buyers. Founder experience is welcome and counts toward the first two, but it is not a substitute for having done this inside a larger organisation. Sector experience is not required.

Compensation: Competitive base salary plus meaningful upside tied to the venture’s performance. Location: UK-based, remote-first, with regular time at the group’s London office and with the venture team.