AI & TechUSExecutive Search

How a seed-stage AI startup hired its Head of AI Engineering in 15 days

Industry
AI & Tech
Region
US
Stage
$7M seed-stage
Role
Head of AI Engineering
Channels
Voice
Agents
Sourcing, Screening, Evaluation

The Challenge

Senior AI leadership roles are among the hardest hires in the market. The qualified pool is small, most are not looking, and a profile that looks right on paper often is not. Searches like this typically run 30 to 45 days, and many never close. For this seed-stage team, the bottleneck was never reach. It was the quality of who got submitted, and closing them.

Shortlist · Head of AI Eng40 screened
EV

Elena Varga

Ex-staff ML eng · LLM infra

offer accepted
ML

Marcus Lee

Applied research lead

89
HS

Hana Sato

ML platform, 8 yrs

86
BC

Ben Carter

Eng manager, CV

84
IM

Ines Moreau

Research scientist

82
Search timeline
0
screened
0
shortlisted
0
hired
Before0 days
With HireBound0 days
Every candidate voice screened before the founder's first call

The Solution

HireBound ran the search end to end and screened 40 candidates, handling 200 to 320 minutes of first-pass screening calls the client's team would otherwise have made.

From those 40, we submitted a shortlist of 5, each evaluated against the role's real requirements.

One was selected and accepted the offer in under 15 days against the 30-to-45-day benchmark.

The Impact

15 days
Time to hire (vs 30-45 day benchmark)
40
candidates screened against role requirements
5
qualified shortlisted
1
senior AI hire closed
~25 hrs
manual screening time saved per recruiter
~120 hrs
recruiter time saved on manual shortlist

From a 30-45 day search to a senior role in under 15 days.

Customer Stories

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