Founding People Lead (m/f/d)
A11 · Hamburg
About the Job
As a key growth accelerator, A11 partners with Europe’s most ambitious startups and scaleups, corporates and SMBs to connect them with top-tier talent ready to make an impact.
We're looking for an experienced Founding People Lead (m/f/d) to join and build the join and build the People and Talent function at one of our ecosystem companies.
As a Founding People Lead, you'll be the first dedicated People & Talent hire and own how we find, hire, onboard, and keep the people who build this company. Our ecosystem company is just past 20 people and plan to multiply that in the coming months and years, so every single seat matters, and you'll own that build-out end to end, from the first LinkedIn message to the signed contract to the first 90 days on the job. This is not a coordinator role and there's no team to delegate to: you're hands-on in the sourcing, the conversations, the interview loops, the offer negotiations, the onboarding, and the employer brand. You build the playbook, run the funnel, and own the hires.
Join the A11 Ecosystem – a next-generation procurement platform redefining how businesses discover, evaluate, and win public tenders across one of the world's largest yet most fragmented markets: €2 trillion in annual contract volume, scattered across 4,500+ portals in 29 countries. It harnesses qualified AI matching and agentic workflow automation to surface only the tenders that fit, analyze 100+ page documents in 30 seconds, and draft winning bids in minutes. Backed by leading investors, the company is scaling fast toward becoming the category-defining player in European public procurement.
In this role, you’ll:
- Own full-cycle recruiting across all departments: sourcing, first calls, interview loops, offers, and closing
- Live in LinkedIn Recruiter and build outbound sourcing lists that actually convert, not vanity funnels
- Improve our employer brand across LinkedIn presence, careers page, team storytelling, and event visibility
- Design and calibrate interview loops per role: scorecards, structured questions, and decision meetings
- Own onboarding end to end: first-week plan, 30-60-90 milestones, and the feedback loop that keeps improving both
- Own comp bands and offer strategy: benchmark, negotiate, and close, keeping pay competitive and fair as we scale
- Own the People stack: contracts, offsites, culture rituals, performance reviews, and the internal processes that let a team of 20 turn into a team of 100 without losing what makes us us
- Feed every signal back to the founders: which channels ship talent, where we lose candidates, and where the next hire has to land
Typical tasks (first 90 days):
- Close five hires across GTM, with time-to-hire measured, tracked, and trending down
- Stand up a standardized interview loop for every priority role, with clear scorecards and calibrated interviewers
- Get the employer brand live and consistent on LinkedIn, with a steady drumbeat of content the team is proud of
- Standardize onboarding end to end so every new hire lands, ramps, and knows what good looks like in week one
- Build a live picture of the hiring funnel: sourced, in process, offers out, offers signed, and drop-off reasons per stage
Your Profile:
Must-haves:
- 1+ year of hands-on recruiting, talent, or People experience, ideally in-house at a high-growth startup or scale-up
- Fluent in LinkedIn Recruiter and modern sourcing tools: you can build a targeted list, open a cold candidate, and run a real conversation
- You've closed candidates: you know how to sell a company, handle a counter-offer, and get to signature
- Clear, confident communication in German, plus strong English
- You care about the craft of hiring, not just filling seats
Nice-to-haves:
- Strong personal network into top Sales teams in Germany
- Early track record of hiring GTM talent
- Employer branding and LinkedIn content experience
- Comfortable building AI-native workflows with tools like Claude Code, n8n, Clay, or comparable, to make sourcing and screening compound
- People Ops experience: onboarding programs, comp benchmarking, performance cycles
- Background in fast-scaling B2B SaaS
You might be a fit if you:
- Get a kick out of closing a candidate who was already off the market
- Are comfortable saying no to a candidate before the founders have to
- Move at builder speed, not corporate HR speed
- Are hungry for ownership and not interested in waiting for permission
- Have something outside of work that shows you don't do things halfway, whether that's competitive sports, a side project, or something completely different
- See this as the path to becoming Head of People in a company that plans to scale fast
Please note that this position is based in Hamburg (on-site).
Benefits and Perks:
- The first dedicated People & Talent seat, shaping the team that defines our growth
- Direct proximity to the founders on every strategic hire and every people decision
- A serious recruiting budget with real autonomy over how you deploy it
- LinkedIn Recruiter and a best-in-class sourcing stack from day one
- An AI-native People stack. If a tool makes hiring faster, sharper, or more human, we'll get it
- Competitive base plus meaningful equity
- MacBook, sport membership, and everything you need to work at builder speed
- A clear path to Head of People as the team scales
- A young, hungry, on-site team in Hamburg where people care deeply about their craft
If you’re eager to join the A11 Ecosystem and shape what’s next, we want to hear from you!
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
A11 is committed to diverse and equal opportunities hiring for all – applicants, candidates, and employees alike. We value humans – with all our glorious multifaceted backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences – and look forward to your application.