Talent Manager

About Panda Drum

Panda Drum is the world's biggest steel tongue drum brand. Bootstrapped, profitable, ~$50M this year, growing 3x year over year. That growth runs on one engine: hiring great people faster than our competitors can, across Europe, LatAm, and Asia, fully remote, ~40 people and climbing.

Right now the founder runs hiring himself: structured funnels, paid test tasks, scorecards, hard filters. It works, and it doesn't scale. Your job is to take the machine he built and own it completely: every pipeline, every funnel, every offer.

The structure

• Month 1: run the playbook exactly as it exists. Scripts, scorecards, stages, as written. You're learning why every gate is there by operating them yourself, personally, including first-round calls. No process changes in month 1.

• Month 2 onward: the machine becomes yours to sharpen. Improvements come from you, proposed with data from the funnels you've been running, and shipped monthly. If our screening guides aren't sharper in 90 days, that's on you.

• Your first hire is your own junior recruiter. You'll spec them, source them, and place them, which is also how we'll know you can recruit.

If running an existing playbook for a month before changing it sounds beneath you, we're not a fit, and both sides are better off knowing now.

What you'll own

• The entire hiring operation: 5-10 concurrent pipelines (support agents, editors, assistants, senior operators) in our ATS

• Sourcing strategy per role, including headhunting currently-employed A-players for senior seats

• Structured screening: you run first-round calls with scorecards, not vibes

• Test task logistics, offer processes, reference checks

• Directing our sourcing assistant, who handles volume under your direction

• The weekly hiring report: pipeline health, metrics, bottlenecks, one page, every Friday

• Your scoreboard, visible at all times: time-to-fill, trial pass rate of your hires, 12-month retention, candidate response SLA

How we think about hiring

• Interviews are the weakest signal. Work samples, trials, and references decide.

• We pay top of band and filter brutally. Both, always, never one without the other.

• Stability matters: we hire people who stay, and we screen hard for it.

• Speed is respect: candidates hear back within 2 business days at every stage, and internally, same-day responses are the norm. Senior candidates have options; slow recruiters lose them.

Requirements

• 4+ years running structured recruitment yourself, not just managing it, including recent hands-on sourcing and closing

• You've built or transformed a hiring process, not just operated inside one: be ready to show the before and after

• Placements that stayed: name hires still in seat 12+ months later

• ATS fluency and AI tools in your daily recruiting workflow

• Full CET working-hours overlap

Comp

• $5,000-7,000 USD/month base, depending on experience

• $200 bonus per hire passing their 60-day mark (paid quarterly), $500 for senior hires

• Q4 performance bonus, terms in writing in month one

• Fully remote, direct line to the founder, and a hiring machine that's already half-built and waiting for an owner

What we're looking for

• 3+ years recruiting experience with real full-cycle ownership (you sourced, screened, and closed, not coordinated someone else's process)

• In-house or embedded experience for a fast-growing company (agency-only backgrounds: only if you owned accounts end to end)

• Experience hiring remote and international, ideally LatAm and Europe

• You've personally made 20+ hires you can talk about, including the ones that failed and what you changed

• At least 1.5 years at one company (we practice what we screen for)

• Excellent written English; ATS fluency (we use Recruitee/Tellent)