As our Talent Fellow, you’ll spend a year building an early-stage talent pipeline and helping to grow startup teams across a wide variety of sectors in our portfolio.

You’ll see how different startups operate, and understand the hiring challenges they face. This is a chance to experience the startup journey up close, grow your recruiting tool kit, and gain broad exposure across a startup talent ecosystem.

This role may be for you if your long-term career aspirations are to become a Head of Talent at a fast-growing startup or a VC Talent Partner. After a year in the startup hiring trenches, we’re confident you will easily land a founding recruiter role at an early-stage company.

In your year-long fellowship, you will:

Source: Help our startups hit milestones faster by identifying and engaging the crucial zero-to-one team members they need to get it done
Pilot: Test sourcing & candidate engagement tools to stay on the frothy edge of recruiting and hiring innovation
Innovate: Shape the future of early-stage talent services and help plan our recruiting events (Initialized invests in ~ 20 new seed companies a year)
Network: Grow the Initialized Talent Den, our top-of-funnel talent community for early stage startup ready candidates

We’re looking for a builder and connector and are optimizing for the following:

You are around 2-3 years into a talent acquisition career focused on technical recruiting.
Output Driven: You are hungry to learn and grow fast—and have a track record of exceeding quotas and expectations. (You recognize this role is a stepping stone to your dream job).
Technical fluency: Proficient in a modern recruiting stack (and critical of their limitations), a demonstrated track record in early tool adoption, and a love for automating repetitive recruiting tasks. (We will test many tools for ourselves & the portfolio to streamline workflows).
An ethic of excellence: You take pride in your work and want to build an A Player resume… … and have a reputation for positively improving the processes, systems, and teams you are a part of. (Your current team and manager should be sad to see you departing but excited for what you will do next).
High velocity ownership: You don’t just have ideas, you implement them. You know when & how to escalate vs fix independently. (You can take partially baked ideas and bring them across the finish line.)
Able to commit to a year-long paid fellowship

Bonus Points for

Hardware/ deeptech company experience
A knack for building internal tools & developing automation workflows
Event chops - ideating, coordinating, & participating (we will be upping our talent events in 2026)

Why Join Us

Ground-floor impact: Be the first Initialized Talent Fellow in our program and have real influence in the program roadmap while helping to build the foundational teams in our startups
Rapid career growth: Clear path to first recruiter in a growing startup…and towards Head of Talent
Broad exposure: The chance to influence the futures of dozens of early stage startups and experiment with new tools

A few additional notes about this Fellowship:

Full time (40 hrs per week) for 1 year
US-based Remote friendly but prefer someone based in the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, or NYC (where the majority of our portfolio companies are based). You will not be expected to come to the office regularly.
Compensation: $100- $125k

The pay range for this role is:

100,000 - 125,000 USD per year (United States)

Venture Capital Careers

Talent Fellow