Internal Recruiter

Department: People

Reports To: Chief of Staff

Location: On site, Durham, NC

To Apply

To apply directly to this role, email jess@mycarpe.com with your resume attached as a PDF and a short, non AI paragraph, in your own words, explaining why you want this job.

We use AI heavily at Carpe and expect you to. For this application, though, we want your own words.

Then answer these two questions:

1. Tell us about someone you actively recruited who was not looking for a new job when you found them. How did you find them, how did you get them interested, and what happened?

2. Tell us about a candidate who looked great on paper but you decided not to move forward. What did you uncover that changed your mind?

We read every application.

We reply to the ones that answer the questions.

About Carpe

Carpe is the fastest growing deodorant brand in the US. Our team is composed of about 30 insanely smart people working together in person in downtown Durham, NC. Our office is rather open with many private niches, and our energy level is HIGH.

Ask anyone here what they like most about working at Carpe and you will get the same answer: the people.

No ego. Honest feedback. High expectations. Everyone pitching in outside their job description. People who are really, really good at what they do and want the people around them to be just as good.

We protect that fiercely.

About the Role

We are hiring our first Recruiter to own hiring across Carpe.

One week you may be hunting for someone in finance, the next ecommerce, creative, operations, product, or marketing. You will learn every part of this company because you will be responsible for finding the people who make every part of it better.

At a 30 person company, every hire changes the company.

A significant part of your job is finding exceptional people who are not looking for us yet.

Research the market. Figure out who is actually good. Find them. Get their attention. Start the conversation. Get them excited about Carpe.

You will also help find and onboard freelancers and contractors across the company, building a bench of exceptional independent talent we can turn to when we need it.

What You’ll Do

• Own full cycle hiring for every open role, from intake with the hiring manager through sourcing, screening, interviews, references, offer, and close.

• Source proactively and constantly. Build targeted searches, identify passive talent, and go after great people instead of waiting for them to apply.

• Get really good at knowing who is good. Understand what someone actually owned, what they accomplished, how they think, and where the gaps are.

• Run the first candidate screen and develop a point of view. We do not need you to summarize the resume for us. We need to know what you think.

• Partner with hiring managers to define what exceptional looks like before a search begins and recalibrate quickly when the market tells us something.

• Own the candidate experience. Great candidates should never wonder where they stand or what happens next.

• Find, assess, and onboard freelancers and contractors across Carpe and build relationships with great independent talent we want to work with again.

• Manage external recruiting partners when we use them while building our internal ability to need them less and less.

• Write and test job descriptions, titles, job posts, and outbound messages. Pay attention to what works and change what does not.

• Run our in person interview process, including projects and panels, and make sure every step is actually helping us make a better hiring decision.

• Reference deeply. We want to understand what it was actually like to work with someone before we hire them.

• Help close exceptional candidates who have other great options.

• Keep our applicant tracking system accurate and useful. No candidate should disappear into a black hole, and no hiring manager should have to ask you where a search stands.

What We’re Looking For

• You learned recruiting somewhere that taught you to hunt for talent, not wait for applications.

• You already know how to source. You know where to look, how to build a search from scratch, how to identify the right people, and how to get passive candidates to respond.

• You are comfortable picking up the phone and calling someone who was not thinking about changing jobs five minutes ago.

• You can carry multiple searches across completely different functions without losing candidates, details, or momentum.

• You ask good questions and actually listen to the answers.

• You can tell the difference between someone who interviews well and someone who is actually exceptional at their job.

• You can recognize when an impressive resume is hiding a mediocre candidate and when an unconventional resume is hiding an exceptional one.

• You have high EQ. People trust you quickly, and you read people well.

• You write clearly, move quickly, and follow through obsessively.

• You are comfortable disagreeing with a hiring manager when you have the evidence to back it up.

• You have no ego, and you notice ego in other people.

• You are competitive. If someone else is better at recruiting than you are, your instinct is to figure out why and get better.

• You want to be exceptional at this, not just good at it.

What Makes You Stand Out

Tell us about the people you found.

Not the applicants who came through a job posting. The person you identified, went after, got on the phone, convinced to take the meeting, assessed, and ultimately closed.

Experience recruiting across multiple functions or working with freelancers and contractors is valuable. Consumer, CPG, ecommerce, or high growth experience is a plus, not a requirement.

We care much more about what you personally did and how good you became at doing it than whether your resume follows a perfect path.

Why This Role

You are coming in with recruiting expertise. We are going to teach you how we hire.

We have spent years getting exceptionally good at defining what great looks like, assessing people beyond their resumes, designing projects that test whether someone can actually do the work, running panels that produce real signal, referencing deeply, and making hard calls when someone is good but not great.

That process helped build the team you see at Carpe today.

You will learn it directly from the Chief of Staff, founders, and leaders who have built this team. Then we expect you to combine it with everything you already know about recruiting and make it even better.

You will have direct access to leadership and visibility into every part of the business. There are not many recruiting jobs where you get to understand a company this deeply or have this much influence over who joins it.

And there is a very clear bar for success:

Build an internal recruiting capability so good that Carpe does not need an external recruiter.

We should be able to look around Carpe a few years from now and point to exceptional employees, freelancers, and contractors who are here because you found them.

This is not a recruiting coordinator role.

It is not an HR generalist role. You will not be doing benefits or payroll.

And it is definitely not a job where you post a role and wait.

If your favorite part of recruiting is hunting for an exceptional person, figuring out what makes them tick, and getting them across the finish line, you will probably love this job.

What You’ll Get

• Competitive salary based on experience

• Health, vision, and dental coverage

• Flexible PTO

• Direct access to the people who have built an exceptionally high performing team

• A front row seat to the growth of one of the most disruptive brands in body care

To Apply

To apply directly to this role, email jess@mycarpe.com with your resume attached as a PDF and a short, non AI paragraph, in your own words, explaining why you want this job.

We use AI heavily at Carpe and expect you to. For this application, though, we want your own words.

Then answer these two questions:

1. Tell us about someone you actively recruited who was not looking for a new job when you found them. How did you find them, how did you get them interested, and what happened?

2. Tell us about a candidate who looked great on paper but you decided not to move forward. What did you uncover that changed your mind?

We read every application.

We reply to the ones that answer the questions.