Talent Apprentice / future Head of Talent

The best talent leaders are made, not found -- and almost nobody is actually making them.We built this apprenticeship to fix that.

Who We’re Looking For

The profile that excites us:

• 2 to 6 years into a career, talented, cares, hasn't fully landed yet.
• We could imagine this person coming from sales, consulting or investment banking, business operations, or a recruiting role who is looking for more.
• We care far more about how you work than what your resume says.
  
  

We're looking for someone sharp enough to problem-solve well, human enough to earn trust with people they've just met, and high enough agency to make the next move without being told.

The two year apprenticeship.

The ramp:

• Month one: fundamentals. Shadow every interview, own coordination, sourcing, learn what good looks like by doing.
• Month two: shift from reactive to proactive. The basics become self-directed.
• Month three onward: run searches end-to-end. Build judgment and start bringing opinions we trust.
  
  

What it adds up to:

• At six months: you know the playbook and you're running it. In practice that means running four to six searches at any given time across our portfolio companies, owning the full process from sourcing to close.
• At twelve months: your hires changed the trajectory of a business, and you do it again at the next one, faster.
• At two years: you have range across Talent: recruiting and people ops, with real judgment in both.
  
  

Where you go from there is wide open: deeper into B&W as we build new companies, in-house to lead people somewhere, a talent search firm, or to the investor side.

How We Work.

Boulton & Watt is perhaps the slowest startup incubator in the world. We’ve just launched our third company and can’t wait to keep going.

We're direct, low-ego, and serious about developing the people who work with us. High standards and real investment in people are not in conflict here. You'll get honest feedback, clear expectations, and the kind of training that makes you better faster than almost anywhere else you could be at this stage.

Apply - Skills, Not Resume Lottery.

Once you apply, you'll be invited to complete a short skills-based exercise - the same one every other candidate takes. It's the most direct way we know to find the person who can actually excel at this work, regardless of where they've been.

Don't apply if you want to do a job. Apply if you read the section above and started thinking about the fun you'd have actually solving these puzzles.

Why now, if you're the kind of person who reads this far:

Recruiting and talent development can be a backwater. We don't see it that way: if you start with excellence here, all else follows.

The part of the job that was always the least interesting is the part that's automating first: copy-pasting LinkedIn profiles into an application tracking system, fake-customizing your cold-sourcing emails, rewriting behavioral questions after a profile pivot. For the first time, recruiting can actually become what everyone always said it was.

What's left is the work that is high value and fun: the judgment call between pedigree and underlying talent, finding the hire that unlocks the market expansion, the pattern recognition to see a mis-hire coming before it happens.

The opportunity for that kind of impactful talent work has never been more real. The well-paid transactional middle is eroding fast. Over the last 4 years, we’ve lived through the evolution of our own talent approach, with trajectory-changing hires and lessons learned. This apprenticeship is how we start doing that deliberately.

Compensation Range: $75K - $130K