What are the responsibilities and job description for the Talent Acquisition & Comp Lead position at Zanskar?
Title: Talent Acquisition & Compensation Lead
Hours: Full-time; Salaried
Location: Salt Lake City, UT (hybrid)
Benefits Eligible: Yes
Leader: Sr People Operations
Mission – Why we exist and why we need you
Geothermal energy is the most abundant renewable energy source in the world. There is 2,300 times more energy in geothermal heat in the ground than in oil, gas, coal, and methane combined. However, historically it’s been hard to find and expensive to develop. At Zanskar, we’re using better technology to find and develop new geothermal resources in order to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid.
Zanskar grew 50% in the last twelve months and we plan to accelerate that growth. We need a Talent Acquisition & Compensation Lead to build upon and run existing systems to enable faster and more hiring across all our teams, which include software engineers, geophysical experts, geologists, drilling managers, administrators, finance, and more.
Outcomes – Problems you'll solve
The Talent Acquisition & Compensation Lead will be responsible for the recruiting process such as building a healthy pipeline of candidates, managing initial screening and candidate interactions, and ensuring the candidate interactions with the company are smooth. Success will primarily be measured in speed in which we close qualified candidates through a structured process, targeting 5 weeks for time-to-hire. You will build other systems to track and improve our ability to measure recruiting success. Secondarily, the Lead will maintain a longer-term hiring plan and make sure Executive team members and necessary stakeholders are updated on the process. Additionally, the Talent Acquisition & Compensation Lead will support our People Ops function for compensation research and bi-annual comp review.
Key example activities include:- Maintain and improve scorecards and structured interviews for priority roles; train interviewers and achieve >90% feedback form completion.
- Proactive outreach to qualified candidates for roles based on Hiring Managers’ blueprint of an ideal candidate, in addition to vetting inbounds.
- Maintain / Reduce time-to-accept by ~20% through streamlined stages, calibrated rubrics, and faster decision cycles.
- Support research function for salary bands for ≥80% of roles; introduce offer guardrails within internal salary bands
- Optimize ATS/HRIS configuration; create single source of truth for accepted offers as well as tracking reasons for decline, if applicable.
- Structured, hypothesis-driven problem solving: You break ambiguous talent and comp challenges into testable hypotheses, quantify tradeoffs, and drive to decisions with clear logic and data.
- Compensation analytics & architecture: Skilled in market pricing, leveling frameworks, salary banding, location differentials, and pay equity analysis; comfortable with messy data and building pragmatic models using tools such as Pave, Mercer, Carta comps, etc.
- Full-funnel talent acquisition craft: You’ve built scalable sourcing strategies for technical and/or niche roles, supported structured interviews, and improved quality-of-hire while keeping time-to-hire to 30 days for traditional roles, 50 days for more niche/technical roles.
- Stakeholder influence & change management: Credible partner to hiring managers; you align on principles, maintain & improve operating mechanisms, and hold teams accountable without creating friction/disrupting HM’s current work-flow.
- Systems fluency & operational rigor: You get leverage from tools ATS/HRIS systems (Lever & Lattice knowledge a plus) and support processes that are simple, compliant, and flexible, but hard to break. You maintain organized job search documentation, help draft federally compliant job descriptions, and leverage appropriate recruiting channels depending on the role (university job boards, domain specific job boards, etc)
- Nice-to-haves: Startup experience; exposure to energy, drilling, geoscience, or tech
- The position is located in Salt Lake City, UT (hybrid)
- Full-time; Salaried
- Paid holidays and 18 days PTO
- Medical, Dental & Vision
- 401k
- Paid parental leave
- A direct impact in displacing carbon emissions, plus growth opportunities in a quickly scaling geothermal startup
Equal Opportunity Employer
Zanskar is an equal-opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practice laws.
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