Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role stands out in SaaS because it treats talent acquisition as a product problem, blending data, workflows, and community building into a repeatable system. Clay is positioned as a scaling SaaS company with a sophisticated go to market footprint, which makes proactive talent intelligence and network activation a strategic lever rather than a back office function.
For a SaaS career, the long term value lies in building an operating model that can be reused across modern software organizations: market mapping, signal driven sourcing, and lifecycle engagement before roles even open. The remit also sits at the intersection of recruiting, GTM, and customer facing collaboration, which mirrors how many SaaS companies increasingly run cross functional programs that require both analytics and high trust relationship work.
The best fit is someone who enjoys designing systems while staying close to real conversations, and who is comfortable owning an ambiguous mandate from first principles. It will suit a senior operator who wants to lead a team, set standards for how sourcing is done, and think in terms of platforms and communities rather than one off searches.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About Clay
Our mission is to help organizations turn any growth idea into reality.
We see growth as a creative practice, not a formula. Finding and reaching your best-fit customers takes unique ideas and constant iteration. As AI makes execution faster and tactics easier to copy, creativity is the only lasting advantage. We're already helping thousands of customers — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.
In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C backed by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue.
In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.
Some things to know about us:
Our community includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs, and 30k members on Slack.
Our cultureis unique inside and outside of work. Our team members are also DJs, activists, writers, clowns, marathoners, skydivers, psychedelic therapists, social workers, and more.
All employees can work for free with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity, management, and more.
Our operating principles — including negative maintenance and non-attached action — guide our work. Read more about them here.
Read about us in the NYT, Forbes, First Round Review, and more.
Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!
Head of ARC (Activation, Research & Community)
Recruiting is an interesting space to be in these days. Ripe for automation and AI application, but at the same time, it’s more important than ever to have a very human-centered approach to the work. There are more sourcing platforms available than ever, but referrals are a top hiring source. At Clay, we’re responding to this moment by building out a new team we’re calling ARC - Activation, Research and Community.
As the Head of ARC, you'll build and lead the team who will figure out who the world's best people are before we have an open role, turn that intelligence into precision sourcing, and extend Clay's talent reach into a thriving external customer community.
The mandate behind the mandate, though, is to redefine what a modern talent function looks like when it's built on the same product and principles we sell to the world.
You'll need to know when to build the system and when to work the room, when to automate a signal and when finding signal just means picking up the phone and catching up. The systems you build will matter just as much as the personal touches you insist on (meeting the candidate at the airport, surprise picking up their tab at dinner, remembering their coffee order years after your first meeting).
What You'll Do
Map the Constellation: Activation & Talent Intelligence
Build and own Clay's talent intelligence infrastructure: market mapping, exec-level relationship programming, and always-on signal monitoring across our highest-priority talent segments
Design the touchpoints, rituals, and outreach sequences that keep Clay's talent radar warm. When a role opens, we already know exactly who we'd want in it
Develop proactive, exec search-style engagement strategies at scale.
Own the system of record for Clay's talent constellation — who they are, where they are, and what would make them move (or at least pick up the phone!)
Bring Intelligence to Every Search: Research & Sourcing
Translate talent intelligence into activation: take what we know about the market and turn it into a sourcing motion that's faster and more precise than any other sourcing motion out there.
Build Clay-native sourcing workflows using our own product — enrichment, signal tracking, network activation, personalized outreach, and make Clay for Recruiting a lived practice.
Own and evolve our Referral Jam program, turning warm networks into a structured, repeatable, and genuinely fun sourcing channel.
Build a team of sourcers/researchers to support our scaling.
Build the Network — Community & Talent Matching
Design and run an external talent community that serves both Clay's pipeline and our customers’ hiring (especially for the GTME space)
Build the matchmaking layer: how we connect the right people to the right opportunities inside and outside of Clay, at the right time
Partner with GTM and customer-facing teams to make the talent community a product-quality experience
Define what community means in a recruiting context and bring it to life: events, programming, communication, and the connective tissue that holds it together
What You'll Bring
Experience & Expertise
10+ years in talent acquisition, executive search, venture capital, or a senior recruiting function with meaningful ownership of sourcing strategy (hopefully you have a combination of these experiences!)
Demonstrated experience building proactive talent programs — market mapping, exec relationship management, talent networks
Fluency with modern sourcing tooling and data enrichment; hands-on experience with Clay or similar platforms is a plus!
Experience designing referral programs, talent communities, or network-based sourcing at scale
Prior experience building a function or team from scratch
Core Competencies
Systems thinker who can hold the strategic vision and the operational detail at the same time
Genuinely curious about the intersection of product, data, and the craft of finding exceptional people
Wonderful, empathetic, and inspiring people leader
Exceptional relationship builder: as comfortable with a quiet one-on-one with a passive exec as you are running large events and speaking on panels
Comfortable with ambiguity. What we’re building really doesn’t exist yet!
Bias toward experimentation: you'd rather run a test and learn than wait for certainty
