Our mission is to transform lives by helping people direct themselves. We do this by running retreats where curious programmers come to recharge and grow. Programmers of all stripes work alongside each other for 6 or 12 weeks of self-directed growth, exploration, and programming.

Since 2011, more than 2,800 people from nearly 200 cities around the globe have participated in our retreats. People routinely describe their time here as among the most productive, educational, and transformative periods of their lives.

Our retreats take place both in-person at our hub in Brooklyn and online, with most participants spending at least some of their batches in person. After their retreats, participants join our lifelong alumni community.

Our recruiting agency supports all of our operations and is fully integrated with our retreat. We recruit for a range of companies on a contingency basis, with a focus on US-based early-stage startups and technology-focused finance firms. These companies pay us a referral fee when they hire our candidates. Our recruiting business provides lifelong career services to Recursers, and allows us to keep our retreats free to all participants.

The retreat is our recruiting advantage: We get to know our alums over the course of months and years, which lets us get under their resumes to find great matches employers otherwise wouldn't for their open roles.

What you’ll do

As a Career Facilitator, you’ll focus on full-cycle recruiting. But unlike traditional agencies, we only source candidates from our own community. Instead of emailing strangers, you’ll:

• Make the retreat our recruiting advantage. What distinguishes us as recruiters are the wonderful people in our community, and our relationships with and knowledge of them. You’ll get to know Recursers and help them through every part of their job searches.
• Delight and serve our partner companies. You’ll understand their hiring needs, find Recursers for their open roles, organize hiring events, onboard new companies, and solicit and integrate feedback about how we can best serve them.
• Help build an enduring business. In addition to making great matches, you’ll help improve how we do recruiting. This includes refining our internal processes, systems, and tools, so that we can better support Recursers, serve companies, and scale our efforts sustainably.

Although the primary focus of this job is recruiting, we view RC as an integrated whole, and all of us sometimes jump in and help with other parts of the company. Working at RC requires being adaptable and happy to contribute in whatever ways best support the business and team.

A collaborative environment with supportive colleagues

We work hard to foster a fast-paced culture that’s collaborative, trusting, and thoughtful. Here are some things you’ll find working at RC:

• Clear company-wide goals, set as a team. You’ll have an understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish together and why.
• Our belief in self-direction isn’t only for Recursers, it also influences how we approach our own work. At RC, you’ll have the freedom and the responsibility to decide how to structure your time and work.
• Weekly one-on-ones to give and receive regular feedback and help you work through challenges and be as effective as possible with your work.
• Organizational transparency. You will have access to whatever information about RC you want, from how much money we made last month to our bank balance.
• A culture of direct, but kind and constructive feedback. This helps us resolve disagreements quickly and work together more effectively.
• A warm and lively work space, filled not just with friendly colleagues but a rotating cast of kind and curious programmers learning and building incredible things.

Work that matters

By helping to run, improve, and grow RC, you’ll have a big impact on our small but steadily growing community. Since we operate entirely on recruiting revenue, your work will power the economic engine that keeps RC running.

Your work at RC may not change the world, but it will definitely change individual people’s lives. That is to say: your work will matter. It will matter to the Recursers and partner companies we serve, the colleagues we support, and the business we build. You will never finish a day wondering if anyone cared about the work you did.

Who we’re looking for

• You’re extroverted. You’re energized, not drained, by meeting and speaking with lots of people. You’re empathetic with high emotional intelligence (“EQ”), and can handle occasional difficult interactions.
• You have an excellent memory with fast recall. You remember people’s faces, names, and facts about them with ease. We of course write things down and build the best systems we can for storing and sharing knowledge across the team, but for many parts of this job — from building rapport to making unexpected but great matches between people and roles - a great memory pays huge dividends.
• You bring relevant industry experience. You’ve worked in recruiting or a related role, ideally in a tech/startup context, and can hit the ground running. For this hire, we’re looking for someone who can contribute right away and ideally expand the team’s collective knowledge.
• You can “sell” without being salesy. You know how to get people genuinely excited about roles, Recursers, or the work we do — without being pushy or insincere.
• You have a bias towards action, and no job is too small for you. When there’s valuable work to be done, you do it without waiting for permission or instruction. When you see opportunities or problems, you take action rather than assume someone else will tackle them.
• You’re trustworthy. You’re conscientious, ethical, and have good judgment. Honesty and integrity are not only right, they help distinguish us from most other recruiting firms.
• You communicate clearly. You can express yourself clearly in conversation and text, and you can write clear, error-free emails with a conversational but professional tone.
• You’re open to and can give kind, direct feedback. Feedback is a gift. It helps us improve, and it’s critical to cultivating an ever-better RC culture.
• You understand RC and want to help it succeed. This doesn’t need to be your life’s mission but you do need to understand what RC is, see how your work contributes to its success, and be excited to join a thriving team that wins.
• You’re plugged into the world of technology and hiring. You have a thoughtful and optimistic view of how technology can be a force for good in the world. You enjoy learning about new tools, ideas, and industry news — maybe through podcasts, newsletters, HN, or tinkering — and you’re eager to bring that curiosity and perspective to the team.
• You’re intellectually curious, self-directed, and pleasant to work with. These attributes are necessary both for our work and to mesh with our team culture.

Role details

• We are hiring for two levels for this role. We determine the appropriate level for a candidate based on interview performance and relevant years of experience:
  • Career Facilitator (2-4 years of relevant experience): $70,000 - $100,000.
  • Senior Career Facilitator (5+ years of relevant experience): $100,000 - $135,000
• In-person at our space (which we call the “hub”) in Downtown Brooklyn, 5 days/week, roughly 10am-6pm with occasional evening work for events.
• Health, vision, dental, and basic life insurance with premiums covered 100% by RC for standard plans.
• A 401k. RC contributes 3% on top of your salary to a 401k for you regardless of how much or even if you choose to contribute yourself.
• 15 days of vacation (we effectively have unlimited vacation, but we have a number to make sure people actually take it), a 10-day winter holiday (Dec 23 to Jan 1), and nine additional holidays. We also have five days for personal development, which you can use for anything that supports your personal and professional goals and growth.
• Three months of paid parental leave, which you can take within a year of having or adopting a child.

Downsides and other things to know

No job is perfect, and this one is no exception. Here’s what we think the biggest downsides are:

• Much of the work is unglamorous, and some of it can be rote and repetitive. While our community and team culture are highly intellectually engaging, some of the daily work for this role is not.
• You’ll sometimes need to be able to take calls or respond to emails in the evenings or during weekends. We try to avoid this, but we prioritize being responsive to our alumni and partner companies, and so if an alum wants our help deciding between two offers on a Sunday evening, we’ll happily take the call.
• This role requires occasional evening work (usually 1-3 times a month) to run events.

A few other things to know, which may be upsides or downsides depending on your perspective:

• RC is a dynamic place. You need to be flexible and comfortable with some amount of uncertainty to be happy working here.
• We are a small, privately held business that operates purely off our own revenue. We do not plan to ever sell or go public, so there is no equity or chance of a big financial windfall.

We use Rails and React with Redux. Our challenges are primarily not technical; we write software when we believe it will help us run our retreat, community, and recruiting service more effectively.