Senior Director, Talent Acquisition

About CoLab

At CoLab, we help engineering teams bring life-changing products to the world years sooner.

CoLab is the AI platform for driving stronger engineering decisions. Every design review in CoLab builds a knowledge repository of design feedback, decisions, and lessons learned - which AI agents draw from to flag issues on future designs before they compound. The more your team works in CoLab, the smarter it gets and the faster you arrive at the ideal design. Companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to catch issues earlier, eliminate rework cycles, and bring products to market faster.

Founded in St. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab has grown quickly from our first customer in 2018 to a rapidly scaling company. We’ve recently been recognized on Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, and named a company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post.

About the Role

This is a plan, build-and-lead role. You’ll set the strategy for how CoLab finds, assesses, and wins the people who will take us from where we are to where we’re going. You won’t be an order-taker. You’ll sit with our executive team and hiring managers as a trusted advisor on the talent market. When a wish list doesn’t match reality, you’ll say so, bring the data, and help reset it. You’ll help decide which roles get priority, where we invest our sourcing energy, and when it’s worth paying for outside support.

You’ll also build the system. That means a rigorous, consistent assessment process aligned to our “Hell Yes” hiring criteria: scorecards, structured interviews, and work samples. It means a tech stack and reporting that leaders trust, with clear visibility into pipeline health, time-to-fill, pass-through rates, offer acceptance, and quality of hire. And it means playbooks that make us repeatable across engineering, go-to-market, and executive hiring.

Our Ideal Candidate

You’ve built a talent acquisition function, not just run one. You drive an organizational workforce plan and you’ve taken a recruiting function to a strategic partnership level inside a high-growth B2B company. You can show the before and after: faster hiring, a higher bar, and leaders who plan around your data instead of around their gut.

You’re a leader and a craftsperson. You coach your team, and you can still pick up a hard search yourself, whether that’s a VP or a mechanical engineer with a rare skill set. You can sit with a CEO and explain what the talent market will and won’t give them, and when a hiring plan doesn’t match reality, you say so, bring the numbers, and help reset it.

You think like a first-team leader. You’d give up a win for your own function if it was the right call for the company, and you build the same mindset in your team.

You’re energized by building: structured assessments, scorecards, playbooks, tooling, and a clear view of when to use agencies and when not to. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and with a function that’s still taking shape.

This probably isn’t the role for you if you want a fully built team and tech stack on day one, a role that’s purely strategic with no hands-on work, or an environment where hiring decisions are made without you.

Responsibilities

Lead the function

• Set the Talent Acquisition strategy and multi-year hiring plan, tied to company growth targets and workforce planning
• Lead, coach, and grow the Talent Acquisition team.
• Decide how work is split between in-house, agency, and executive search partners, and manage those vendors and budgets.

Be a strategic partner

• Advise the executive team and hiring managers on the talent market, compensation positioning, and hiring trade-offs, and push back with data when expectations don’t match reality
• Run hiring prioritization (for example, tiering roles to focus sourcing and agency support where it matters most)
• Join the People Team and Leadership Team as a first-team member, putting company outcomes ahead of functional ones

Build the system

• Own a consistent, structured assessment process aligned to CoLab’s “Hell Yes” criteria: scorecards, structured interviews, and work samples etc
• Own the Talent Acquisitions tech stack (ATS, sourcing tools, AI-assisted workflows) and drive adoption
• Build scalable playbooks for high-volume, GTM, technical, and executive hiring
• Report on search health: pipeline, time-to-fill, pass-through rates, offer acceptance, quality of hire, cost per hire, and diversity metrics

Build the brand and pipeline

• Shape the employer brand and candidate experience, including the CoLab story for senior and passive talent
• Build talent pipelines for anticipated roles, including engineers, GTM, and leadership
• Develop an approach to hiring internationally and across Canada, the USA, including the local talent market

Stay hands-on when it counts

• • Personally support critical searches and close key candidates, especially in the early phase of the function

Qualifications

Must-Haves

• [10-12+] years in recruiting, with [5+] years leading TA teams and [3+] years at Director level or above
• Experience scaling hiring at a high-growth B2B technology company (ideally Series D-F)
• Proven results hiring across technical, GTM, and executive roles
• Strong operator: builds process, data, and tooling, and can show before-and-after outcomes
• Experience managing recruiting budgets, agency partners, and offer/comp strategy
• Data fluency, with metrics used to make decisions, not just to report
• Executive presence and business acumen; you can hold your own with C Suite, SVP’s and VP’s and advise them on the talent market
• Experience managing complex offers, including equity and multi-stakeholder negotiations
• Recruiting experience in industrial software, PLM, CAD/CAE, manufacturing tech, or deep-tech hardware
• Experience recruiting in Globally, including cross-border hiring considerations

Bonus Points

• Experience building or rebuilding TA from an early-stage function
• International hiring experience
• Hiring for industrial, engineering software, or hardware-adjacent companies
• Hands-on experience with Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter, and AI sourcing tools
• Remote or distributed team leadership

Equity Note

Frequently cited statistics show that people who identify with historically marginalized groups are likely to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to help us break that statistic and apply even if you don’t meet every single qualification—your potential is what matters most to us.