Talent Sourcing Specialist

About the Role

The Talent Sourcing Specialist will find the people the movement most needs and start the conversation that brings them in. Many senior leaders, founders, and specialists who could have a real impact for animals have never considered animal advocacy as a path for their skills. Your job is to reach them, give them a reason to look, and bring them into AAC’s orbit.

You’ll own proactive sourcing and outreach to senior and hard-to-hire talent. You’ll identify the right people, research a credible way in, and open the relationship. From there, our advisors and programmes help them find their path into the movement, whether that’s career advising, training, fellowships, or another route that fits where they are. You’ll report to the Director of Marketing and sit in our marketing team, sharing what you learn about which audiences respond and feeding it into our wider experiments and strategy.

This is the first role of its kind at AAC. You won’t be handed a playbook. You’ll decide how AAC reaches senior talent, which channels and approaches to bet on, and build the function from the ground up, with the autonomy to shape it and the accountability that comes with it.

Are you considering applying but have questions about the role?

Join us for a live Q&A on the three roles we’re hiring for at AAC — Talent Sourcing Specialist, Career Advising Specialist, and Content & Communications Specialist. We’ll open with how AAC works as a team and what it’s like to work here, then take questions on each role in turn. Come with anything you want to know about the culture or the role itself.

Date and time: 17th of July, 5:00 PM CET

Register for the Q&A here.

How Will YOU Make a Difference?

Sourcing and proactive outreach (70%)

• Find senior and specialist talent who fit our target profiles (leaders, founders, fundraisers, policy specialists, campaigners) and bring them into AAC’s programmes and career advising.
• Design and run outreach that earns a reply from experienced professionals: personalised LinkedIn outreach, warm introductions, and direct approaches grounded in research about the person.
• Build outreach systems that compound: referral pathways, peer introductions, and alumni networks that surface new leaders over time.
• Test different angles for different audiences and learn what moves each one, logging results in our experiments tracker. Report regularly on pipeline health, outreach performance, and trends in the candidate market, and review them with the team in our analytics sessions.

Strategy, pipeline building and research (20%)

• Develop and own AAC’s approach to reaching senior talent: which channels, sectors, and methods to prioritise, including approaches beyond direct outreach (network-based sourcing, referral systems, alumni and peer introductions).
• Map where our target candidates are: the sectors, companies, networks, and communities worth a sustained presence.
• Build relationships before a role exists, so when one opens, we already know who to approach.
• Sharpen our understanding of who the best candidates are and what skills transfer, feeding what you learn from real outreach back into how we define and target our audiences.
• Over time, help establish AAC as a trusted point of contact for talented professionals considering a move into animal advocacy, building relationships early so candidates are warm when the right opportunity arises.
• Identify and propose improvements to how we work: better tools, smarter targeting criteria, or more efficient ways to track and manage a growing pipeline.

Candidate database and shortlists (10%)

• Maintain and grow AAC’s candidate database, keeping it current and useful.
• Build shortlists when organisations request candidates, working with the Managing Director, who bridges to hiring managers.
• Help shape and test a new service we’re piloting to support organisations with their hiring, moving into light talent acquisition: candidate vetting and shortlisting. This is an early experiment; if it grows, there’s room to shape where it goes, and we expect to eventually bring in a dedicated person to own it.

About Animal Advocacy Careers

Animal Advocacy Careers connects experienced, mission-driven professionals with the roles where their skills will have the greatest impact on ending factory farming. We research where the movement’s talent bottlenecks are, and help people move into the roles where the need is greatest.

Why Join AAC

You’ll help decide how the movement finds its future leaders. The people you bring in could run organisations, start them, or shape policy that affects billions of animals, and most of them have never heard that animal advocacy needs them.

Benefits to you

• An independent but supportive working culture where we value and encourage high agency and autonomy.
• Fully remote work environment and team.
• Generous and flexible self-managed time off policy, 20 days per year is the organisation's minimum.
• Closed-office periods from 21 December to 1 January each year, which doesn't count against your annual leave.
• Optional 2 days of direct volunteering work, e.g. at a sanctuary, protest, or self-care days.
• 1-month paid sabbatical after every 3 years.
• Encouragement and support to spend at least 5% of your paid time on learning and development, plus a $500 USD annual professional development budget.
• A home office equipment allowance of $1,000 USD every two years.
• A clear compensation policy with opportunities for progression.

A couple of things to know:

• You’ll be required to attend one in-person team retreat in Europe per year.
• We have collaboration hours every weekday from 14:00–16:30 CET, when you’re expected to be online, available for meetings and responsive to peers on Asana.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Required:

• A track record of sourcing, headhunting, or proactive outreach that got hard-to-reach people to respond. You can point to people you found and approached, and what came of it.
• Excellent written communication. You write outreach that sounds like a person, not a template, and you adapt your tone to who you're writing to.
• Strong research instinct. You dig into someone's background and find the specific, true reason they might care.
• Comfort with rejection and long timelines. Senior people say no or go quiet for months, and you keep going.
• High agency. You'll build this function from close to nothing, spotting what's missing and acting on it rather than waiting to be told.
• Organised across many relationships at once, documenting and keeping your work visible to the team.

Desirable:

• Experience designing or improving a sourcing or recruitment process, not only running someone else's.
• Familiarity with executive search, senior recruitment, or the people side of leadership hiring.
• Experience building referral systems or communities.
• Background in or exposure to mission-driven, nonprofit, or advocacy work.
• Experience with LinkedIn Recruiter, a CRM, or outreach tooling.

Personal Attributes:

• You think in systems, not just tasks. You'll design the sourcing approach, not only execute it, and you can explain why you'd bet on one channel or approach over another.
• You’re energised by this type of work. Finding someone great and getting them to reply is a part of the job you'd do for fun.
• You treat feedback as data, give it straight, and want to know where you stand.
• You work independently while keeping the team informed.
• You care about doing this for animals, and it shows up as rigour.

• An independent but supportive working culture where we value and encourage high agency and autonomy.
• Fully remote work environment and team.
• Generous and flexible self-managed time off policy, 20 days per year is the organisation's minimum.
• Closed-office periods from 21 December to 1 January each year, which doesn't count against your annual leave.
• Optional 2 days of direct volunteering work, e.g. at a sanctuary, protest, or self-care days.
• 1-month paid sabbatical after every 3 years.
• Encouragement and support to spend at least 5% of your paid time on learning and development, plus a $500 USD annual professional development budget.
• A home office equipment allowance of $1,000 USD every two years.
• A clear compensation policy with opportunities for progression.