Manager, Talent Acquisition & Operations - Volunteer Leadership Role

About Us:

The Donovan’s Venom is a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on curating universal accessibility to fine arts and music education for all. We are passionately dedicated to ensuring that everyone, regardless of financial circumstances, has access to high-quality music education, performance opportunities, and fine art. We aim to inspire, empower, and uplift communities by fostering a love for music and the arts through our commitment to education, inclusivity, diversity, and social impact, which drives us to expand our reach continually and enrich the lives of those we serve.

The Manager, Talent Acquisition & Operations is a hands-on builder, operator, and player-coach responsible for strengthening and scaling the organization’s talent acquisition function.

This is not a role for someone who simply wants to manage an established recruiting process. We are looking for someone who can assess what exists today, identify gaps, improve current processes, and build the systems, workflows, tools, and practices needed for the future.

You will lead recruiting execution while helping design a more structured, efficient, measurable, and scalable talent acquisition function.

The ideal candidate enjoys building from the ground up, bringing order to evolving environments, solving operational challenges, and continuously improving how recruiting gets done.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Recruiting

• Personally manage a portfolio of open positions from job launch through hire.
• Source candidates through LinkedIn, Idealist, referrals, job boards, networking, and other channels.
• Conduct candidate screenings and structured interviews.
• Assess candidate qualifications, experience, motivation, and organizational fit.
• Help prepare and extend offers and support candidates through acceptance.

Team Leadership & Coaching

• Provide day-to-day direction and support to recruiters and recruiting specialists.
• Assign and balance recruiting workloads based on organizational priorities.
• Coach team members on sourcing, interviewing, candidate assessment, and candidate engagement.
• Review pipeline activity and help remove obstacles affecting hiring progress.
• Establish consistent recruiting standards and expectations across the team.
• Serve as an escalation point for recruiting challenges.

Hiring Manager Partnership

• Lead recruiting intake meetings with hiring managers.
• Help managers define role requirements, candidate profiles, and interview strategies.
• Advise hiring managers on candidate quality, market conditions, and recruiting challenges.
• Maintain regular communication regarding pipeline progress and hiring timelines.
• Support managers in making thoughtful, consistent, and timely hiring decisions.

Recruiting Operations

• Implement HRIS.
• Build and maintain standardized recruiting workflows, interview guides, scorecards, templates, and processes.
• Ensure recruiting activity and candidate records are accurately maintained in the applicant tracking system.
• Identify opportunities to streamline and automate recruiting processes.
• Maintain strong recruiting documentation and data quality.
• Partner with People/HR leadership on workforce planning and hiring priorities.

Recruiting Metrics & Performance

• Monitor recruiting performance across open roles.
• Track key metrics.
• Use recruiting data to identify bottlenecks and recommend improvements.
• Provide regular recruiting updates to People leadership and hiring managers.

Candidate Experience & Employer Brand

• Ensure candidates receive a professional, welcoming, and responsive experience.
• Maintain clear communication and realistic expectations throughout the recruiting process.
• Help strengthen the organization’s employer brand and recruiting presence.
• Represent the organization professionally during interviews, networking events, and candidate outreach.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in recruiting, talent acquisition, recruiting operations, or a related People function.
• Experience helping build, redesign, or scale recruiting processes or talent acquisition programs.
• Demonstrated ability to improve existing workflows and introduce new processes.
• Experience managing full-cycle recruiting across multiple functions or departments.
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating recruiters or recruiting teams.
• Strong understanding of recruiting operations, candidate pipelines, and hiring processes.
• Experience with ATS platforms, recruiting technology, spreadsheets, dashboards, and reporting tools.
• Strong project management and organizational skills.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and stakeholders simultaneously.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Comfort operating in a startup, nonprofit, growth-stage, or evolving environment.
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to data quality.
• A continuous-improvement mindset and genuine interest in building better ways of working.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or improving recruiting processes from the ground up.
• Experience recruiting across multiple functional areas.
• Experience working in a startup, nonprofit, mission-driven, or rapidly growing organization.
• Familiarity with LinkedIn, Idealist, referral programs, and other sourcing channels.
• Experience introducing recruiting automation, dashboards, or standardized interview practices.

What Success Looks Like

Within this role, success means leaving the talent acquisition function stronger than you found it.

This person will:

• Personally move high-priority searches forward.
• Develop strong recruiters and interviewers.
• Maintain healthy and diverse candidate pipelines.
• Increase visibility through recruiting metrics and dashboards.
• Build trusted partnerships with hiring managers.
• Improve recruiting speed, consistency, and candidate experience.
• Use data to identify and solve recruiting challenges.
• Create recruiting processes that can scale as the organization grows.

Important Disclaimer

As a 100% volunteer-led U.S. nonprofit organization, we may engage volunteers located outside the United States. International volunteer participation is subject to applicable U.S. sanctions and export-control requirements, data privacy and information-security requirements, background screening where appropriate, and confirmation that the volunteer’s country and assigned responsibilities have been approved by the organization.

This is a volunteer position and does not constitute employment.

Please only apply if you are prepared to begin within the next 1 week