Recruiting has been one of the harder places to work lately. As overall hiring slowed, recruiting teams shrank, and recruiters were often among the first roles cut. The demand has not vanished, though. Demand for talent-acquisition specialists rose 87% over the past year (MSH). In the companies we track, that demand is concentrated in AI. 44% of the AI companies in the McCoy hiring tracker have an open recruiter role, a higher share than the B2B SaaS or fintech companies we follow.
A company staffs recruiting right before it staffs everything else, so who is hiring recruiters, and what kind, is an early read on the next hiring wave. The trend is still climbing: over the last week these companies opened 24 recruiter reqs and closed 9.
What kind of recruiters
Of the 51 AI companies hiring recruiters, here is the share looking for each kind. Many are hiring more than one.
Two kinds show up at more than half of the companies. Technical and engineering recruiting (55%) makes sense, since engineering is the biggest function these companies hire for. Recruiting operations (53%) is close behind: the coordinators, analysts, and systems people a company adds when it plans to hire more than its current process can handle. After that, a smaller number of companies are hiring finance, research, executive-search, and campus recruiters.
Go-to-market recruiters mean the selling has started
Go-to-market and sales recruiting, often shortened to GTM, shows up at 39% of the hiring companies, the third most common focus. It usually means a company is moving from research or product-led growth into enterprise sales. A company hiring GTM recruiters is about to hire account executives, sales engineers, and the managers who run them.
Hardware recruiting is almost all one company
Almost all hardware and manufacturing recruiting open roles are at Anduril, whose 68 recruiter reqs include 33 for hardware, production, and manufacturing roles. A few others, including Applied Intuition, Apptronik, Etched, and Crusoe, are staffing for physical build-out too.
Who is hiring recruiters the most
The companies with the most open recruiter reqs, across the AI, B2B SaaS, and fintech companies we track:
Anduril, defense hardware and autonomous systems
Harvey, legal AI for law firms
Brex, corporate cards and spend management
Salesforce, enterprise CRM software
OpenAI, ChatGPT and frontier AI models
Airwallex, cross-border business payments
Applied Intuition, software for self-driving vehicles
Paycom, payroll and HR software
Notion, workspace and docs app
Legora, collaborative AI for lawyers
How long roles stay open
Nine recruiter roles closed at these companies in the last week, and how long each had been open varied widely: the finance and accounting recruiter at Anduril had been open 26 days, the recruiting coordinator at Cursor 55 days, and the GTM recruiter at ElevenLabs 61 days, while the technical recruiter at World Labs (144 days) and the HR and recruiting coordinator at Cognition (150 days) had been open for months.
Among the roles still open, some companies leave recruiter reqs up far longer than others. These five have the longest-standing open recruiter roles, by the average days their current reqs have been posted:
Mistral, European AI lab: 255 days
Rogo, AI for financial analysts: 200 days
Etched, AI inference chips: 151 days
Databricks, data and AI platform: 103 days
Krea, AI image and video tools: 101 days
And these are the five most recent recruiter roles posted this week:
Talent Acquisition Coordinator (Contract) at Coreweave
GTM Senior Recruiter (Contract) at Cursor
Senior Technical Sourcer, Applications Engineering at OpenAI
Recruiting Coordinator at Anyscale
Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, Tech at Legora
Contract recruiters
A quarter of the AI companies hiring recruiters, 13 of the 51, are bringing on contract recruiters rather than permanent ones.
The postings do not say why, and it could point a few ways. It may mean a company needs to ramp hiring faster than it can build a permanent team. It may mean the push is expected to be short-lived, so the company would rather not add permanent recruiting headcount. It may also be a budget choice, since contract roles often sit outside the permanent headcount plan. Across those readings, the common thread is speed: contract recruiters get brought in when the hiring is already happening.
Want to see which companies are hiring, and for what? The McCoy hiring tracker follows open roles across the AI, B2B SaaS, fintech, and law firm groups we watch, updated every week and filterable by company, function, location, and pay.