Manager, Talent Acquisition at Court Avenue

CourtAvenue, INC. is a collective of digital marketing, performance media, immersive experience, and AI-driven agencies serving some of the most ambitious brands in the world. We are scaling — adding agencies, adding talent, and building the People Operations infrastructure to support a multi-entity, multi-geography workforce. We are hiring a Manager, Talent Acquisition to own end-to-end recruiting across our U.S. agencies — CourtAvenue, Modifly, Gigantic Playground, GTX Solutions (+any future agency added to the Collective). With a consistent pipeline of 10–15 niche open roles at any given time, this role will be a go-to resource for our recruitment process. You will take roles from requisition to close, navigate every internal approval layer, uphold a fair and consistent process, and keep candidates, hiring managers, and partners informed across multiple priorities, client teams and time zones. You will be trusted to contribute to our talent strategy and manage day-to-day relationships with our external recruiting partners. This role reports to the Director, People Operations and is part of a lean, high-trust Shared Services team of Finance, IT, HR and Operations professionals. Responsibilities Full-Cycle Recruiting Across the Collective • Manage recruiting for all open roles — full-time, part-time, and contract — across CourtAvenue, Modifly, Gigantic Playground, GTX Solutions, and future agencies. • Partner with Hiring Managers and Ops leaders to develop role descriptions, intake briefs, determine interview loops, confirm budgets, and understand timelines to hire. • Proactively source candidates through LinkedIn Recruiter, Handshake, referrals, and your own network — with particular focus on niche creative (UX/CX, UI, Copy), performance media, digital strategy, data, account and engineering-based roles. • Manage every candidate touchpoint in Lever, ensuring all communication, feedback, and decisions live in the ATS. • Hosts recruiter screens, schedules interviews for internal team, and manages interview debriefs across multiple geographies and time zones. Process Integrity & Stakeholder Management • Hold the line on our hiring process: we need someone who can confidently uphold it when timelines get tight. In a fast-paced and high-growth environment, stakeholders will sometimes push to bend the process. Your job is to confidently problem-solve, maintain the relationship, and protect the integrity of a consistent and fair process. • Navigate our approval layers like COO + CFO sign-off for all open full roles, agency partner approval for comp bands under $150K, and Founders approval for roles over $150K. • Keep compensation discussions, benefits, bonus and conversations regarding any special offer terms within People Ops — redirect Hiring Managers and interviewers back to HR when these come up. • Escalate people issues that may carry legal or company-wide risk to the Director, People Operations. Referral Management • Referrals are core to how our agencies hire. You'll manage them with care: triaging referrals against open roles, setting realistic timeline expectations with both the referring employee and the candidate, and following up with thoughtful, candid notes on where (or whether) someone may fit across the Collective. • Work with finance for Employee Referral Bonus approved roles and communicate those internally, as appropriate. • Keep a bench of rock star talent referred to us — from interns to C-suite — separately from active requisitions, so high-quality talent isn't lost when a role doesn't yet exist. Contractor Bench & Vendor Relationships • Build and maintain a Contractor Bench of prioritized talent types with pre-negotiated activation rates. • Manage relationships with third-party recruiters, staffing agencies, and external vendors — influencing strategy and ensuring we have the bench depth to staff client work on time. • Ensure contractor engagements meet our 50% margin requirement on billable work. People Operations Support • Partner on the development of managerial standards: templates, documentation, internal training and communications around our hiring process — including how we evaluate full-time vs. contract needs, where to hire, non-negotiables for open roles, and the financial impact of people decisions. • Support broader People Ops initiatives including career paths, feedback culture, and formal review processes. • Maintain Open Roles worksheets for leadership and support new hire announcements. • Contribute to the weekly recruiting activity update sent to CourtAvenue partners. • Study best practices in recruiting on an ongoing basis, recommending adjustments and improvements as appropriate. Systems & Automation • Optimize use of our recruiting stack — Lever, ADP TotalSource, LinkedIn Recruiter, Handshake, Verified First, DocuSign — and identify opportunities to automate without losing the white-glove candidate experience that defines how we hire. • Partner with People Ops and IT to improve data flow between Lever and ADP, surfacing gaps and contributing to better reporting. Requirements • 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, with demonstrated ownership of niche or hard-to-fill roles. • Hands-on experience managing recruiting through an applicant tracking system (Lever experience strongly preferred). • Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to keep distributed hiring teams, candidates, and partners aligned across geographies and time zones. • High sense of urgency; complete work with both speed and accuracy. • Strong organizational instincts and a bias toward systematizing repeatable work. • Ability to handle confidential and sensitive information with integrity and professionalism. • A resilience to change; setting a tone of optimism and calm in times of many competing and/or shifting priorities. • Sound judgment on what to escalate, when, and to whom. • Experience recruiting for creative (UX, CX, UI), media, data, and/or digital engineering roles in an agency environment preferred. • Experience in a high-growth, multi-entity, or scaling organization preferred. • Familiarity with ADP TotalSource HRIS a plus. • Experience managing third-party recruiter and staffing agency relationships a plus. • Track record of improving recruiting workflows a plus. Work Environment • Candidates for this position will ideally be located near our San Diego office by PetCo Park. • Our organization follows a structured-hybrid work model, where employees work in an office environment in the middle of the week and remotely on Mondays and Fridays. • Candidates located in Dallas, TX, Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, Cincinnati, OH or Los Angeles, CA will also be considered. CourtAvenue, INC. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. CourtAvenue recruits qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, status as a protected veteran, or genetic information. CourtAvenue, INC. participates in the E-Verify program. In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form (I-9) upon hire.