Lead Recruiter, Specialist Domains

As a trusted global transformation partner, Welocalize accelerates the global business journey by enabling brands and companies to reach, engage, and grow international audiences. Welocalize delivers multilingual content transformation services in translation, localization, and adaptation for over 250 languages with a growing network of over 400,000 in-country linguistic resources. Driving innovation in language services, Welocalize delivers high-quality training data transformation solutions for NLP-enabled machine learning by blending technology and human intelligence to collect, annotate, and evaluate all content types. Our team works across locations in North America, Europe, and Asia serving our global clients in the markets that matter to them. www.welocalize.com

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Overview

The Lead Recruiter, Specialist Domains owns the end-to-end recruitment of highly credentialled, domain-expert freelance talent across a defined portfolio of cultural, creative, and specialist domains. This is not a generalist recruitment role. Every candidate placed through this function must be a recognized practitioner or expert in their field – credentialled, verifiable, and operating at a level that generalists cannot replicate.

The Lead Recruiter, Specialist Domains combines hands-on sourcing and assessment with team leadership – directly identifying and evaluating rare talent while guiding a small team across talent acquisition, partner coordination, and vendor management. This includes oversight of a vendor management function responsible for pricing activities, support operations, and brand experience, ensuring all vendor relationships uphold Welocalize’s quality and commercial standards. The role is data-oriented, automation-assisted, and built for creative sourcing in markets where the talent does not self-present through conventional channels.

Main Responsibilities

Specialist Recruitment Delivery

A core deliverable of this function is not just identifying SME candidates, but providing structured evidence of their expertise to stakeholders. The Lead Recruiter, Specialist Domains and their team are responsible for gathering and presenting the following signals for every shortlisted candidate.

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Source and identify candidates who combine senior-level domain expertise with specific language capabilities – where both are required and neither alone is sufficient.

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Design and execute creative, non-traditional sourcing strategies: professional associations, academic institutions, creative guilds, competitive circuits, specialist forums, and community-based outreach – not job boards.

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Build and maintain evergreen talent pools for across domains so pipeline is not rebuilt from scratch each cycle.

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Design structured assessment frameworks tailored to each domain to evaluate credential depth, language proficiency, and cultural competency simultaneously.

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Compile and present evidence signal packages (role, experience, affiliations, publications/awards, leadership positions) for every shortlisted candidate before stakeholder review.

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Ensure a rigorous, respectful candidate experience appropriate to the seniority of the experts being engaged.

Team & Partner Management

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Provide daily guidance, coaching, and direction to a small team comprising recruiters and partner management professionals, ensuring clear priorities and consistent delivery standards.

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Manage team capacity and allocate resources to ensure all global recruitment requirements are met within defined timelines and quality expectations.

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Prioritise and delegate work across the team to maintain pipeline momentum across all active domain tiers.

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Set and maintain quality standards for candidate profiles, evidence documentation, and stakeholder submissions.

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Foster a collaborative, high-performing team culture aligned with Welocalize’s values.

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Partner with dev and jayme welo systems collect the necessary metadata to allocate work

Stakeholder Partnership

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Build trusted partnerships with internal stakeholders to deeply understand hiring needs, domain nuances, and quality thresholds for each subject area.

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Adapt communication style and approach to the cultural and functional needs of each stakeholder group, operating effectively across geographies.

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Translate ambiguous or evolving SME briefs into precise sourcing criteria and assessment rubrics.

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Proactively communicate pipeline status, risks, and decisions with appropriate transparency and frequency.

Partner & Supplier Management

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Oversee external specialist partner relationships to ensure quality, responsiveness, and domain alignment.

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Identify and onboard niche sourcing partners – including domain-specific agencies, academic networks, or community connectors – where internal reach is insufficient.

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Monitor partner performance against SLAs and quality standards; escalate and resolve issues promptly.

Partner Management

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Oversee pricing activities for specialist freelance vendor engagements, ensuring rate structures are competitive, commercially sound, and market based.

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Champion brand experience across all vendor-facing touchpoints – ensuring that communication, onboarding materials, and engagement practices reflect Welocalize’s brand standards and values.

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Collaborate with internal stakeholders to align vendor pricing and support frameworks with project budgets, delivery requirements, and long-term sourcing strategy.

Data, Automation & Continuous Improvement

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Operate as the primary Lever administrator for this function: configure workflows to appropriately progress candidates, automate repeatable processes, and maintain data integrity across the full pipeline.

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Evaluate where automation tools improve sourcing efficiency or candidate screening without compromising the quality of expert assessment.

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Analyse hiring data and market intelligence to identify pipeline trends, sourcing channel effectiveness, and time-to-fill patterns across domain tiers.

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Use data to drive evidence-based prioritisation, sourcing investment, and process improvement decisions.

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Ensure hiring practices and evidence standards are applied consistently across regions, projects, and team members.

Skills and Requirements

Essential

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Minimum 7 years demonstrated experience recruiting for highly specialised, hard-to-fill, or niche SME roles – particularly where domain expertise and language capability are both required.

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Advanced proficiency with Lever ATS, including workflow configuration, pipeline reporting, and automation features.

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Proven creative sourcing capability beyond job boards like LinkedIn: niche platforms, community-based outreach, and passive expert engagement in cultural, academic, or professional domains.

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Ability to assess and document candidate credentialing evidence at a senior practitioner level, including verification of affiliations, publications, and recognition.

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Experience managing or coordinating a small team, including task prioritisation, coaching, and performance conversations.

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Strong structured assessment skills: ability to contribute to and apply evaluation frameworks for complex, culturally embedded, or technically specialist profiles.

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Excellent stakeholder management skills, with experience operating across regions and adapting communication to diverse cultural and functional audiences.

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Data-oriented working style: comfortable interpreting pipeline metrics and using insight to improve sourcing and assessment outcomes.

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Experience managing or overseeing a vendor management function, including knowledge of pricing frameworks, vendor support operations, and brand experience standards.

Desirable

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Experience with recruitment automation and AI-assisted sourcing tools; ability to assess where automation is appropriate vs. where expert human judgement must prevail.

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Background in freelance, contractor, or partner talent models.

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Experience with multilingual hiring across multiple regional markets.

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Familiarity with credentialing norms across key SME markets such as Asia-Pacific

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Professional affiliations across the recruitment function.