Senior Talent Manager

The Role

You’re an experienced talent professional who knows the creative industry, has a strong instinct for identifying exceptional talent, and can build trust quickly with candidates and senior leaders alike. You’re proactive, thoughtful, highly organized, and comfortable owning recruitment independently while bringing ideas and perspective to how we build great teams.

In Koto’s LA studio, you’ll own recruitment across a range of disciplines, partnering closely with studio leadership and hiring managers to understand what they need, identify and engage the right people, and keep hiring moving with pace and diligence. Reporting to our Talent Director, North America, you’ll have significant autonomy in LA recruitment while working with the team to continually strengthen how we hire, build our networks, and create a thoughtful and distinctly Koto candidate experience.

Your Responsibilities

1. Own full-cycle recruitment for our LA studio, from shaping the initial brief and sourcing strategy through screening, interviews, offers, and close. You’ll independently manage multiple searches while keeping momentum with both candidates and hiring teams.

2. Build strong, trusted relationships with studio leadership and hiring managers. You listen closely, ask good questions, understand the nuances of different teams and disciplines, and develop a clear understanding of what the team really needs.

3. Develop a deep understanding of Koto — our work, culture, ambitions, and what makes someone successful here. You use that context and judgment to assess candidates beyond their portfolios or resumes and to authentically communicate the Koto opportunity.

4. Proactively source and build relationships with exceptional talent across brand, digital, strategy, Client Services, motion, and operations. You stay close to the creative talent market and build pipelines ahead of immediate hiring needs.

5. Create an excellent candidate experience from first conversation through offer. You’re warm, communicative, honest, and thoughtful, understanding that every interaction is an opportunity to represent Koto and build a relationship — whether someone joins the team now, later, or not at all.

6. Bring market knowledge and candidate insights into hiring conversations to help us understand talent availability, compensation expectations, and trends across the wider creative industry.

7. Partner closely with the Talent Director, North America on recruitment priorities and opportunities to continually improve how we hire. You bring ideas, identify ways to streamline our approach, and help create consistent and effective recruitment practices across our North American studios.

8. Own the organization and health of our recruitment pipelines through our ATS platform, keeping candidate information, feedback, and hiring activity current and using those insights to identify bottlenecks or opportunities to improve our process.

Our Responsibilities 

1. We will ensure you have meaningful and regular access to your manager to support your personal development and career trajectory.

2. We will actively reward performance with promotions, pay increases, and a discretionary annual bonus of up to 10% of salary to all employees.

3. We ensure Koto is an equal environment for all its employees.

4. We will support you in taking family leave and offer significant paid maternity and paternity leave.

5. We will actively encourage you to take 25 vacation days per year, in addition to US national holidays, and a studio closure between Christmas and New Year.

6. We offer a 401(k) that you can contribute to, and Koto matches contributions up to 4%.

7. We deploy a monthly ‘employee wellness’ benefits package via Juno of $105 per month.

8. We offer YCN access and fund relevant training opportunities for any employee looking to develop themselves and their career.

9. We reward five years of service with $5,000 and five days' holiday. We reward ten years of service with $10,000 and four weeks' holiday.

10. We will allow you to work from any of the five Koto studios globally, with appropriate planning and application.

Our Culture

• At Koto we encourage our team to be ‘rationally optimistic’ about the potential of our work, our clients, their businesses, and the power of brand.

• We pursue the best briefs, want to inspire meaningful work, and for those interested provide an opportunity to make the work of their lives. We are actively cultivating leadership, culture, and spaces to encourage this.

• We work in person, with an optional WFH day on Friday and an additional two weeks of remote work per year. We believe this produces the best work, mentoring opportunities, collective learning and culture.

• We encourage autonomy in each member of our team, allowing them to manage their own time, hours, and personal commitments appropriately to complete work.