Recruiting Manager at Form Energy — Berkeley, CA

Role Description

Form Energy is building multi-day energy storage to help decarbonize the grid, and we're scaling the team that builds it quickly. We're hiring a Recruiting Manager to lead our West Coast talent acquisition team out of our Berkeley office, where a growing concentration of our engineering and hardware development work lives.

This is a role for someone who loves complexity. You'll manage a team of recruiters and coordinators, partner directly with engineering executives and hardware leaders, and collaborate closely with our People team across Somerville, MA and Weirton, WV to keep our talent strategy unified. You'll set the strategy for how we attract technical hardware talent, and you'll coach the team executing it every day.

This is a hybrid role, which will require working onsite from our office in Berkeley 2 or 3 days a week.

Relocation assistance is available.

What you'll do

• Team leadership. Directly manage, coach, and grow a team of 5+ recruiters and talent coordinators. Build a culture of excellence, humanity, and creativity, and set the standard for how we recruit, hire, and treat candidates at every stage.
• Hardware talent strategy. Design sourcing and hiring strategies built for complex, niche hardware roles across battery, mechanical, electrical, controls, and manufacturing engineering. You'll create the motion that makes hard-to-fill roles fillable.
• Executive partnership. Serve as a trusted advisor to West Coast engineering and leadership teams. Understand their technical requirements at a real level, forecast talent gaps proactively, and translate business plans into concrete hiring plans.
• Cross-site collaboration. Build strong bridges with our talent and HR partners in Somerville and Weirton. Share best practices, standardize where it makes sense, and maintain a unified national talent brand across all three locations.
• People Ops partnership. Act as a strategic partner to the People Operations team on total rewards, headcount planning etc. You're a peer to the People team, not a customer of it.
• Data-driven optimization. Own the metrics for your team, including time-to-hire, quality of hire, pipeline health, and source of hire. Use them to continuously sharpen the process and present clear insights to leadership.
• Employer brand. Sharpen how we tell the Form Energy story to top hardware talent. Turn our mission into a reason candidates say yes.

What you'll bring:

• Proven leadership. 3+ years of direct people management experience, including a meaningful stretch managing a team of 5+ recruiters or coordinators. This is real, sustained people leadership, not senior IC work with occasional mentorship.
• Hardware recruiting expertise. A proven track record recruiting within a hardware development company. Batteries, automotive, aerospace, robotics, semiconductors, medical devices, or other complex physical products all count. Manufacturing exposure is helpful but not required. What matters is that you deeply understand hardware engineering talent and how to attract it.
• Startup agility. Prior startup experience is strongly preferred. You're comfortable navigating ambiguity, moving quickly, and building processes from the ground up as we scale. You know the difference between a process that helps and a process that slows people down, and you build accordingly.
• Cross-functional and distributed team fluency. You've partnered closely with People Operations and HRBP peers, and you've worked effectively across matrixed teams in multiple locations and time zones.
• Location. Ability to work from or commute regularly to our Berkeley, CA facility.

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