Founding Growth Operator - MeritFirst

The Role

Tests only matter if the right people take them and companies act on the results. A test creates signal; a network turns that signal into opportunity. We’re looking for a hands-on Growth Operator to build that system.

• Identify job categories where MeritFirst can become the best place to discover talent and attract exceptional candidates.
• Turn real work into compelling assessments, build flagship programs and competitions around them, and work with companies to convert demonstrated ability into interviews, offers, and successful hires.
• This is not a conventional growth-marketing or internal recruiting role. You will own the operating loop - from role selection and candidate acquisition through programs, employer activation, matching, and placement - and then turn what works into a repeatable growth engine.

What You’ll Build Over Time

• Choose the markets we enter. Identify role categories with meaningful employer demand, large pools of overlooked talent, and skills that can be demonstrated objectively.
• Activate employer demand. Build relationships with founders, hiring managers, and talent leaders. Secure real opportunities and help companies understand how MeritFirst’s signal should inform their hiring decisions.
• Create ways for people to prove themselves. Work with our product team, assessment experts, hiring managers, and exceptional practitioners to turn popular roles into rigorous, efficient assessments and realistic work challenges.
• Build flagship programs. Create competitions, cohorts, showcases, and in-person or online events that ambitious candidates want to participate in - and that employers pay attention to.
• Make placements happen. Turn strong assessment performance into curated introductions, interviews, offers, and successful hires.
• Stay close enough to candidates and companies to understand what works after the introduction. Build the growth flywheel. Turn placements into referrals, case studies, employer advocates, candidate ambassadors, and organic demand for the next program.
• Measure the full funnel. Track candidate source, assessment completion, qualification, interview, offer, acceptance, retention, employer repeat rate, and candidate experience. Optimize for outcomes, not registrations or event attendance.
• Productize what works. Some of the early work will be manual. Your job is to identify which parts should become software, systems, partnerships, and repeatable operating playbooks.

Who Will Thrive Here

• You are an unusually high-agency generalist who operates with extreme ownership and a maniacal sense of urgency.
• You can move between strategy, growth, partnerships, recruiting, operations, and storytelling.
• You have built something from zero - not merely operated a mature channel or inherited an existing playbook.
• You can persuade both an exceptional candidate to bet on a new platform and a skeptical hiring leader to act on a new signal.
• You have strong taste for programs, competitions, events, and experiences people genuinely want to join.
• You are analytically rigorous and willing to kill exciting ideas that do not produce interviews and hires.
• You are comfortable doing unscalable work before you know what should become scalable.
• You treat candidate trust and experience as product requirements.
• You write clearly, communicate directly, and can represent MeritFirst’s mission with conviction.
• You care deeply about finding exceptional people whom existing systems fail to recognize.