Director of People Operations

REPORTS TO CEO / Founder

DIRECT REPORTS People Operations Manager

ALSO PARTNERS WITH Clinical Recruiter, PEO, Director of Clinical Operations, Business Operations

SCOPE Member of the ReKlame leadership team • owns the people budget

LOCATION Grand Central, NYC 5 days in office for the first six months, 4 days thereafter

COMPENSATION $145-165K base + performance bonus + equity

ABOUT THE ROLE

ReKlame Health is seeking a Director of People Operations to own the employee lifecycle for a workforce spanning clinical providers (psychiatric NPs, therapists) and corporate teams across three states. Today this work is distributed across leadership; this role consolidates it into a single accountable function.

The job is four buckets, deliberately weighted toward the first three: talent, performance, and culture. The fourth, the operational engine, is real but supported: a PEO handles payroll, benefits, and multi-state compliance mechanics, and a People Operations Manager reports to you to run day-to-day administration. Much of the foundation already exists: a PEO, a title-and-leveling framework, an onboarding buildout, and a first performance review cycle behind us, but it needs an owner who can systematize, scale, and run it.

THIS IS A LEADERSHIP ROLE

We mean that structurally, not as a compliment. Four things come with the seat:

• A seat at the leadership table. You participate in quarterly and annual planning, own the people section of company planning, and report people metrics to the CEO and, when relevant, the board.
• A budget you own. Compensation planning, recruiting and agency spend, the PEO contract, HR tooling, and learning and development. You build the case, make the trade-offs, and answer for the spend.
• Org design and workforce planning. You own the workforce plan and partner with the CEO, Clinical Operations, and Finance on org structure, spans of control, and the sequencing of hiring against the growth model - including the case for growing your own function.
• Trusted advisor to leadership. You will coach and challenge your peers at the leadership level, delivering honest and sometimes difficult feedback. We are looking for someone with the judgment to know when to push back, not someone who simply agrees.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

1. Talent - bring in top-tier people, everywhere we hire

The bar is the point. We are not looking for someone who fills seats; we are looking for someone who consistently lands excellent, mission-aligned candidates who are better than our current average. You own recruiting strategy and pipeline across all three channels - clinical hires (psychiatric NPs, therapists), non-clinical and corporate hires, and our special programs: internships and early-career pipelines that let us build talent rather than merely source/acquire it. A clinical recruiter drives sourcing and screening on provider roles; you set the strategy, own the bar, and answer for the outcome across all three.

• Define the hiring bar and hold it - scorecards, structured interviews, and calibrated hiring managers, so "great" means the same thing across every team.
• Drive role definition, comp benchmarking, and offer construction, and close the candidates we most want, including the discretion and compliance considerations unique to clinical offers, where licensure and credentialing timelines shape what we can offer and when.
• Build and run our internship and early-career programs as a genuine pipeline - sourcing, structure, mentorship, and conversion into full-time roles.
• Make hiring predictable, measurable, and fast without trading down on quality: pipeline health, time-to-fill, and offer acceptance, as well as quality of hire, 90-day retention, and hiring manager confidence in the slate.
• Maintain the pay band and leveling architecture offers are built from, so parallel clinical and non-clinical careers are compensated coherently by state - and so we can pay for excellence without breaking internal equity.

2. Performance - develop our talent and build an exceptional culture

Performance management here is not a paperwork exercise. It is how we grow people and how our culture gets reinforced or eroded.

• Build review cadence, templates, and calibration so ratings and promotions are consistent across teams.
• Set goal-setting frameworks that connect individual goals to company priorities.
• Development and career pathing: growth plans and clear paths for both clinical and non-clinical tracks, so strong people can see a reason to stay.
• Talent review identifies our high performers and future leaders, deliberately invests in them, and knows where our succession risk lies.
• Manager enablement: coaching a leadership layer to set expectations, give feedback, develop their people, and address underperformance early.

3. Culture - steward culture and employee relations

As a growing team finds its rhythm, you will be a stabilizing force.

• Handle the sequencing of sensitive internal communications so change lands well.
• Manage employee relations issues with discretion and fairness.
• Serve as a trusted point of contact for employees, separate from the direct reporting line.
• Protect retention where it costs us most - provider attrition directly affects patient continuity and revenue.

4. People Operations - own the people engine, with leverage

This function should run quietly. With a People Operations Manager reporting to you and a PEO carrying the mechanics, the standard is not that you handled it - it is that it stopped needing to be handled.

• Onboarding and offboarding. Standardized flows on our multi-platform infrastructure, the credentialing handoff with Clinical Operations so onboarding and billing-readiness move in lockstep, and clean, compliant offboarding across all three states.
• PEO and compliance administration. Multi-state payroll and benefits, I-9 / E-Verify, and state-specific employment law across NY, NJ, and FL. You are the point person when PEO issues surface - and the reason they stop surfacing.
• Policy and people data. The handbook is maintained across all three states with no policy creating exposure in any one of them, plus the reporting layer beneath your workforce plan - attrition, headcount against plan, and workforce data feeding financial forecasting.

YOUR FIRST YEAR

Days 1-30 - Diagnose. Map open roles and pipeline health, where our hiring bar is inconsistent, performance review learnings to date, the leveling framework and pay data, culture and retention signals, and the operational baseline. Set the division of labor with your Manager and the working model with our clinical recruiter. Deliver a People Operations diagnostic and 90-day plan.

Days 31-60 - Build. Stand up the recruiting pipeline tracker and hiring cadence; the review cadence and templates; and the pay band framework by state. Through your Manager and the PEO, stand up the onboarding and offboarding playbooks and the multi-state compliance calendar.

Days 61-90 - Show movement. Active pipelines for every open role with a defined bar in use by every hiring manager; a plan for the next internship cohort; the next review cycle scheduled and templated with managers trained to run it; zero open compliance gaps; and a first attrition and headcount dashboard feeding forecasting.

After that, you are measured on company outcomes rather than activity: provider capacity staffed to support our patient growth targets, key clinicians and leaders retained with provider attrition trending down, an engagement baseline established and improving, a leadership layer that manages better because of you, and a people function that runs without needing the CEO in it.

WHO YOU ARE

You have 7+ years of progressive people operations experience and have built people functions, not just administered them, including hands-on ownership of a PEO or HRIS without a big team behind you. You have likely done this at a scaling healthcare company where the workforce is mixed licensed clinicians and corporate staff.

Required

• A track record of raising the talent bar: you can point to specific hires you landed, how you found them, and how you closed them.
• Full-cycle recruiting experience for both licensed clinical roles and corporate roles, including comp benchmarking and offer construction.
• Experience designing performance review processes, development or career frameworks, leveling, or pay bands from scratch, not inheriting and maintaining them.
• Experience owning a budget and operating at the leadership-team level, advising a founder or CEO directly.
• Demonstrated discretion handling sensitive employee relations matters, and experience managing at least one direct report.
• 4 days a week in person at our beautiful New York City Grand Central Office

Preferred

• Digital health, Behavioral health, substance use/addiction care, or a similar care-delivery model.
• Clinical hiring compliance: licensure verification, credentialing timelines, and provider onboarding.
• Building internship, residency, or other early-career pipeline programs, including university or training-program partnerships.
• SHRM-CP/SCP or PHR/SPHR certification; onboarding infrastructure in tools like Notion and Trainual.

Must-have traits

• Discreet and trusted. People bring you hard things because you handle them with judgment, confidentiality, and fairness.
• A closer on talent. You hold a high bar under pressure to just fill the seat, and you treat an unfilled clinical role as a revenue problem.
• Willing to be the counterweight. You can disagree with a peer and hold your position with evidence, and stay in the room afterward.
• Commercially fluent. You can hold a budget, defend a headcount request in financial terms, and connect people decisions to revenue and patient access.

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Salary: 145,000 to 165,000
• Annual bonus based on performance milestones
• Equity, e.g., stock options
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) with company matching, Short-Term Disability, FSA, HSA, and an Employee Assistance Program through Spring Health.
• Pre-tax commuter benefits for our Grand Central office.
• 21 days of PTO plus 8 company holidays.