Gem

Head of Performance

Gem$120K — $180K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7 to 12 years in performance management or talent upgrading systems, preferably in high-growth or turnaround environments.
  • Expertise in performance methodologies like Topgrading and forced ranking, with quick execution of tough decisions.
  • Understanding of legal risks associated with talent grading and exit processes, with experience in mitigating them.
  • Proficient in people analytics and HRIS tools to create actionable dashboards for leadership.
  • Ability to coach and develop existing talent into higher performers, not just evaluate and replace.
  • Knowledge of multi-state HR compliance, ensuring risk management without compromising performance standards.
  • Proven success in building lean, high-density teams focused on capability.

Responsibilities

  • Design a Performance Operating System with measurable KPIs and scorecards.
  • Implement a formal grading process to ensure true performance accountability.
  • Establish clear processes for addressing underperformance effectively.
  • Partner with leadership to maintain a constant pipeline of high-quality talent.
  • Create development plans for high-potential employees to enhance performance.
  • Develop dashboards for real-time visibility into talent metrics and productivity.
  • Maintain consistent performance standards across various operations while managing compliance.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • 401(k) with company matching.
  • Professional development opportunities for personal and professional growth.
  • Fully remote work flexibility, with occasional travel for investor meetings.
Full Job Description
The Mission of This Role

We are seeking a Head of Performance who will build the operating system for talent at Rex: a rigorous, standards-driven infrastructure for measuring performance, enforcing accountability, and continuously upgrading the talent bar. This is not a traditional HR role. You will not be optimizing for engagement surveys or employee experience; you will be optimizing for talent density, ensuring every seat is filled with an A-player, that standards are unambiguous, and that underperformance is identified and resolved quickly rather than tolerated. You will design the scorecards, calibration processes, and grading systems that make performance visible and comparable across the ecosystem, and support the recruiting engine that keeps a pipeline of superior talent ready to backfill every seat we upgrade.

What You'll Do

  • Build a Performance Operating System: Design role-specific scorecards, KPIs, and standards so performance is measurable, comparable, and undeniable, not a matter of opinion or politics.
  • Run Rigorous Calibration: Implement a formal grading process (A/B/C player identification, forced differentiation) across the ecosystem, ensuring managers surface true performance instead of avoiding hard calls.
  • Systematize Accountability: Build clear, fast, well-defined processes for addressing underperformance, up to and including exit, so cutting bottom talent is routine execution, not a rare, dreaded event, built on solid documentation and legal review so speed doesn't create exposure.
  • Drive Continuous Upgrading: Partner with leadership to run an aggressive, always-on recruiting pipeline so every seat vacated by a low performer is immediately backfilled with someone better. Talent density should rise every quarter.
  • Level Up Existing Talent: Build targeted coaching and development plans for high-potential B players identified through calibration, with clear timelines and standards for moving into A territory. Upgrading talent density means growing people as often as it means replacing them.
  • Own People Analytics: Build dashboards that give leadership real-time visibility into performance distribution, attrition quality (regretted versus unregretted), hiring-bar strength, and productivity: the same rigor we apply to capital, applied to talent.
  • Enforce Standards at Scale: Keep the performance bar consistent across multifamily, real estate, tech, and insurance operations, resisting drift toward comfort, tenure-based leniency, or politics.
  • Manage Compliance & Legal Risk: Own multi-state HR compliance as risk management, not the mission of the role, but a hard floor. Partner with legal counsel to ensure calibration, forced differentiation, and exit processes are documented and defensible, given the real exposure these systems can create if run carelessly.
  • Lead Change Management: Communicate the shift to a calibration-driven, faster-exit culture clearly to managers and employees outside the pilot group, so the system lands as fair and high-standards rather than arbitrary.
  • Advise Leadership Directly: Serve as Peter Rex's direct partner on talent decisions: who to hire, who to promote, who to exit, bringing data and conviction, not consensus-seeking.


Ideal Candidate Profile

  • 7 to 12 years building performance management, talent grading, or workforce-upgrading systems, ideally in PE-backed, high-growth, or turnaround environments where standards had to be built from scratch.
  • Direct experience with rigorous performance methodologies (Topgrading, forced ranking/calibration, standards tied to real consequences) and comfort making and executing hard people decisions quickly.
  • Working knowledge of the legal risk profile of forced ranking and rapid-exit systems (e.g., disparate impact exposure), and experience building processes that move fast without inviting litigation.
  • Fluency in people analytics and HRIS tools sufficient to build dashboards leadership actually uses, not reports that sit unread.
  • A bias toward standards over sentiment: someone who sees clear accountability as respect for high performers, not cruelty toward low ones.
  • Real experience coaching and developing high-potential talent into stronger performers, not just grading and cutting. Sees leveling up existing people as a core lever, not a side project.
  • Working knowledge of multi-state HR compliance, enough to keep the company out of trouble without letting compliance become the operating philosophy.
  • Track record of building lean, high-density teams: "fewer, more capable" in practice, not just in language.
  • Genuine conviction for a high-standards, no-excuses culture: someone who finds building this kind of engine energizing, not exhausting.


Rex Ecosystem-Wide Mission

Catalyze Human Flourishing through our products/services and to elevate/further humanity in all our business dealings.

Rex Values / Rex Culture

  • Customer Fanatic. We fanatically focus on customers, seeking to ever-deliver more value, and inventing/innovating on their behalf.
  • Product/Service Passion. Our business thrives or dies by products/services.
  • Ludicrous speed. Our default pace is extremely fast. Time is precious, life is short; and moving fast is more fun and effective.
  • FAWOMO. We will find a way, or make one.
  • Loves going to war: prefers wartime to peacetime, always hungry to move forward, do more, and push growth.
  • Chutzpah. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Fortune favors the bold. Duc in altum.
  • Fun. We should only do work, over the long run, that's fun; and work with fun people. Jokes and humor welcomed; PC stuff and uptight behavior prohibited.
  • Never-lose-money approach. Protects the downside, using careful analysis before deploying significant resources, and ensuring cash is plentiful; never risking what others have and need for what they don't have and don't need.
  • Other-centered. Idealist, desperate more than anything to leave an impact with their life by helping other people, seeing money as a means to serve.
  • Creative cost cutting constantly. There's always a smarter way, always room to cut, always ways to do more with less - a cost advantage is a competitive edge.
  • Fewer, more capable. Bias to as lean of a team as possible, with the highest competency - reducing communication and coordination, creating more effectiveness.
  • Underdogs. What we've done is nothing compared to what we're going to achieve now. We're fighting to be the best, clawing and biting up and forward, aiming to be the champs, be #1. Scrappy AF no matter how much we accomplish. We've never 'arrived' in our minds. We're the underdogs always.
  • Other attributes valued. Pointblank forthrightness in conversation with teammates, brutally facing problems; velvet glove with iron fist in human dealings; shrewd as a serpent innocent as a dove; hardcore work hustle; invictus mentality; swagger with humility; quiet professionalism; thrifty and not materialistic; loves who they work with, loves what they do, and loves who we serve.


Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: Commensurate with experience and market standards

Benefits:

  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
  • 401(k) with company matching
  • Professional development opportunities to advance personal and professional growth
  • Fully remote work flexibility, with travel required for investor meetings and strategic engagements


Employment Eligibility Requirements:

Applicants will be required to pass a background check and reference check prior to their first day to verify their employment eligibility. For finance focused positions a credit check may also be required.

We operate in the following states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. At this time, we will only hire people who live in or will relocate to those states. We have a strong preference for Texas and Florida as the majority of our portfolio is within those states.

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