Program Manager - Research Operations

Outset

$110K — $130K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-10 years in research operations or participant recruitment, with digital qualitative expertise; quantitative experience is a plus.
  • Hands-on knowledge of participant recruitment mechanics: panels, screeners, quotas, and quality control.
  • Proven vendor management skills: selecting, negotiating, and managing accountability and spend.
  • Effective program management capabilities with cross-functional problem-solving skills.
  • Experience in both large organizations and startups, balancing enterprise processes with agility.
  • Excellent communicator, capable of simplifying complex information for various audiences.
  • Familiarity with AI tools; experience in developing AI dashboards is an additional asset.

Responsibilities

  • Own and optimize partner communication and performance assessment to ensure quality and reliability.
  • Negotiate rates and commercial terms, establishing a feasibility framework for predictable recruitment.
  • Design and document the complete recruitment process with benchmarks for performance tracking.
  • Create training materials for the GTM team to enhance understanding and confidence in recruitment procedures.
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering to align recruitment experience with product development needs.
  • Identify and specify internal tools to minimize manual operational tasks.
  • Translate recruitment processes into clear content for both internal teams and external customers.

Benefits

  • Access to a global partner network and diverse recruitment processes.
  • Opportunity to build scalable recruitment systems from the ground up.
  • Collaboration with cross-functional teams including Product and Engineering.
  • Professional development and training opportunities for career advancement.
Full Job Description
Participant recruitment at Outset spans a global partner network, internal process, and the product experience itself - and this role owns all three. Rather than running recruitment study by study, you'll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You'll be Outset's authority on recruitment: the connective tissue between our partners, our teams, and our product. Responsibilities • Own partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases. • Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process (incidence rates, targeting, which vendor for which use case) that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows. • Design and document the end-to-end recruitment process, from intake through delivery - with fill-time benchmarks by audience/screening criteria and a clear playbook for tracking and escalating at-risk projects. • Build the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works. • Partner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience - fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds - bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap. • Identify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work. • Translate how recruitment works into content for two audiences: best-practice guidance for Account Directors/AEs, and customer-facing explanations of our role, our partners' role, and what to expect. Qualifications • 5-10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus • Hands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control. • Track record managing vendors and partners - selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend. • Genuine program management ability - you can hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system. • Experience at both a large organization and a startup. We want the enterprise process instincts and the scrappiness to build fast without waiting for permission. • Strong communicator - able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content. • Comfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus. • Highly independent - this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them. • Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.

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