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, you9ll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You9ll be Outset9s 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 partner9s 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 partners9 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.
