Program Manager - Research Operations

Outset

$100K — $120K *
Nye, MT 59061In-Person
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; quantitative recruitment experience is a plus.
  • Hands-on understanding of participant recruitment mechanics, including panels, marketplaces, screeners, fraud, and quality control processes.
  • Proven ability in managing vendors and partners, including selection, negotiation, and accountability for performance.
  • Strong program management skills to handle complex, cross-functional challenges and develop effective systems.
  • Experience in both large organizations and startups, blending enterprise insights with a results-oriented approach.
  • Excellent communication skills to create clear training documentation and customer-facing content.
  • Familiarity with AI tools for content automation; experience building these tools is advantageous.

Responsibilities

  • Own and enhance partner performance, ensuring quality and reliability evaluation processes are in place.
  • Negotiate commercial terms and define the feasibility process for scalable recruitment solutions.
  • Design and document the complete recruitment process, establishing benchmarks and escalation pathways for at-risk projects.
  • Create training and enablement resources for the GTM team to ensure effective recruitment understanding.
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering to integrate recruitment enhancements into the product roadmap.
  • Spec internal tools that minimize manual operations and improve efficiency.
  • Translate recruitment processes into accessible content for Account Directors/AEs and customers.

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment promoting a healthy work-life balance.
  • Opportunities for professional development and skills training.
  • Access to a global partner network enhancing professional outreach and learning.
  • Unique role with a strong emphasis on building scalable systems in recruitment.
  • Innovative atmosphere supporting new ideas and methodologies.
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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