Strategic Project Lead (Demand Side)

Clera

$100K — $120K *
Business Services
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 1-2+ years in a client-facing or growth role
  • Experience in a fast-paced environment like startups or consulting
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  • Strong relationship-building capabilities with senior leaders
  • Proficiency in initiating conversations, especially via cold calling
  • Analytical mindset with an experimental approach
  • Comfortable balancing strategy development with tactical execution
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity and independently solve problems

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end process of company acquisition from prospecting to onboarding
  • Build credible relationships with high-growth startup leaders
  • Understand and translate client hiring needs into successful searches
  • Execute across diverse go-to-market channels like events and content
  • Conduct outreach campaigns via email and LinkedIn to generate conversations
  • Experiment with messaging and customer segments to optimize outreach
  • Develop repeatable processes based on successful outreach experiments
  • Collaborate with teams to enhance platform matching and client experience
  • Track and improve outcomes in the demand funnel

Benefits

  • Opportunity for rapid career growth into a General Manager role
  • Work directly with the founding team with high autonomy
  • In-person collaboration in a close-knit team environment
  • Access to a dynamic startup culture
  • Ability to influence and shape the company's growth trajectory
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is not a traditional sales role. You'll own the full journey - from identifying promising companies and building relationships with their leaders, to onboarding clients, ensuring their success, and codifying what works into a repeatable growth engine. You'll work directly alongside the founding team with significant autonomy to experiment and build.

This role is explicitly designed as a launchpad: high performers will have the opportunity to grow into a General Manager position with broader ownership of the business.
What You'll Do
  • Own company acquisition end to end - from prospecting and first outreach through onboarding and activation of new clients.
  • Build trusted, credible relationships with founders, executives, and talent leaders at high-growth startups.
  • Develop a deep understanding of each client's hiring needs and translate them into successful searches on the platform.
  • Execute across multiple GTM channels: outbound, referrals, partnerships, events, content, and beyond.
  • Personally run the work required to learn what works - cold calling, writing outbound sequences, attending events, and executing highly personalized outreach.
  • Create compelling email and LinkedIn campaigns that consistently generate qualified conversations.
  • Rapidly experiment with new messaging, channels, customer segments, and commercial models.
  • Turn successful experiments into measurable, repeatable processes the company can scale.
  • Collaborate with talent and product teams to improve matching quality, client experience, and marketplace liquidity.
  • Track the full demand funnel, identify conversion bottlenecks, and take ownership of improving outcomes at every stage.
What We're Looking For

Required
  • 1-2+ years of experience in a client-facing, commercial, consulting, operations, or growth role.
  • Background in a demanding, fast-paced environment - venture-backed startup, management consulting, investment banking, or venture capital.
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
  • Strong relationship-building instincts with the ability to establish credibility with founders and senior leaders.
  • Willingness to pick up the phone, initiate conversations, and maintain momentum in the face of rejection.
  • Highly analytical and experimental approach to growth problems.
  • Comfortable operating across both strategy and execution - designing a GTM motion one day, personally sending the first hundred messages the next.
  • Ability to create structure from ambiguity and solve unfamiliar problems independently.
  • High ownership, urgency, and genuine ambition to build something meaningful at an early stage.
Location & Work Arrangement

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. We're a small, close-knit team and value in-person collaboration, especially at this stage of building.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

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