Founding Growth Operator - MeritFirst

8VC•Austin, TX

11d

About The Position

MeritFirst is building the infrastructure to make talent allocation the default. We create objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution - and help companies hire based on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree alone. This role is for a hands-on Growth Operator to build a system that identifies job categories where MeritFirst can become the best place to discover talent and attract exceptional candidates. You will turn real work into compelling assessments, build flagship programs and competitions around them, and work with companies to convert demonstrated ability into interviews, offers, and successful hires. This is a zero-to-one builder role where you will own the operating loop from role selection and candidate acquisition through programs, employer activation, matching, and placement, and then turn what works into a repeatable growth engine. You will do the work, learn quickly, and build the playbook as you go.

Requirements

Evidence of ability to influence people to take action and produce measurable outcomes.
Unusually high-agency generalist who operates with extreme ownership and a maniacal sense of urgency.
Ability to move between strategy, growth, partnerships, recruiting, operations, and storytelling.
Experience building something from zero.
Ability to persuade both an exceptional candidate to bet on a new platform and a skeptical hiring leader to act on a new signal.
Strong taste for programs, competitions, events, and experiences people genuinely want to join.
Analytically rigorous and willing to kill exciting ideas that do not produce interviews and hires.
Comfortable doing unscalable work before you know what should become scalable.
Treat candidate trust and experience as product requirements.
Write clearly, communicate directly, and can represent MeritFirst’s mission with conviction.
Care deeply about finding exceptional people whom existing systems fail to recognize.

Responsibilities

Identify job categories with meaningful employer demand, large pools of overlooked talent, and skills that can be demonstrated objectively.
Build relationships with founders, hiring managers, and talent leaders to activate employer demand and secure real opportunities.
Help companies understand how MeritFirst’s signal should inform their hiring decisions.
Find and activate exceptional people through communities, referrals, partnerships, content, schools, trade programs, creators, and channels that do not look like conventional recruiting.
Work with our product team, assessment experts, hiring managers, and exceptional practitioners to turn popular roles into rigorous, efficient assessments and realistic work challenges.
Create competitions, cohorts, showcases, and in-person or online events that ambitious candidates want to participate in and that employers pay attention to.
Turn strong assessment performance into curated introductions, interviews, offers, and successful hires, and stay close enough to candidates and companies to understand what works after the introduction.
Turn placements into referrals, case studies, employer advocates, candidate ambassadors, and organic demand for the next program.
Track candidate source, assessment completion, qualification, interview, offer, acceptance, retention, employer repeat rate, and candidate experience, and optimize for outcomes, not registrations or event attendance.
Identify which early manual work should become software, systems, partnerships, and repeatable operating playbooks.