Founding Growth Operator

MeritFirst • Austin, TX

10d

About The Position

America is strongest when ability can rise. The right person can change the trajectory of a team, a company, or an entire field. But most hiring systems are built to avoid mistakes, not to discover extraordinary upside. They rely on the credentials that are easiest to read: the right degree, the right previous employer, or the right personal network. These filters, while convenient, are often very poor proxies for what someone can actually do. When exceptional ability is missed, the loss is larger than one denied opportunity. A company loses performance. Coworkers lose a force multiplier. Ideas and businesses that could have existed never get built. A country that mistakes pedigree for ability does not merely distribute opportunity unfairly, it leaves growth on the table. History suggests that better talent allocation has been a major source of American growth. When capable people reach the work where they can contribute most, workers rise, companies become more productive, and the benefits can spread through new ideas, stronger teams, families, and communities. MeritFirst is building the infrastructure to make that 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. For the worker, that means upward mobility. For the company, better performance. At scale, it can mean national growth. The role Tests only matter if the right people take them and companies act on the results. A test creates signal; a network turns that signal into opportunity. We’re looking for a hands-on Growth Operator to build that system. You will identify 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 not a conventional growth-marketing or internal recruiting role. 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. This is a zero-to-one builder role. One day you may be selecting the next role category for MeritFirst to enter. The next, you may be recruiting candidates, refining a challenge with a domain expert, producing an event, convincing a hiring leader to interview someone they would normally overlook, or analyzing why strong candidates are dropping out of the funnel. You will do the work, learn quickly, and build the playbook as you go.

Requirements

• Unusually high-agency generalist who operates with extreme ownership and a maniacal sense of urgency.
• Can move between strategy, growth, partnerships, recruiting, operations, and storytelling.
• Have built something from zero - not merely operated a mature channel or inherited an existing playbook.
• Can 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.

Nice To Haves

• Prefer clean functional boundaries or consider certain work beneath you.
• Want an established team, budget, brand, and operating playbook.
• Primarily want to run paid acquisition, lifecycle marketing, or a conventional demand-generation funnel.
• More interested in the idea of meritocracy than the difficult operational work required to make it real.
• Looking for a predictable 9-to-5.

Responsibilities

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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed