At Progression we're helping everyone to build better, more meaningful careers by letting teams define career paths and employees measure themselves against them.
We think HR software is fundamentally broken for employees and managers.
As an employee, not only do HR tools give you more work to do, but they rarely deliver real value back. The endless goals, performance reviews, surveys and learning and development blah blah blah. Honestly, just let me do my work. What's more — when you leave, *poof*. All your data is gone. No record of what you've accomplished, or the projects you've worked on.
Meanwhile as a manager, you have nothing to help. You're stuck with whatever the HR team bought because they knocked a dollar off the price. Oh, and spreadsheets. Endless spreadsheets.
This has to change. The tools we use to design and build our careers must do a better job for us.
That's where Progression comes in.
We've flipped the traditional approach to HR tech and we're starting with first principles. We believe if we build a tool that is a delight to use for employees and managers we can revolutionise the way organisations think about career and skill growth.
What we have today, we built with just the two of us (Jonny and Neil) from a tiny office, then socially distanced in our houses in East London with a puppy each. We're sustainable and fully bootstrapped.
But the opportunity here is huge. This summer we raised money from fantastic UK and US investors and are now starting to build a remote team of wonderful humans to help us with our vision to turn Progression into the definitive way for anyone to track their career.
We've been around the block a few times, and know how important it is to start with some principles.
About the role
We're looking for a growth-focused content operator to help us build and manage content and community at Progression. We're building a new type of product, and need someone comfortable with category creation and building a compelling go to market proposition powered by user love as well as working closely with content creators, partners and our team to build fantastic content for the library which powers customer success at Progression.
You'll have an enormous amount of autonomy and responsibility over editorial and content strategy across the product suite, but also have to be comfortable with rolling your sleeves up and creating content yourself
Your skillset and experience:
You'll have demonstrable experience of:
- Working in at least one senior content or editorial role for a loved, opinionated or fast-growing brand
- Creating compelling narratives when taking a known product to a new market, or introducing a new category
- Thinking through content strategy across multiple touchpoints (blogs, newsletters, social, podcasts, video!) and stakeholders
- Working with and commissioning freelance content creators as well as being able to write well yourself
- Sourcing and building relationships with key partners and co-marketing opportunities
- Strong communication and organisational skills — you'll be able to work effectively in teams or work autonomously as needed
Bonus points for:
- Experience building a user-led community
- An understanding of SEO best practices, or working closely with SEO experts
- Experience running experiments on paid marketing channels and measuring CAC
- Experience writing technical content as part of a product team
- A background in HR/Career tech or in marketing to managers and employees in tech companies
We expect you to:
1. Be autonomous
We're not the command and control leadership types, so if you prefer to be told what to execute on, we may not be the right fit for you. If you've proven that you thrive when given a goal and gathering your own data, hi there. Let's talk.
2. Have a high quality bar, and able to self-critique
You will be one of our first hires, making fundamental decisions that will last for years. As you grow with us, you may well be hiring others who also have an outsized impact. Therefore it's incredibly important that you're thinking critically about the work we've done already, the work we're doing right now and what needs to be done going forwards.
3. Be smart with time and resources
This doesn't mean cheap. It means that if we've done something three times, the next time we're thinking about how to automate it, give it away or remove it (with help from others). We believe small teams are far more efficient than large teams, so the ability to buy yourself more time is incredibly important.
4. Be candid but empathetic
We challenge ideas, challenge preconceptions, call out ambiguity. But we do so with empathy and consideration. We expect honesty but in constructive ways.
What you're getting into
You'll be the first hire in a new team, with plenty of contact time with founders but ultimately running your own roadmap and planning your own goals. As founders this isn't our area of expertise so we'll be excited to learn from you and let you guide our strategy.
If things go well, our preferred career path for you will be to lead and build the team that we need to scale.
The metrics you'll be caring about will be things like:
- Brand recognition for key terms and categories (that we'll define together)
- Success of evergreen and seasonal content marketing campaigns (traffic, leads, conversions, awareness)
- Quality of our library content (size, coverage across disciplines, quality of authors)
- Engagement of our key audiences both pre and post signup (community etc.)
- Success of key partnerships
You'll have a great time if you want:
- To get in on the very ground floor of a new tech company
- Huge influence over all content strategy and brand building
- High level goals and a lot of freedom to run
- The ability to prioritise, justify and manage your own roadmap
- To learn unfamiliar things quickly so you can unblock yourself
- To work on the most business critical projects, whatever they are
You may not have such a great time if you want:
- To work in a large marketing or ops 'team' (at least at first)
- To hand off the things you don't like to someone else
- To be fed work
- Free lunches
What we'll do for you
We can't compete on salary with the really big folks, but we're doing everything we can to make you feel comfortable with what you're getting in return for believing in us.
That includes:
- A fair salary for our stage
- A healthy options package
- A good holiday allowance which we will expect you to use
- Remote flexibility — flexible hours, work from anywhere
- Remote benefits (e.g. a stipend towards coffee and a good chair — you tell us what you want!)
- Regular in-person working sessions and kick-offs whenever we need, once we're able to
- Off-sites and hangouts somewhere nice
- £1000/year for training, coaching or personal/professional support, and very regular career growth conversations (it's kind of what we do...)
We're careful about how we hire
We really care about hiring thoughtfully and from all backgrounds (see our pledge). Whatever your race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability, we want to hear from you.
Thats not just hollow words. We're:
- Ensuring a fair and rigorous hiring process, whether we know you or not
- Doing everything we can to create a diverse candidate pool
- Ensuring diversity in our interview panel (i.e., not just us!)
If you aren't sure whether you tick all the boxes but you want to apply, please do! We'd love to meet you.