The posting
Company Description
Manara is a social impact startup whose mission is to unlock the human potential of the Middle East & North Africa, uplifting the region's economy and diversifying the global tech sector, with a focus on women. We are experienced founders, operators, and technologists with leading investors (including Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Stripe, Y Combinator, Seedcamp) and advisers from Andela, Lambda School, and Honeypot.
This region has a rapidly growing population and a highly educated, diverse population. But nobody has cracked the puzzle of employment: college graduates face the highest youth unemployment in the world. Women are particularly impacted: in Palestine, 52% of computer science students are women, but 83% of them are unemployed. We run an entirely remote solution to identify the top talent, familiarize them with interviewing approaches, vet them, and find them amazing jobs (whether remote or on-site). It works: at Google 71% of our referrals in our last batch were hired.
We don’t stop at job placement. Our vision is to build the top tech talent community in this region and support them at each stage in their lifecycle: how to get a promotion, become a manager, be the first woman engineer on a team, etc. The community is driven by a tech product that facilitates connection, shared learning, and motivation.
Job Description
To achieve our ambitious vision, we’re seeking a Director of Growth. You’ll set our growth & marketing strategy and execute on it, managing and growing the marketing and sales teams. Your mission is two-fold:
- Create high-quality leads of hiring partners (e.g., startups that hire remotely) so that engineers who graduate from Manara can get their dream jobs; establish & grow those partnerships over time
- Inspire more women engineers (and senior engineers of any gender) from the Middle East & North Africa to join Manara to pursue their dreams
If interested, you could also play an important role managing our community, including engineers in the pipeline and our accomplished alumni.
Qualifications
Note: Diverse candidates often screen themselves out of job applications if they don’t have all the qualifications. Please apply if you’re excited about the role - we’d love to see your application!
- Growth: You are an accomplished marketing professional with a focus on growth. You experiment constantly, leveraging marketing or technical solutions, to significantly increase the number of relevant people signing up for the products you market. You use creative techniques (not just throwing more money at the problem!) and monitor analytics to see their results.
- Entrepreneur: You are scrappy, comfortable with ambiguity and change. You experiment & iterate quickly. You take immense pride in creating solutions that will have long-term impact and you find their monetization opportunities. You build teams/organizations that thrive at each stage of their growth. You can figure out what Manara’s next service/product will be.
- Strategic: You identify opportunities for improvement or innovation. You quickly develop solutions for a variety of needs. You listen to users and do competitive analyses. You think through the business opportunities.
- Operations: You can figure out how to create processes & efficiencies & excellent experiences where none existed. How to go from 10 to 1000. You work with engineers effectively to build tools, or find and manage vendor relationships yourself.
- Project management: You align stakeholders (e.g., volunteers, staff members) and make sure they get their commitments done on time. You deliver efficiently and on deadline, and provide status updates or get unblocked. You take ownership and get a lot done independently. You execute a variety of tasks with high reliability and few errors. You track & follow up on dozens of details.
- Experience setting up & using tech tools: Airtable, Salesforce, Google Spreadsheets, etc. You identify vendors and implement their software when it can accelerate our work.
- Collaboration/team player: You can work effectively with other people at Manara. You roll up your sleeves to do the unglamorous work or support a team member when needed.
Knock our socks off:
- Sales & Marketing Management: You have managed sales and marketing teams successfully. You are a stellar manager. Your teams know what is expected of them, deliver on their goals, and love the whole experience of working with you.
- Talent industry expertise: You have experience in the recruitment/talent industry (especially for software engineers) and can thus hit the ground running and grow our own team’s expertise in this area.
- Product strategy: You have great ideas about how to go from placing 100 engineers per year to 1000, without growing our team. You collaborate effectively with engineers and designers.
- Remote: You have experience working on effective remote teams & thrive in such environments. You work well across time zones (e.g., you communicate effectively via asynchronous oral & verbal channels).
- Passion for Manara’s mission of creating a community that unlocks the full potential of top tech talent in MENA (with a focus on Palestine & women)
