Head of People & Organizational Effectiveness

Head Of People & Organizational Effectiveness

Organization Design | Talent Selection | Team Effectiveness | Incentive Design | People Science

Location: Remote, US

Company: Seeking.com, STNDRDS, and Standards.com (combined US operating organization)

Reports to: Co-CEOs

Type: Full-Time, Exempt

Compensation: $175,000 to $225,000 base

The Question You Will Spend Your Time Answering

Why do some groups of talented people accomplish extraordinary things together, while other groups of equally talented people become slow, political, or frustrated? And how do we deliberately build the first kind?

If you have spent a meaningful part of your career thinking about that question, often when nobody was paying you to, keep reading.

About Us

Seeking.com is the world's largest premium dating platform, founded by an MIT alumnus and headquartered in Las Vegas. STNDRDS is our consumer media brand; Standards.com is our independent news publication. Together we are a combined US operating organization built on one premise: we exist to create value for the people we serve, not to extract it from them.

We are 50 to 60 people, split between our Las Vegas office and remote roles across the country, and we intend to stay small by design. We grow through leverage per person, not headcount. That makes how our people are selected, organized, and work together the single biggest determinant of what we can accomplish.

The Opportunity

You own the design and effectiveness of the human operating system of the company: what people and structure we need, how we select them, how we organize, develop, and reward them, and how they work together. You are not here to administer HR programs. You are here to make the organization, and every person in it, more effective.

The core question you carry every day:

Do we have the right people, organized the right way, operating under the right conditions and incentives, to accomplish what we are asking the company to accomplish?

When the answer is no, you diagnose before you prescribe. Is it the person, the manager, the structure, the incentives, the team composition, unclear ownership, decision rights, information flow, missing capability, or something nobody else has noticed? Then you design the smallest intervention that fixes the real cause, and you measure whether it worked.

Three ideas shape how we work. The Value Creator System: people earn gain share based on demonstrated repeatable value. The Certainty Framework: design work to create the conditions for eustress (voluntary striving toward something you care about) and remove structural sources of distress. The 10x Operating Principle: growth comes through leverage per person, not added headcount.

What You Will Own

You own the architecture of each area below. Payroll, benefits administration, and onboarding and offboarding logistics are run by our Director of Business Operations. You design the systems; that team helps run them.

1. Organizational Design and Diagnosis

Shape roles, teams, reporting lines, decision rights, and operating models around our strategy. Find overlaps, gaps, unnecessary layers, and structures built for yesterday. Be the company's organizational doctor: the person the Co-CEOs call when something involving people does not make sense. The org chart is an output of your thinking, not the starting point.

2. Talent Architecture, Recruiting, and Selection

The goal is capability per employee, not headcount. Before a role opens, ask whether AI, redesign, clearer ownership, or developing someone already here would solve the problem better. Own recruiting strategy, critical and leadership hiring, succession, and retention of high performers. Build selection methods that predict who will perform here, not who interviews well, and track quality of hire at six and twelve months to learn what actually predicts success. Shape an employer brand that attracts people energized by high standards and lets everyone else self-select out.

3. Individual and Team Effectiveness

Most of us, leadership included, can become dramatically more effective at the fundamentals: organizing work and information, focus, prioritization, problem-solving, decisions, and communicating ideas simply. Diagnose the habits limiting output and build simple interventions people actually use. Understand why some combinations of people multiply each other and others create friction. Coach the Co-CEOs on their own operating habits when relevant. That is part of the job, not a boundary.

4. Management, Performance, and Feedback

Managers amplify or suppress everyone around them. Own manager selection, development, delegation, 1:1 quality, and manager evaluation. Replace annual reviews and stack rankings with continuous, lightweight feedback close to the work. Every person should be able to answer: What is expected of me? How is my performance measured? What happens when I create exceptional value? What happens when I repeatedly do not perform? When someone struggles, determine whether it is a person, manager, role, structure, or incentive problem.

5. Communication Systems and Norms of Excellence

Design how we give feedback, disagree, raise bad news, present information, run meetings, and choose between synchronous and asynchronous work, including across our office and remote teams. Reset the norms so excellence is the polite behavior: it is impolite to sit in a meeting you are not adding to, and impolite to hold back a concern to avoid friction. Observe whether behavior actually changes, and adapt when it does not.

6. Planning and Operating Systems (with Program Management)

Program Management owns the executive planning process and operating cadence. You own its human effectiveness: whether priorities and OKRs actually land throughout the organization, whether people can connect their work to them, how teams plan their week, and whether reporting improves decisions or just creates more work.

7. Compensation, Incentives, and Gain Share

Own the architecture and behavioral design of pay: salary philosophy and bands, bonus structures, promotion criteria, and the gain share model behind the Value Creator System. Partner with the Co-CEOs and Finance on the economics. Keep asking what behavior each incentive will actually produce, and watch for gaming, internal competition, free riding, and short-term thinking. Build systems where people understand how creating more value for the company creates more value for them.

8. Employee Lifecycle and a Lean People Team

Design the lifecycle around what matters: how fast a new hire can create value independently, which people we cannot afford to lose and why, and what each departure teaches us about selection, management, or role design. Own career paths and the Associates Program for early-career talent. Build a small team (for example recruiting and learning specialists) as the work requires, with the same rigor you expect from every hiring manager.

Who You Might Be

There is no single acceptable career path. You might be a People leader whose real obsession has always been how organizations work, an organizational effectiveness or development leader, an applied organizational psychologist, an organization-design consultant ready to operate, or a founder or executive adviser. We care far more about how you think than about your title, your degree, or how many years you have held a particular job. What we need to see:

• A track record of diagnosing difficult human or organizational problems and showing what changed because of your intervention
• Experience redesigning structures, roles, decision rights, or operating models
• Evidence you have improved individual, manager, or team effectiveness, not just delivered training
• You have done this work from the inside at least once and lived with the results, not only as an outside adviser
• Real thinking about incentives and motivation: team versus individual rewards, intrinsic versus extrinsic drive, unintended consequences
• Comfort telling the Co-CEOs something they may not want to hear
• Active use of AI in your own work and a view on how it should change the way teams are designed

Graduate training in industrial-organizational psychology, organizational behavior, or organization design is a plus. Like every senior leader here, you will set quarterly OKRs with leading and lagging measures and work in Confluence, Jira, and Monday.

How We Hire for This Role

We will not rely on polished interviews. We want to see how you think, so the process is transparent and mostly hands-on:

1. A conversation about what you have studied. What you have spent years trying to understand about people and organizations.
2. A diagnostic case. An anonymized real situation from our company. We will ask what you see and why, not what you would do.
3. Observing a team. You review a