Human Resources Manager (New York)

HR Manager

Fastbreak Sports | 1629 1st Avenue | Full-time | In office

$100,000–$120,000 annual base salary, plus a company-performance-based bonus

The job

We run basketball, multi-sport classes, cheer, flag football, volleyball, and birthday parties across eight brands in New York City. Thousands of families, hundreds of sessions, a lot of gyms.

Every single thing a family experiences here is a person. Not a program, not a brand, not a schedule — a coach standing on a court with their kid. When a family re-enrolls for a fourth season, it’s because of who we hired and how well we prepared them. When a family quietly disappears, that’s usually about a person too.

Right now, nobody owns that end to end. We hire, we run payroll, we get people on the floor — the machine works. But it runs on a handful of people’s memory, it scrambles every time a season turns over, and no one is accountable for whether a good coach is still with us in year two. You’d own all of it: who we hire, how fast, how well they start, whether they stay, and whether we’re doing it legally and well.

You’ll report directly to Dave Brown and be a member of the leadership team.

Get this right and you won’t just have filled roles. You’ll have built the bench that lets this company grow — and made Fast Break a place where good coaches build a career instead of working a season.

What you’d own

• Recruiting, end to end. Coaches at volume and seasonally, plus the corporate roles — program managers, sales, marketing, ops. Sourcing, screening, interviewing, offers. The goal is a pipeline that exists before we need it, not a scramble three weeks before camp.

• Onboarding and performance. What day one looks like, what training a new coach actually gets, what good means in each role, and how we tell someone they’re not there yet. Right now this varies by brand and by manager. It shouldn’t.

• Payroll structure and compliance. Develop a thorough understanding of how our people get paid across all eight brands — pay rates by role and program, how compensation is calculated, and how hours and payments are recorded and approved. You’ll help ensure that managers apply rates consistently, employees understand their pay, and payroll runs accurately every cycle. You’ll also own NY labor law compliance, I-9s, classifications, background checks, youth-safety requirements, and certifications.

• Coach development and retention. Build a mentoring program with experienced coaches and program leaders. Make regular check-ins, on-court development, and opportunities to grow part of how good coaches build a career here.

• Culture. Our eight values are real, and your job is to turn them into something operational — how we hire against them, review against them, and promote against them — rather than words on a page.

• Making our managers better managers. This is where the leverage is. You will not be in the room for most people decisions here. The program managers will be. Your real output is their judgment.

Now the honest part

We’d rather you not apply at all than start here and work out in month three that this wasn’t what you pictured. So here is the job, plainly.

• You’re inheriting a half-built system. Not a blank page, not a running machine. Some of it works well, some of it lives in one person’s head, and you won’t know which is which until you’re in it.

• You are the department. No recruiting coordinator, no HR generalist under you, no HRIS team. You’ll set the strategy and you’ll also run the background check and chase the signature. If handing off the admin is what makes a job senior to you, this isn’t senior.

• The year is spiky. Hiring is seasonal, and the weeks before camps and new sessions are not normal weeks. Volume hiring and a VP-level search are different muscles and you’ll use both, sometimes the same week.

• In office, and close enough to the programs to know what’s really happening. You’ll work at 330 E 85th St, New York, NY, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m. to approximately 5:30–6 p.m. Weekends are required as needed to review and manage program delivery, observe interactions, and understand how programs and staff work together. You’ll visit gyms and programs to see coaches in action. This is not a remote role.

• You’ll have hard conversations, and some of them will be with leadership. Letting someone go. Telling a manager their favorite hire isn’t working. Telling an owner something he doesn’t want to hear. If conflict makes you go quiet, this will be a bad year.

• You’ll hold things you can’t tell anyone. Pay, performance, personal situations, decisions before they’re announced. That weight is part of the job. And not everything will be fixable this year — you’ll live with some problems while you solve bigger ones first.

What we hire on

Eight values. Here’s what each means in this job:

• Accountability — you own time-to-fill and retention as numbers, not vibes, and you say so when they’re bad.

• Heart — you talk about the person you had to let go with respect, not as a mistake you corrected.

• Respect — every candidate hears back, including the ones we don’t hire.

• Spirit — you’re the person people want to work for, in a job that mostly surfaces problems.

• Self-Belief — you tell the owner no, with a reason, and you don’t need him to agree to stay steady.

• Teamwork — you make the program managers better rather than taking the decision away from them.

• Integrity — you hold confidences completely, and you don’t let a compliance gap slide because it’s inconvenient.

• Humility — you’ll still be the one chasing the I-9, and that’s fine.

We’ll take someone who’s eight-for-eight and light on formal HR credentials over someone with twenty years of HR who’s five-for-eight.

This isn’t for you if

• You think of HR as policy enforcement, or you see yourself as the compliance police.

• You want to be purely strategic — there is nobody here to hand the administrative half to.

• Firing someone, or sitting with someone while they cry, is something you’d rather avoid.

What matters, and what doesn’t

Doesn’t matter: SHRM or PHR certification; what you majored in; whether you’ve worked in sports or with kids; whether your last title said Head of People. Big-company HR experience is welcome but it isn’t an advantage — most of what works at 2,000 people doesn’t work at our size.

Does matter: you’ve personally hired a lot of people and can talk about what you learned from the ones who didn’t work out. You can hold a hard conversation without flinching and without turning cold. You’re organized enough that a compliance deadline never slips, because the consequences land on a company that works with children. You can be trusted with anything. You actually like people and want them to do well. And you understand the New York labor market and what it is to work in this city right now.

Seven years of hands-on recruiting experience is preferred, not a cutoff. The scope of the hiring you’ve personally owned and what you learned matter more than tenure alone.

Exceptional practical AI literacy is a huge plus. Show us how you use, or would use, AI to improve recruiting, documentation, or routine administration: what you put in, what you keep private, and how you check the result. Prior AI implementation is not required, and people decisions stay with people.

If you’ve run recruiting at a restaurant group, managed staffing for a camp or school, built people ops at a growing small business, or been the person everyone brought their problems to, you may fit this better than a career HR specialist.

First 90 days

• Day 30 — You’ve met every program manager and a real cross-section of coaches, watched sessions at multiple locations, and audited what exists. You can tell us where we’re exposed on compliance and where hiring actually breaks.

• Day 60 — There’s a hiring process from intake to offer that the program managers actually use. Onboarding is the same no matter which brand you join. The compliance gaps are triaged: urgent risks are addressed, and the remaining corrections have owners and deadlines.

• Day 90 — Open roles are filled. You can show time-to-fill and coach retention as numbers with a baseline. A coach-mentoring plan is underway with program leadership. And you’ve told leadership the one people problem we didn’t want to hear.

Logistics and how to apply

$100,000–$120,000 annual base salary, plus a company-performance-based bonus

Benefits: health, dental, and vision; 401(k) with a 3% company contribution.

To apply, email your résumé, start availability, and answers to the three questions below in your own words to View email address on apply.placed-app.com. All candidates should submit these materials by email. We are an equal opportunity employer.

1. Tell us about someone you hired who didn’t work out. What did you miss?

2. Of the eight values above, which is your strongest and which is your weakest?

3. What part of this gave you the most hesitation? Everyone has one — we’re more interested in candidates who name it.