Head of People Operations (Fully Remote)

Who Are We

We are Virtual Internships, an EdTech startup on a mission to bridge the gap between education and the workplace by making internships accessible to all.

Over the last four years, we’ve established partnerships with 12,000+ companies, 100+ universities, and supported thousands of students and graduates in becoming more employable via our online work experience product.

Backed by some of the world’s top investors, we recently secured our Series A funding from investors such as Hambro Perks, Sequoia Capital, Kaplan, Arsenal Growth, and Ascend Vietnam Ventures who have collectively guided the likes of Google, Linkedin, WhatsApp, Canva, Udemy, and Applyboard. Our 2022 awards include:

• Ranked 20th out of 13,000 organizations in The Escape 100: the top purposeful organisations to ‘escape’ to in 2023
• Tech in Asia’s “Top 50 Rising Startups” (No.6 in Vietnam)
• Top100 EdTechStartup Selected by HolonIQ
• Finalist for Go:Tech Awards

Your Role

At Virtual Internships, we ‘dare to be different’. After all, our mission of guaranteeing internships for any learner, anywhere… at scale is something that no-one else has solved (as far as we know!).

Hence we’re looking for a Head of People that will continue the “always find a way” ethos we have at Virtual Internships, whilst simultaneously evolving our culture and people ops function so we are performance-minded, collaborative , and continuously innovating.

‍

Your Impact

Over the past 3.5 years our org has grown to 100 employees across 20+ countries, in a remote-first setup with the majority of VI-ers based in Vietnam, India, South Africa, UK and the US. As we’ve scaled, we’ve implemented a Company Wiki, a Compensation Philosophy, a Career Progression Framework, a Performance Review Framework, an open source “VI-P Guide”, Working From Home Budgets, Employee Pulse Checks… we’ve even won awards such as the 20th best organization in the world to “Escape To” … so surely it means there’s nothing left for you to do? Definitely not. Like our product, we are always iterating.

As such if you become our Head of People Ops your impact will be to take what we have and evolve it in line with our culture. Rather than list the “regular” responsibilities of a startup People Ops Leader - we’d rather share some key things to figure out within the next 12 months. Reporting to our COO, and working closely with the leadership team, you’ll help us figure out how to:

‍

• Evolve our culture so it has two new components : i) Being high performance-orientated ii) Having an “always be learning” lense. Why? We have some world-class VC investors and we are Education Technology. We want our culture to embrace both these aspects. How? We hope you can help us with that!
• Balance business needs with employee needs. This might be the toughest part of being Head of People (we get it!)...you don’t want to be a “Yes” person to leadership but equally you don’t want to always align with employees and inadvertently create an “us vs them” divide. How you do this will be very much down to your People leadership philosophy
• Navigate compensation across our geographies. We have a compensation philosophy, but like anything we know it could be better!
• Navigate our operational, compliance, payroll & benefits setup of having a remote-first org but with three entities
• Bring best practices from other growth stage startups into VI - learning is in our DNA
• Help colleagues understand ‘who does what’ now that we’ve crossed that threshold of having more people than can be fed by two pizzas (credit Jeff Bezos)
  

‍

Whilst this might be bold (again we want to do things a little differently), we do want to share a few things where this might not be a fit:

• If you need to Google/ChatGPT the responsibilities of an early-stage startup People Ops leader (if you do, that’s fine, but it might be an indicator this isn't the right role for you)
• If you’re currently spending more time on writing diligent strategy documents instead of hands-on execution. Put another way…if you’re currently leading a team, when someone is OOO you are the one who can step-in and cover without needing a manual. Ideally you were involved in creating the manual!
• If you’re not comfortable with tech and data- we are an EdTech startup after all, but also our remote-first setup leans upon various tech stacks and processes to ensure operational efficiency. Iterating our Notion Company Wiki, recalibrating our HiBob HRIS, analyzing our E-NPS data … you’ll need to be able to do this yourself without needing to “ask IT”
• If you think resilience is overrated. Building and scaling startups is hard, a common trait amongst our best VI-ers is their ability to show resilience whilst delivering results. It’s not easy, we know. But as our Head of People, we hope you’ll be another bastion of this resilience value
• P.S. the secret password is “3Space”.

What Do We Offer?

One of our core values at Virtual Internships is transparency. That’s why, we’re giving you the opportunity to ‘try before you apply’ in our “VI-P Guide” which includes our values, how we operate, how we build our packages, and how we interview.

To give you an example of some of our perks and benefits:

‍

• Flexible working hours - Start earlier, leave earlier, take a shorter lunch or leave a bit later, it's totally up to you.
• Remote first - work from anywhere, with a budget to support your remote setup
• Learn from the world’s best - access to exclusive content including how-to guides and playbooks from Sequoia/500Global backed organizations
• Swag - delivered to your door
• Birthday leave - go enjoy yourself on your birthday without needing to use your annual leave
• Impact - we’re still at an early-stage, so your impact is magnified. You will likely be solving something that hasn’t already been solved or you will be taking something to an entirely new level !
• Meritocracy - a culture that prides itself on internal promotions and meritocracy. The majority of our managerial team have risen up (quickly), including our COO, CAO, CFO, Head of Host Companies, and Head of Intern Experience

Your Attributes

‍

TLDR Version? You like the idea of a high–performance culture whilst being super creative and resourceful

‍

As for the long Version….

• Performance Orientated - you’re comfortable with the idea that data can determine performance (most of the time). You’re driven to be the very best version of yourself, and this manifests itself in what you say and do
• Prefer a lean team - You like to find quick and clever solutions. When you need to solve a big challenge your instinct is to look at (re-engineering) process, introducing AI, taking a first-principles approach instead of “throwing people” at the problem
• Tech-Enabled - you know your traditional “HR Tech Stack”, but you also consistently use no-code/easy to use platforms (e.g. Notion, Zapier, Loom, Canva, AirTable)
• Bias For Action - you don’t need complete information to act, you don’t always need a green light from your manager. Your instinct is to make something happen
• Creative - you have a “second brain” of notes/resources that you keep with ideas you‘ve picked up from webinars, podcasts, videos, articles. You tap into this to give you inspiration when coming up with new solutions

Your Experience

‍

Organizational Experience:

• You have worked at a remote-first or hybrid/remote organization with employees across multiple countries AND
• You have worked at an early/growth stage startup (10-150 people and/or Seed to Series B)

Role Experience:

• “You’ve see the movie before” - you are the leader of the People/HR function OR
• “It’s time for you to step up” - you report to the leader of the People/HR function, and you’d like your chance to become the #1

“Dare To Be Different” Experience

If you don’t meet the role experience criteria (but you do meet the organizational experience criteria), then this role might fit if you’ve got:

• 5+ years experience as a Head of Operations or Chief of Staff or Product Manager OR
• 3+ years experience running your own startup/business with at least 10 full-time employees

‍