About the Role:

The Associate Director of Admissions will be responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of Merit America’s admission process. This role is essential in our efforts to prepare hundreds of learners for transformative careers in the near term and furthers our ultimate goal of serving tens of thousands of learners in the future.

The Associate Director of Admissions is responsible for driving operational excellence, collaborating across departments, ensuring the implementation of best-in-class admissions systems, and overseeing the admissions process to evaluate applications and issue decisions. This role will combine a combination of people leadership, administration/operation management, cross-departmental work, and implementation/process improvement.

The Associate Director of Admissions will proactively implement best practices, provide support, and be a strong voice in determining our applicant experience. Beyond acting as a "first line of defense" to identify experience, operational, and strategic issues, you and your team will propose systematic solutions to customer barriers (e.g., suggesting improvements to our Admissions platform that will proactively address applicant concerns and questions).

This is an ideal role for those seeking to directly impact the lives of our country's underserved members and help build a fast-growing nonprofit startup. Ideal candidates will be those who excel at people management, system implementation, and operational excellence, with a proven track record of using data to optimize an end-to-end user experience.

The Associate Director of Admissions is an exempt position and will report directly to the Director of Admissions and will work primarily with the program, growth, product, and marketing teams across Merit America.

What You’ll be Doing:

The responsibilities of the Associate Director of Admissions will include, but are not limited to, the following:

People Leadership (40%):

• Attract, develop, coach, and retain high-performance team members, empowering them to elevate their level of responsibility, span of control, and performance while building out a talented and diverse team.
• Articulate and establish measurable goals, objectives, and metrics for assessing, reporting, and improving the admissions process.
• Set individual and team OKRs and evaluate team members’ individual and collective effectiveness by evaluating acceptance and applicant satisfaction rates.
• Monitor critical metrics for the daily backend operations conducted by the Admissions team.
• Supervise admissions team of 2 direct reports,: an Admissions Operations Lead, and a Lead Admissions counselor, overseeing the work of three Operations Associates and three Admissions Counselors to facilitate the admissions process for a high volume of candidates.
• Inspire and motivate the admissions team to meet and exceed enrollment targets while maintaining a positive and inclusive team culture.
• Address and resolve conflicts among team members, creating a harmonious and productive work environment.

Administration/Operation Management (20%):

• Manage the end-to-end admissions process, ensuring timely and accurate processing of applications.
• Develop and maintain clear communication channels with applicants, providing guidance, updates, and next steps throughout the admissions journey.
• Continuously identify opportunities to streamline and improve admissions workflows, enhancing efficiency and applicant experience.
• Maintain and track all applicant Salesforce data.
• Work directly with behavioral scientists and the Director of Admissions to optimize the admission funnel.
• Devise, manage, and revise the admissions to program handoff for all accepted applicants seeking to reduce attrition from application to program start.

Cross-Departmental work (20%):

• Collaborate with program, marketing, and growth teams to align admissions strategies with organizational goals.
• Act as a liaison between admissions and other departments, sharing insights and feedback to enhance program offerings and outreach efforts.
• Participate in cross-functional initiatives to improve the overall learner experience, ensuring a cohesive and well-integrated approach.
• Provide relevant data and insights to assist other teams in understanding learner demographics, preferences, and needs.

Implementation/Process improvement (20%):

• Own end-to-end applicant journey, ensuring all applicants are set up for success.
• Use multiple data sources to understand admissions strengths and weaknesses and conceive and test admission refinements based on data insights.
• Develop and deploy tools, frameworks, and systems to enable applicant success. This includes but is not limited to developing and evolving a robust applicant communication platform.
• Integrate learnings from ongoing assessment, research, evaluation, and best practices to continuously improve resources and processes.
• Improve our ability to run analytics on our customer support, run weekly or bi-weekly analyses on our support center, and use data to improve processes and efficiencies around customer communication and information needs.
• Identify opportunities for process automation, self-service features, and data-driven decision-making within the admissions system.

What Makes a Successful Candidate:

We know that women, people of color, and individuals with disabilities are often less likely to apply to a position if they don’t match 100% of the job qualifications. Don’t let that be the reason you miss out on this opportunity! We encourage you to apply if you can demonstrate many of these skills and competencies. Below are the skills that are relevant for thriving in this role:

Must Haves:

• Operational Excellence: Ability to manage your schedule and balance multiple demands, with demonstrated success working in fast-paced environments, solving problems creatively, and delivering measurable results
• Professionalism & Communication: Highest standard of professional conduct and communication; articulate with strong self-confidence and initiative; strong verbal and written communication skills are a must
• Entrepreneurial Drive: Resourcefulness, agility, and comfort working in ambiguous, quickly changing environments, including eagerness to wear multiple hats as needed and to help shape our start-up’s future
• Relationship-Building: Strong interpersonal and communication skills and ability to form trust-based relationships with applicants and other stakeholders
• Lifelong learning: Commitment to lifelong learning and ongoing personal and professional development; openness to feedback and relentless pursuit of improvement
• Social-Impact Mindset: Desire to work directly with underserved populations and meaningfully improve their lives; experience driving a “double bottom line” in terms of producing business and mission impact
• Be energized by our organizational mission and impact
• Proven history of living within our values
• Sense of deep personal responsibility for our collective success
• Experience with Salesforce or other CRM platforms
• Proficient with Google workspace (Google sheets, docs, etc.)
• Experience leading/presenting to large groups of people in a virtual setting
• Prior experience in workforce development, edTech, or equivalent training programs

Nice to haves:

• Prior experience in workforce development/leading in a virtual environment

Other Logistics

• This position is full-time: 4-day work week (Fridays are an operating day if there is a holiday closure during the week)
• Location: Remote
• Salary: $82,200

Our goal is to have competitive and equitable compensation. We have a market-based compensation approach which means that we benchmark each role from reputable data sources. We compare our benchmarks against similarly sized non-profit organizations with comparable annual budgets and geographical areas. We pay the same rate for the same roles and adjust to comply with statutory mandates.