Strategic Planning
What will I be doing?
You will build our staff and grow the firm. You’ll do everything from setting priorities to idea generation to candidate selection. You will also create new initiatives that ensure the right candidates have access to the opportunities we offer. You may work on business planning, building target profiles, sourcing, interviewing, building relationships with counterparties, and outreach.
What is impactful about this particular role?
In a company of just over twenty people, a single hire brings disproportionate impact compared to other firms; it immediately transforms the kinds of projects we can do, deepens our shared knowledge pool, and changes the types of things we can start dreaming up. Recruiting is valuable because of the future, not just the present. Our future success depends largely on the excellence of our team, and your responsibility is to bring in the highest quality team and thus enable our future. Your work -- the hires you bring in -- will affect many different aspects of the company and our future, so this role is exponentially impactful. Your value-added is based on how much your hires contribute to the company, not on the number of hires you make. If Strategic Planning fails, it doesn’t matter how well the other parts of the company do in the long-term.
How is this different from recruiting?
The process of hiring and building a team has many stages. Unlike many companies where recruiting is a supporting member of the process, at Spark you can be directly managing the entire cycle from establishing the business need to refining a role’s essentials to ultimately deciding on candidates and details of offers. You are a strategic partner to the founder-president in scaling Spark’s team and therefore you’ll need to appreciate the intricacies of Spark’s businesses intimately.
Who might find this role aligns with their skills and interests?
Maybe you want to learn to build teams from scratch for a startup in the future or a political campaign.
Maybe you enjoy interacting with a lot of talented people and gleaning insights from their knowledge and experiences.
Maybe you want to get the broadest possible access to an established company to understand the operations and inner workings.
Maybe you like building your personal network.
Maybe your goals include financial independence so earning high compensation in a less crowded function than investment researcher is appealing.
Different people might find different aspects of the Strategic Planning role compelling. If any of these resonate with you, we would welcome the opportunity to start the conversation.
In many companies, the responsibility for staffing falls primarily with the business unit head; at Spark, the Strategic Planning group takes primarily responsibility for staffing. The Strategic Planning role at Spark is the opportunity to learn to deeply understand many different elements of our business and to contribute to their success in a tangible and impactful way. The focus of Strategic Planning is on growing Spark’s team for maximum potential and success.
What are more of the unique advantages of this opportunity?
You’ll get to converse with brilliant, accomplished people from different backgrounds. Internally, you’ll be brought into the big picture of the business from the beginning, and you will learn how to put together a successful team every step of the way. The compensation reflects the inherent impact of this role, and you get a stake in your hires’ success at the firm, so your compensation will grow as your hires contribute and produce. This creates a unique alignment between the company, the Strategic Planning team, and new team members so that everyone is invested in reaching the best outcomes and in each other’s long-term success.
What are the unique challenges associated with this opportunity?
Because of Spark’s high standards, you will get to interview wonderful people who want to work here but for some reason don’t get hired. When every hire matters so much, it is essential that the fit matches up well, so even people with excellent credentials or technical qualifications may not proceed in the interview process. It’s hard to break the bad news to people you personally like and had looked forward to working with. You’ll also need to jump into a wide breadth of different functional areas and academic disciplines quickly at an advanced level of understanding.
What is the expected compensation range for this position?
We expect to pay a base salary of $275K-$600K for a hire working in the New York office. Base salary is only one aspect of total compensation, which includes an annual discretionary bonus.