Clever, nice person to be operations generalist in friendly VC-backed, high-growth startup

 

About Koru Kids

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Koru Kids is building the world’s best childcare service, starting in London. We’re making it easier and more affordable for families to access high quality childcare. We’re growing like crazy, are backed by fantastic investors, including top venture capitalists and business angels such as Michael Pennington the founder of Gumtree, and have won a bunch of awards including the South of England region in the ‘Best of Britain’ awards 2017’.

 

We work from a beautiful co-working space near Old St in central London. The office has a gym and showers, bike storage, free snacks and drinks, and a programme of social events.

 

 

About the team

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Our founder is Rachel Carrell, the former CEO of DrThom.com, the world’s largest online doctor service, which she grew to over 1.3m paying users in 3 countries. She’s an Oxford alumn, ex-McKinsey, a Rhodes Scholar and a WEF Young Global Leader. Rachel’s joined by an amazing team with backgrounds including Cambridge, UCL, BCG, KPMG, and some of London’s top startups.

 

We have an informal, hard-working and kind team culture. We’re all passionate about our mission and are determined to create a truly fantastic childcare service to help working parents. Our culture is friendly and fast paced – we are constantly challenging, testing and adapting the way we do things. We’re also really committed to working with integrity, doing the right thing and building a company we are truly proud of. We’re growing super fast but we also want to make sure that we are building a company on really solid foundations.

We take great care with who we hire and all team members are superbly talented and really nice. If you’re brilliant AND humble, you’ll fit right in.

 

 

About the role

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We are growing really fast, and we need someone to come and join our ‘matching’ team. This is the heart of the business, where the magic happens!

 

You’ll be responsible for creating happy outcomes every day for parents and nannies, by matching them up so that the nannies can look after the kids. Most of your day will be spent communicating with parents and nannies, over the phone and email, in order to do this matching.

 

You’ll also have lots of freedom to reflect, analyse, experiment, innovate and improve the way we do things. You’ll be encouraged to think about human psychology, ‘nudges’, messaging and marketing, tracking and analysing data, algorithms and automation – all as part of the job as we improve the way matching works. We’ll welcome your ideas

 

You’ll get exposure to all other parts of the business including marketing, finance, software, and operations. It’s expected that you will wear multiple ‘hats’ at Koru Kids (the joys of a start-up), so you’ll get to dig deep into these other areas as well.  Over time, you may find yourself specialising in one of these other parts - it’s up to you to choose your own adventure.

 

You’ll be a core member of our team, and you’ll get all the training, coaching and support you need to do your job well. We’ll invest in your development and help you succeed

 

Your normal hours of work will be 8:30am to 6pm, although there may be times when late nights are required to cope with particular ‘spikes’ in demand. We’re starting to experiment with covering weekends and/or evenings, which means you’ll need to be willing to work weekends sometimes. It won’t be every weekend day and if you have other commitments (eg you can never do Sundays, or you have some weddings coming up) we can work around them – BUT as a team we are thinking of covering the weekend days and you will be doing your bit to help. When you work a weekend day, you can take a weekday off in lieu - so you’ll never work more than 5 days a week. We are kind to each other regarding working hours but the reality is, we’re growing fast and it’s busy.  We know you have a private life and other commitments and we work as a team to make sure everyone has a good balance.  You’ll normally work from our offices near Old St, although if you like to occasionally work from home that’s totally fine too.

 

 

3 reasons this role is great

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You will learn a TON. Customer-facing operations will be your main focus, but you’ll get plenty of exposure to marketing and other aspects of the business. You’ll learn how to found a business, about operations, marketing, technology, and finance. You’ll also be surrounded by other startups trying to grow. If you want to, you can get stuck into the London startup scene, with its evening meetups and events, which is incredibly dynamic and fun.

 

You’ll be making a huge difference to the everyday lives of parents in London. We’re building a business that will profoundly benefit children, women, and families.

 

We’re well-connected in the startup world, so working with us will open lots of doors for you even if you leave. We’ve got a strong track record of helping people we’ve worked with

 

About you

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We’re after an all-rounder who is clever, practical, positive and nice. We don’t mind what degree you’ve done, as long as you’ve done well in it. We’ll also be looking for evidence of drive, aspiration, spark and energy in the extracurricular stuff you’ve done.  

 

Essential skills

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• You’re able to write clearly, simply and accurately, with perfect spelling and grammar

• You’re comfortable speaking to new people, both in person and on the phone

• You love working with numbers and data. Excel is your friend.  We love people who love analysis.

• You can work at a fast pace and under pressure

• You’re emotionally intelligent. Although you’ll like to talk, the most important thing you’ll do is listen. Choosing childcare is an emotional decision, and you’ll need to help parents through the process

• You’re detail-oriented. We deal with payroll and payments, and the details must be 100% correct

• You’re a problem-solver. As we are a young company, there aren’t many fixed processes yet. That means you can create new processes, make suggestions, and tell us we’re doing things wrong

• You roll with it. You understand that startups are unpredictable environments. You are comfortable with a degree of chaos

• You’re nice. You get that no player is bigger than the team. You fit right into our culture of supporting and helping each other.

 

 

Compensation

£25K+ dependent on experience