Now Hiring: Head of Student Success

 

What We Do

At The Mimic method, we create products for people to learn languages online. But our approach is different from that of any other language learning company.

We don’t teach literacy, grammar theory, or translation like everyone else. Instead, we focus on ear-training, accent-perfection, subconscious learning, and spontaneous performance.  

In essence, we teach people how to have Flowing Conversations in a foreign language.

In a Flowing Conversation, the world disappears and you become fully engaged with the person in front of you. Self-expression and mutual understanding come effortlessly, and time flies by without anyone even realizing it.

By the end of a flowing conversation, both parties walk away with a sense of knowing more about the other person, and feeling more connected to them.

Without a doubt, you’ve experienced Flowing conversations with people who share your cultural-linguistic background.

Our mission is to help MORE people have MORE Flowing conversations with people from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

We’re passionate about this mission, because we believe Flowing Conversations represent the bottom line of human interconnectedness.

We believe the world would be a better place if more people had more Flowing Conversations, ESPECIALLY across the cultural-linguistic boundaries that have historically divided us. We’re convinced that more Flowing Conversations directly correlates with LESS fear, hatred and suffering and MORE curiosity, love and flourishing.

If you agree with our philosophy, and you want to join us in our mission, then we may have the perfect opportunity for you as…

The Head of Student Success

Recently, we developed our most innovative and impactful training program to date. Hundreds of students have already tried it in Private Beta, and the feedback has been phenomenal.

Here are some comments from students:

 

 

In the coming months, we plan to launch this new program publicly in Spanish and French, and we are looking for a dedicated team member to OWN the learning experience for our students.

As the Head of Student Success, your primary responsibility is to ensure that students engage, enjoy, and derive maximal benefit from our programs.  

Scope of Work (a day in the life)

To succeed at helping our students succeed, you must be able to excel at playing the following 3 roles.

• The Ally – Help them along the learning path.
• The Advocate – Represent their needs in the design process.
• The Arranger – Get them what they need when they need it.  

The best way to understand your scope of work is through the lenses of these three roles. Below, I list out the activities you will perform in each role, as well as the innate abilities required to perform these activities with excellence.

The Ally

Learning a new language is like climbing a treacherous mountain. It can be long and arduous, and there are countless crags to get stuck in or even fall off for good.

That’s why it’s vital for every journey-goer to have a trusted Ally. Someone willing to cheer them along in times of triumph, and get them back to their feet during times of defeat.  

Up until now, I’ve taken this responsibility upon myself, but it’s not my zone of genius.

As the Chief product wizard, my primary job is to chart the course through the mountain and inspire people to take their first step upward.

But once things are underway, I need to attend my own adventures. So it’s not my role to guide people along the entire journey. For that, they need you – their Ally!

As the Ally, it’s your responsibility to make sure the students reach their destination.

Activities

• Manage student support inbox, making sure everyone who gets stuck gets the resources they need to get unstuck.
• Proactively encourage students during points of challenge and celebrate their progress during moments of triumph.
• Follow up with inactive members to understand why they aren’t using the program and encourage them to get back involved.
• Eventually develop systems and manage staff of Allies as student body expands.

Abilities

• Empathic Concern – You’ve always felt a spontaneous need to help out when you sense someone in need, and you derive immense satisfaction from resolving people’s pain and helping them achieve their goals.
• Soothing Bedside Manner – You know how to listen compassionately and put people feel at ease with your presence and words.

The Advocate

As we grow our company and design products for more and more students, there’s always a risk of regarding students more as numbers than as individuals with their own stories and struggles.

I personally try to counteract this by speaking directly with students on a regular basis, but my time to do this is very limited. To make sure we stay connected to the students and their needs, I need someone I can trust to build that connection with the students and advocate on their behalf during each stage of product development.

In the initial brainstorming phase, you will act as the filter for bad ideas and refiner of the best ones. Then in the testing phase, you will be the first one to test out and rip apart the initial prototypes.

Then finally, once the prototype is dialed in, you will be in charge of rolling it out to students and assessing its efficacy first hand.

As the engineer, I tend to make things too brainy. That’s why I need someone with heart to push back and bring balance.

As the Advocate, it’s your responsibility to accurately and passionately represent the needs of the students through each step of product development.

Activities

• Closely follow the conversations in our learner community to get a broad sense of student sentiment.  
• Conduct student interviews to get a more intimate sense of student desires and concerns.  
• Monitor and manage objective metrics for student engagement such as lesson completion rate and time spent in learning portal.

• Consolidate all subjective and objective findings in a weekly report along with general insights and recommendations to share with team.
• Regularly brainstorm learning experience improvements on call with me and tech team.
• Manage the rollout of product design improvements and measure their effectiveness.

Abilities

• Perspective-taking – You should have an intuitive ability to gauge how another person feels in the moment, and how they might think and feel in a hypothetical situation. The technical term for this ability is Cognitive Empathy and relates to Theory of Mind.
• Discriminating Taste – You should be able to immediately discern between good and bad quality, particularly in the realm of story-based media (e.g. literature, cinema), since learning experience design is essentially the art of designing someone’s story of success.
• Verbal Acuity – It’s not enough to just “know” whether an idea would work well or not for students. To be a good Advocate, you have to be able to clearly articulate WHY that thing is on or off, so that I and the rest of the team can figure out what to change.

The Arranger

With thousands of students learning multiple languages through multiple different pieces of content, there are A LOT of moving pieces flying around The Mimic Method.

It’s easy for students to get lost in fray, and frankly it’s easy for me to get lost in it as well!

I love innovating and solving complex problems for people – it’s my raison d’etre. I resonate strongly with Sherlock’s quote in the scene below:

“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems! Give me work!”

What I don’t love is arranging all the details necessary to successfully deliver solutions to people who need them.

That’s why I need a highly organized and reliable person to find the problems, extract the solutions from my mind, then deliver them from the people who need them.

As the Ally you will develop an empathic connection to our students and their learning needs. Then as the Advocate, you will develop a sense of inner-workings of our curriculum and which aspects of it resonate best with students.

With these experiences, there is no better person to play the role of the Arranger and “see things through to the end.”

As the Arranger, it’s your responsibility to arrange the successful transfer of knowledge from me to the students.  

Activities

• Setup private consults and webinars between me and students to troubleshoot learning problems.
• Interview me to extract the expertise you need to patch holes in the learning experience.
• Solicit text and video testimonials from students.
• Edit consults, webinars, interviews and testimonials down to their essence to produce tight and engaging pieces of content for training and marketing purposes.

Abilities

• Structured Thinking – With thousands of students learning multiple languages through multiple different pieces of content, you need to be able to float above the trees and chart out a clear path through the forest. As you grow in the role, you will likely start to build out systems and manage staff, so you need to be able to maintain a clear vision to hold people accountable.
• Logistical Competence –  Once you’ve seen forest for the trees, you still need to come back down to the ground and chop those trees down for us to move forward. Logistics is by far my biggest weakness, and managing the details drains my creative energy rapidly, so I will be relying on you to clear the path for me so I can stay in my zone.
• Story-Sense – You should have an intuition for how to capture and keep people’s attention when editing down the aforementioned recordings, since learning materials are only as useful as they are able to capture and hold people’s attention. This is less a “creative” ability as it is a “perceptive” ability.

Bonus Qualities

Aside from the Abilities mentioned above, the following qualities will boost your application.

• Can speak more than one language.
• Has learned 1 or more foreign language to fluency as an adult.
• Has experience in teaching or counseling.
• Can play a musical instrument or can sing
• Experience in project management
• Experience in product management
• Willingness and Flexibility to travel to different parts of world for in-person collaborations.

Compensation and Career

We are looking for an Intrapreneurial-type person to grow with our company in the long term.

Currently, we work as a distributed team. That means you can work from anywhere in the world on your own schedule. We provide a challenging workload, but we don’t track hours, nor do we prohibit you from doing other work. All that we require is that you are very reachable and deliver real results.

During this 6-month trial period, we will pay you a salary of $2000-$ 3,000 per month, depending on experience. If the trial goes well, we will negotiate a higher salary based on your performance.

In the long term, your salary will increase as the company expands. And if you prove yourself to be a rockstar, there is a potential for commissions and/or profit share.

Learning and Growth

Learning is one of our core values at The Mimic Method. Each member on our team is, always has been, and always will be a lifelong learner.  

To live out this value as a company, we like to invest in the professional development of our team members.

If we select you for this position, we will provide you with anything you need to make you a more effective Head of Student Success.

This means professional training in highly useful skills like product management, project management, instructional design, community development – whatever you think will be most useful to you and your as a student success manager. You will have the autonomy to choose the program you want to learn and we will fund it if it’s in budget.  

There is no better way for you to develop than to study the most effective strategies out there and apply them to a real world setting.

Application Process

APPLICATION DEADLINE: This job will remain open for applications until April 1st, 2019. 

THANKS FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS. THE JOB POSTING IS NOW CLOSED.

There will be 3 steps to the selection process:

1. Editing test and video application
2. The Advocate Interview
3. The Final Interview

Editing Test

The main filtering ability here is the Arrangers “Story-Sense,” since very few people have this ability. Again, I generate lots of useful content through my improvised interactions with students. But people can’t benefit from those interactions unless their edited down and packaged in an engaging format.

To test your ability to do that, your task is to download this webinar and extract two pieces video of content from it .

• Long Form: Select what you consider to be the most interesting concept of theme, then create a 8-12 minute video teaching that concept/theme using footage from the webinar. To fill in gaps in content, you may add in text, images and your own voiceover, but it’s not required.
• Short Form: Imagine you had to entice someone on watching the entire webinar. Create a 30-60 second trailer that you think would inspire someone to watch.

We’re not testing you on your ability to make crazy visual effects.

We’re testing you on your ability to weave together a compelling narrative,

Our students’ emotional engagement with our learning materials largely determines whether or not they’ll get value from it – that’s why it’s a critical skill to possess as Head of Student Success.

VIDEO APPLICATION

Next, you must record a video of yourself explaining two things:

• Why do you want this position?
• Why do you think you would thrive as an Ally, Advocate and Arranger?

The video should be between 5-10 minutes in length and uploaded to any video-hosting service like vimeo or youtube. Please sure that we have access to view the videos without restrictions!

Once your videos are ready, fill out this application form.

The Advocate Interview

If I like your videos, I will contact you to set up a skype interview me and the rest of the team.

A day before this interview, we will send you data from a survey we conducted with our students asking about their biggest learning challenges and questions.

You will then have to go through this data in search for useful insights and deliver a presentation on your findings and recommendations live on call.

Here, we are testing your cognitive empathy and verbal acuity as an Advocate.

INTERVIEW ROUND 2

If you make it past the video test, we will have a final interview with you. This is where we ask you all the fun and tough questions to see whether your the best fit for the role.

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Does this description fit you? Are you game for some unconventional interviewing practices?

Do you want to start a new remote career building something epic, making a real positive impact, all while developing your skills and growing as a person?

Then apply now!