Senior Research Operations Lead

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, driving customer success together. Here, ambition meets action, tech meets trust, and innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. We're looking for Trailblazers passionate about leveraging AI to better business and the world, keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. This role specifically focuses on delivering Slack’s mission to make our users' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive by relentlessly obsessing about the Slack UX.

The primary responsibility for this Senior Research Operations Lead position will be to make it easier than ever to connect directly with Slack users (both current and prospective). This involves identifying and reaching out to Slack customers willing to share their experiences and perspectives with our PDE and research teams. This will catalyze our ability to connect directly with customers, ensure we're thoughtfully addressing our users' biggest pain points, and ultimately enable us to increase customer sentiment as measured by NPS (PDE Method M5).

As a Senior Research Operations Lead, you will be the bridge between our research team and the diverse voices that shape our products, ensuring we hear from the right people at the right time. You will play a critical role in building a sustainable and diverse pipeline of Slack users to fuel our research engine.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Sourcing: Source and recruit participants for qualitative and quantitative research studies, including interviews, usability tests, surveys, and focus groups.
• End-to-End Execution: Manage the full recruitment lifecycle: outreach, screening, scheduling, confirmation, and follow-up.
• Panel Management: Build and maintain a diverse panel of research participants across various demographics, personas, and customer segments.
• System Building: Develop and manage tracking systems to ensure data quality, participant history (to prevent over-sampling), and privacy compliance.
• Stakeholder Partnership: Partner with researchers to understand specific study requirements and develop tailored recruitment strategies.
• Vendor Management: Engage and manage external recruitment vendors to ensure high-quality recruits and operational excellence.
• Technical Optimization: Identify opportunities to automate manual recruiting workflows to reduce the time-to-recruit for the research team.

Requirements

• Experience: 5+ years of recruiting experience, specifically focused on research operations, user research, or customer insights.
• B2B Savvy: Experience navigating the complexities of recruiting in a B2B/Enterprise environment (e.g., reaching IT Admins and decision-makers).
• Organizational Excellence: Strong skills in managing multiple high-priority recruitment projects simultaneously with meticulous follow-through.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a focus on “being a great host”—ensuring every user has a pleasant experience with Slack Research.
• Technical Proficiency: Familiarity with research recruiting tools and CRM systems (e.g., Ethnio, UserInterviews, Salesforce, or Qualtrics).
• Inclusivity Mindset: A deep commitment to building diverse and inclusive participant pools.

Key Skills/Competency

• Research Operations
• User Recruitment
• Participant Sourcing
• Panel Management
• CRM Systems
• Stakeholder Management
• Vendor Management
• B2B Research
• Data Privacy
• Usability Testing