The Community Operations Job Description

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

🚨 Be sure to check out this article I wrote for the Community Club’s Creator’s Guild on Essential Skills and Experience for Hiring a Community Operations Role first!

If you’ve read the article linked above, you have a good idea about the type of person who would be a good fit for a role in Community Operations- the previous experience, the skillset, and even some innate personality traits and qualities. In this article, we’ll take the next step and work on creating a job description that you can use as inspiration as you embark on the journey of hiring a CommOps professional.

Leveling

If you’re considering hiring a Community Operations person for your team, you probably already have an idea of what level you want to hire. The level that you hire, i.e. the amount of previous experience the candidate has and therefore what title they would have, is really determinant on what your community team’s needs are and at what stage your community is. It’s also, to an extent, determined by the other people you already have on your team and the skill sets they have.

Coordinator

A Community Operations Coordinator is an entry level position and can be a new graduate or someone with a year or so of experience. They will need coaching and guiding as they learn about the community space, get acquainted with platforms and tools, and build their Community Operations experience. Ideally, there is an ops-savvy senior person on the team to manage this person. The Coordinator can do things like:

• Respond to support cases from community members about operational questions or issues they have
• Document internal and external processes, including creating new documentation and editing existing documentation
• Update and create basic automations (particularly those no-code automations, like in Zapier)
• Maintain and update the community team roadmap
• Do administrative work to support operational components to community programs and initiatives

📋 Visit my template job description for a Community Operations Coordinator here, and real job descriptions examples here.

Manager

The Community Operations Manager is the most common of the Community Operations roles that exist today. They’ve been in the workforce for a handful of years, have some project or program management experience, have had customer-facing experience as well, are tech-savvy, and also, though they may or may not have direct experience working in community, understand what community is about. Some of the responsibilities Community Operations Manager have include:

• Manage the community tech stack, including new vendor selection, implementation, migration, maintenance, and relationship with the vendor CSM
• Manage all internal and external community documentation
• Support operational components of community programs and initiatives
• Drive actionable team insights by determining areas of improvement opportunity and gaps to help guide operational rigor
• Maintain reports and dashboards to track metrics, spot trends, and opportunities throughout the different areas of community

📋 Visit my template job description for a Community Operations Manager here, and real job descriptions examples here.

Senior Manager

As the next step in career progression, the Community Operations Senior Manager does everything the Community Operations Manager does but with a more strategic lens. Looking at the big picture, medium to long-term impacts, forecasting, and planning.

• Forecast and plan for points where scale and automation will be needed
• Oversee the operational dashboards, looking for trends, risk areas, and opportunities for improvement
• Maintain the operational budget planning and report cadence
• Manage platform integrations and architecture, keep current with vendor roadmaps and incorporate with community’s roadmap
• Drive continued operational rigor by creating methodologies, models to scale, standardized processes, and templates to drive repeatable results.

📋 Visit my template job description for a Community Operations Senior Manager here, and real job descriptions examples here.

Director

As the community continues to grow, more programs get introduced, and it evolves to a more mature stage of the community life cycle, ideally the Community Operations team has grown. The Director leads this team, consisting of perhaps one of the roles mentioned above, but also roles like a community developer and a data analyst.

• Work closely with the Head of Community on community roadmap, strategic initiatives, and community goals and ways to track and achieve those goals
• Manage Community Operations team, ensuring ops-related items in the roadmap are planned for and assigned accordingly, and there is team alignment
• Conduct audits of both automated and manual processes, data integrity, platform performance, and general health and performance of the community and its programs
• Work cross-functionally to develop key metrics and data points for community impact and ROI across the organization
• Work closely with both community members and the community team members on feedback and check-in’s on processes, platforms, documentation, and ensure they are supported on operational components

📋 Visit my template job description for a Community Operations Director here, and real job descriptions examples here.

Writing your job description

The above leveling examples are not set in stone; the leveling, depth of the roles and responsibilities, and focus areas that you choose to highlight in the job description and ultimately hire for are determined by a multitude of factors. Depending on variables like your budget, what existing resources exist on your team, and the stage of your community, it’s completely your choice on what you need the most for your team. I’ve seen a Community Operations Manager job description that was essentially a technical program manager, and though I don’t personally agree that is what Community Operations is about, that was their prerogative and was what their team needed.

If you need some more inspiration…

🍾 I’ve compiled a repository of real job descriptions that have been posted for Community Operations roles. Check them out here: https://bit.ly/comm-ops-jobdesc

As a request from me, if you are hiring for a Community Operations person for your team and have a posted job description, please reach out to me at thecommopsgal@gmail.com and share your job posting. I’ll remove any identifiable information before I add it to the repository.

Lastly, if you would like a second set of eyes or help with crafting your job description, please feel free to email me. It’s one of my goals to get more of us Community Operations people out in the world, and I’d love to help you on your hiring journey.

And of course, here is the usual picture of Yoshi to thank you for reading to the end of this post. Happy baseball season! Go Giants. (Also go Warriors! #playoffs)