Nesta is looking for a Chief Operating Officer to join our executive team, lead our operations, and shape our organisational culture and capabilities. 

About Nesta 

Our vision is that by 2030, Nesta will have improved the lives of millions of people by designing, testing and scaling new solutions to society’s biggest challenges. 

We have chosen to focus on three guiding missions - equalising life chances, building healthier lives, and supporting a sustainable economic recovery. In each of these areas, we will partner with frontline organisations to generate and rigorously evaluate new interventions, and support their widespread adoption. We will support the creation of new products and ventures, and shape the system as a whole to support innovation. 

Working with a range of delivery partners, we will deploy multi-disciplinary teams that bring together capabilities in design, data science, behavioural insights, and experimental research. We believe that by bringing together innovation methods to design, experiment, rigorously evaluate, and scale innovations, we can be a world leader in driving innovation for social good.

About this opportunity

As Chief Operating Officer, your primary responsibility will be Nesta’s people – establishing a highly attractive employee brand and employee value proposition, driving the quality of people we attract, and retaining, recruiting and expanding our diversity. You will play a central role in building and championing a rigorous, creative, experimental culture that helps deliver on our strategic goals and advances our diversity, equity and inclusion objectives. You will also be expected to:

• Support the Chief Executive and leadership team to shape and deliver Nesta’s strategy

• Support Nesta’s communications team to strengthen our brand and influence 

• Lead Nesta’s corporate services teams, including People, Technology, Building Management and Operations. This will include delivering highly effective, low-friction services to Nesta’s staff

• Continuously improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our operational functions

What we are looking for

You are curious about new approaches, open to contributions and ideas from all sources, and keen to push the pace and scale of our impact. You have experience in a senior leadership role, with responsibility for managing risk and making decisions that affect organisational impact, profitability, partnerships, and staffing. You have a strong record of leading agile and effective teams, including People, Communications and Operations teams, while also building an inclusive organisational culture. You understand and have experience addressing issues of workplace equity, diversity and inclusion.

How to apply

To find out more about Nesta, and to apply for this role, please visit https://www.nesta.org.uk/jobs/

The closing date for applications is 5 October 2020 at 8:00am.

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.

We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.

This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to in order to be successful.

We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours, job shares and other arrangements. 

Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore.

Please note: After the job advert closes, your answers will go through a sift process: randomising and anonymising answers for taking out individual information that biases hiring decisions and facilitating us to review each answer by more than one person so you can benefit from the wisdom of the crowds. People scoring the applications will not have seen your CV at this stage so please try your best to answer questions without rephrasing your CV, they will see this later! More about the principles behind the blind review process.