Business Development Manager (Direct Partnerships)

What You'll Need

• 5+ years in B2B sales, partnerships or business development, ideally in affiliate or performance marketing, ad tech, HR tech, job boards or online marketplaces — and a track record you can walk us through.
• A genuine sales mentality — comfortable prospecting, pitching and closing, and just as comfortable when the thing you need to close a deal doesn't exist yet and has to be built.
• Persistence that doesn't fold at the first no — you probe what's really behind an objection, come back with a better angle rather than a cheaper one, and know when to keep a promising partner warm for months until the timing changes.
• Strong negotiation skills and commercial acumen, able to structure and defend deals across CPC/CPL/CPA and hybrid models.
• Familiarity with CRM tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Experience working cross-functionally with product or tech teams to translate a partner's needs into a feasible, mutually beneficial solution.
• A self-starter mindset — able to build and manage your own pipeline with minimal guidance.
• Comfort with ambiguity, and the drive to write the playbook for partnership types that don't exist at JobLeads yet.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, fluent in English (additional European languages are a plus).

Nice If You Have

• An existing network among job boards, career platforms, content publishers or comparable digital media partners.
• Familiarity with partner tracking, feeds or click-management platforms (e.g. Appcast/Clickcast).
• An understanding of the subscription economy and user engagement metrics.
• Experience in a startup or fast-growth tech environment.

The Team
JobLeads exists for one reason: to help jobseekers land a better job, faster. We do it by digitizing what a great career coach would do - blending data, matching technology and, increasingly, AI - for millions of people around the world. We're a remote-first crew of roughly 130 JobLeaders spread across 30+ countries, reaching 4M+ users every month in 40+ countries.

We believe in "human + AI": we use AI to move faster and think bigger, but we never outsource judgment to it. If you like building things from scratch, owning outcomes, and working alongside people who take the mission seriously without taking themselves too seriously, you'll feel at home here.

Your Role
Partnerships are one of JobLeads' core growth engines - a sizeable network of job boards, career platforms and other partners that currently runs on a single playbook: job sponsoring, priced on CPC, managed by a small team looking after a large and growing roster of accounts.

We're ready to outgrow that playbook. Over the next few years we want to diversify how we work with partners - new commercial models, new partner types, and eventually placements that reach well beyond job boards into adjacent verticals like news portals. That diversification needs someone whose job is purely commercial: finding and winning new partners, winning back the ones we've lost, and building the kinds of deals that don't exist in our playbook yet.

This is a newly created role, and you'll be our first dedicated Business Development hire - working alongside our Key Account Managers (who look after existing partners). If you want to build a channel rather than just run one, this is that seat.

What You'll Be Doing

Partnerships are how JobLeads reaches the next million jobseekers - and right now, that channel is waiting for someone to reimagine it. If you're energized by building something from a blank page, closing deals that don't fit an existing template, and turning "no" into "not yet," we'd love to hear how you'd make this role your own.

• Own the full new-business cycle for partnerships - identifying, pitching, negotiating and closing deals with job boards, career platforms and other partner types.
• Proactively re-engage churned or dormant partners, dig into why they left, and build the commercial case to bring them back.
• Push beyond the standard job-board playbook - scouting and developing new partnership formats, such as placing JobLeads widgets on partner websites across verticals, including outside job boards (think news portals), on CPL/CPA terms.
• Act as the commercial bridge between partners and JobLeads - when a deal needs a non-standard structure, monetization route or product feature, team up with Partnership Management and our Product Manager, Partnerships to shape something that works for both sides.
• Negotiate commercial terms, contracts and pricing models - CPC, CPL, CPA, co-registration and hybrids - with both new and returning partners.
• Represent JobLeads at industry events and conferences, building a long-term network of prospective partners.
• Track and report on pipeline, conversion and partner performance against the channel's growth targets - active partners, contract volume, ROI.