Why QS?
At QS, our culture fosters a flexible working environment that encourages our employees to own their career whilst personally and professionally thriving. We collaborate, respect and support each other – and as a company, our values underpin these.
Our mission is to empower motivated people around the world to fulfil their potential through higher education, and to ensure everyone has the same opportunity to achieve that potential. We celebrate the diversity of our teams and believe through sharing our experiences we can learn from one another and become stronger together, which enables us to achieve our goal.
At QS, you’ll be responsible for implementing real change in the international higher education landscape, full of exciting and interesting challenges where you can drive positive impact across the business.
As a Head of Product – Digital Transformation, this is what you’ll be doing:
At QS, we are moving into a new stage of our growth; focused on transforming our engagement with students as we support them in connecting with and enrolling at the right higher education institutions around the world. In parallel, innovating and adapting our solutions for our clients to enable them to engage with and enrol the right students into their programmes. A key component of this is defining and delivering a student centric digital strategy to disrupt and transform our existing assets into valuable components of a cohesive student-centric journey. Allowing us to drive rapid business growth, as we enhance, evolve, and innovate our commercial propositions in parallel.
This is a new role, leading a team of product managers, to take ownership of the transformation of our student centric digital student experience. It will form a key part of the existing Digital & Events leadership team and lead our product managers, alongside our tech leads, to innovate our student experience to cement and grow our position as a leading independent partner for students looking for international study. Leveraging (and improving) our assets today, to engage, convert and support students through connections with institutions and counsellors, and enrolment. Working closely with our Commercial Lead to achieve in year business and revenue goals, while innovating and evolving to differentiate vs. our competition build a tech and data enabled solution for the future.
This role is perfect for a curious, impact driven, commercially aware product lead. Someone who is passionate about creating great experiences to engage and convert students on the site, as we build our direct student recruitment business.
Role responsibilities:
Accountability for, and ownership of the digital student engagement and conversion strategy to build our future student recruitment business, and enable rapid revenue growth. Disrupting our sites and existing assets to deliver rapid improvements and business impact for our direct student recruitment business.
Including:
- Definition of the target user experiences and journeys, and implementation and management of tests to enable our users to achieve their goals, and for us to achieve our business goals
- Ownership of rapid disruption to deliver a step change in conversion from our sites to ‘QS students’ to meet direct enrolment and event conversion targets.
- Evolution of our matching capabilities to deliver career and course-based matching for candidates, forming the backbone of our connections and enrolments capability, and enabling tech and data enabled connections and enrolment solutions.
- Leverage generative AI and new technologies convert and deepen our digital engagement with students and deliver to business goals and support candidates in their decision making.
- Implementation of personalization within our student journeys to drive conversion and engagement.
- Alignment with technology directors, to ensure the right squads are in place to enable development at pace.
- Definition of and leading the implementation of our assets on other platforms to ensure we attract, convert and engage students in situ, in particular through engagement on social platforms.
- To ensure we are connecting and supporting students where they are and evolving our student value proposition to ensure longevity of our brand.
- Innovate our assets and approach to student engagement and conversion, to become the insight and support partner for students in their enrolment journey – through a comprehensive understanding of student needs, client needs and competitor propositions and plans.
- Taking a dynamic, horizon scanning approach to enable our product plans to course correct to ensure business goals are met and changing market dynamics are met.
- Accountability for our QS Student proposition and dataset, to enable future business growth and commercial and product innovation.
- Management of the team with a test and learn, MVP approach to deliver measurable impact, gain real time feedback and embed a responsive, iterative product development approach.
Key skills and experience:
Our ideal candidate will be:
- Passionate about building a student-centric digital experience and driving transformative business growth in the short and long term.
- Performance and commercially minded, with experience and enjoyment in delivering to weekly and monthly lead goals.
- Passionate about driving change, and maintaining a pulse on both student, client and competitor dynamics to determine new opportunities or innovations to transform our student experiences and business model.
- Curious, with experience taking qualitative and quantitative feedback, competitor insight to inform innovation.
- Experience transforming onsite conversion and disrupting existing user journeys, comfortable picking up an existing plan to deliver while owning the future innovation and evolution of our end-to-end student experience.
- Of a test and learn mindset, to ensure we create business impact, validate new approaches and create visible, meaningful change in our student experience.
- Strong leader and communicator, adept at translating from business objectives and key results into simple priorities and clear monthly outcomes while building strong relationships across tech and product.
- Action focused and hands on leader, a do-er.
- A collaborator, able to influence and engage others to deliver and resolve challenges.
So, who are we and what do we do?
QS is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics, insights, and intelligence to the global higher education sector – supporting university excellence across the world. Our student recruitment and enrolment solutions enable universities and business schools to connect with talented individuals seeking to further their academic progress and career development. Our portfolio of professional services includes consultancy, student mobility and academic partnerships management, and branding solutions. We publish highly visible and influential rankings of international universities, including the QS World University Rankings® which reaches a global audience of hundreds of millions of people.
Founded in 1990, our activities span across 50 countries, working with over 2000 of the world’s leading higher education institutions and over 12,000 employers.
Headquartered in London, QS has over 650 employees globally with offices in Australia, Malaysia, India, Romania, Singapore, France, Germany, and the USA. QS keeps growing organically, through acquisition and by recruiting top talent across key regions.
We take investing in our people very seriously.
As standard you will have:
- Competitive base salary
- Access to an annual bonus scheme (for qualifying roles only)
- Flexible working options, including hybrid or remote
- 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays – increasing to 27 days after 5 years’
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
- Generous pension through Royal London
- Comprehensive private medical insurance and wellness scheme through Vitality
- Access to QSmiles – a discount scheme that actually makes a significant difference
- Cycle to work scheme
- A vibrant social environment and multicultural and multinational culture
But that’s not all. Outside of these standard benefits we also offer resources to allow professional growth and wellness initiatives to nurture a healthy mindset:
- Free subscription to the Calm App – the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation
- A focus on welfare which is led by our global wellness team, with mental health first aiders globally
- Access to a variety of diversity and inclusion initiatives and groups
- Strong recognition and reward programs – including a peer-to-peer recognition platform, quarterly and annual QS
- Applaud Awards, Connect with your Career annual PD event
- Support for volunteering and study leave
- Free subscription to LinkedIn learning – with over 5000 courses and programmes at your fingertips
- Options to join our outstanding global Mentorship programme
Like what you’ve heard? Great, apply now!
As a candidate, we know the application and interview process can be daunting and so it’s important that you have a great experience with us. Our dedicated Talent Team will work hard to ensure you are fully informed at all stages and you are really excited by this opportunity to do meaningful work in the education space.
Equal opportunities
QS Quacquarelli Symonds is proud to be a fair and equal organisation where everyone has the same opportunity to achieve their full potential, irrespective of their background or personal attributes. We celebrate our diversity and believe through sharing our experiences we can learn from one another, be stronger together, and enable our business to thrive.