Head of Internal Communications
About Gusto
Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 100,000 businesses nationwide.
We are building our Internal Communications team at Gusto and are looking for an experienced communicator and senior leader to build and scale our internal communications function for our fast-growing company.
As the Internal Comms Lead for Gusto, you will be responsible for helping our more than 1,300 Gusties stay informed, feel connected and engaged, and share a sense of purpose. Your role will be critical in scaling our culture and values as we continue to grow. Your goal will be to increase employee engagement, develop our company-wide internal communication framework, develop and manage our communications channels, and connect our company strategy and narrative to Gusto-wide initiatives. You’re able to lead through influence and are able to see around corners to help us continue scaling successfully. You will serve as a trusted advisor to our senior leaders and report to Gusto’s Chief People Officer. In this role, you’ll work closely on communications with all of Gusto’s leaders, including frequent interactions with our CEO. You’ll be a confidante, sounding board, and thought partner to him and the rest of Gusto’s leadership team.
Internal comms is about both empathy and understanding; you should have an extraordinary ear for language and tone, acumen for moments of storytelling and moments of concision, and a business-focused style that resonates with a data-informed team. We’re looking for a candidate who can fluidly understand tech industry terms and communicate using universally understood language; a bridge between the tech and non-tech worlds.
Internal comms is also about strategy, and the ideal candidate brings a great deal of strategic acumen to this role. This leader will be instrumental in helping to ensure Gusto’s strategy is effectively communicated to Gusties and aligned across the organization, and will be opinionated about driving communications programs and channels to support strong alignment and engagement.
Most of all, you fundamentally believe that to be great at internal communications, you must be able to capture what is unique about a specific company and translate those nuances into the connective tissue of an organization.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Build and lead a team of communications professionals who support business unit, corporate, people/culture and executive communications
- Work with Gusto’s CEO, CEO Team, and executive team to ensure our strategy is clearly communicated to our employees and aligned across the organization
- Support company-wide communications processes and manage company communications channels
- Manage our company internal communications cadence and editorial calendar
- Work across the business to discover, curate and share compelling stories about our company, our product, our technology, and our people.
- Partner closely with our external communications and PR team to ensure exquisite alignment of messaging and a holistic communications approach on all internal and external communications
- Works closely with Gusto leaders to support communications to their organizations
- Help engage Gusties across multiple Homebases and ensure our communications scale as our footprint grows
- Make recommendations and craft guidelines around how we leverage various internal communications tools and forums (team meetings, Slack, memos, email, etc) and ground research in qualitative and quantitative data.
- Identify opportunities to amplify content and news across various channels and keep your finger on the pulse of internal chatter, as well as local, industry and competitor news
- Coordinate multiple streams of information, weaving complex ideas into a story that can be easily understood by a diverse internal audience
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- 10+ years of communications experience – ideally focused on internal communications, executive communications, public relations, and/or Chief of Staff roles
- 8+ years of people management experience - including hiring and scaling a communications team
- High emotional intelligence, matched with the ability to execute
- An innovative approach to developing success metrics and demonstrated ability to influence successful outcomes
- Ability to build collaborative working relationships with staff at all levels of the organization and develop strong professional relationships and networks externally
- Exceptional written and oral communication and presentation skills
- Experience working with and influencing senior leaders
- Experience working for a high-growth, scaling tech company
- Experience working with an employee base distributed across multiple locations
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.