Senior Partnership Manager

Do you look at a partner program that works and immediately see what it could become at three times the size? Are you the kind of person who owns your number and a running book of business, while designing the channels that will carry the next phase of growth? Do you want a mandate that is yours: rethink how we work with resellers, open up consultancies and universities, and work out where tech partnerships fit? And do you like variety, where growing an existing commercial partner one day and presenting a new partner model to leadership the next is just part of the job?

AIHR is looking for a Senior Partnership Manager to grow our commercial partner book and build the partner programs that take us into the next phase of growth within our Sales Department. This is not a marketing position.

About AIHR

Founded in 2016 with the mission to future-proof HR, the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has become the world’s market leader in online training for human resources (HR) professionals. We have a global customer base spanning 140+ countries, including companies such as Unilever, Reckitt, Goldman Sachs, Philips, Deloitte, Nike, Heineken, and UBS. It is our goal to continuously upskill and empower 1,000,000 HR Professionals.

We are an international team of 100+ people, driven by excellence, innovation, and a hunger to grow in everything we do. As such, we strive to provide the world’s best courses and excellent support to our customers while continuously optimizing every aspect of our work. With over 30 nationalities, our team is diverse, yet we all share a few traits: we're friendly, enthusiastic, and great team players.

Being a fast-growing company, working at AIHR means taking on a lot of responsibility. For a senior hire, that means real ownership: the room to shape a commercial channel, direct access to leadership, and the potential to craft your own role as the program grows.

Role and Responsibilities

As Senior Partnership Manager, you come in with the ambition to triple the AIHR partnership program. Today that program is a global portfolio of 130+ commercial partners driving primarily single-seat e-commerce sales, plus a reseller channel that brings in B2B business. Both work, and both have far more potential than we currently capture. Your job is to optimize what we have, evolve it into a set of structured commercial partner programs, and work out which new channels deserve investment.

This is a quota-carrying role with a build mandate. You manage a running book of business with our existing commercial partners and stay their main point of contact. On top of that, you design and launch larger partner programs with resellers, HR consultancies, system integrators, and universities. We have a strong belief that these partners, HR implementation consultants in particular, are well placed to position our courses with their clients, and that this can become a major revenue stream for AIHR.

Your work is built from three connected workstreams:

• Grow the existing partner channel: run the existing book, grow partner revenue, and identify the commercial opportunities that drive meaningful additional business.

• Build the extended partner programs: restructure the reseller program so it generates more predictable, repeatable B2B revenue, and extend it to consultancies, system integrators, and universities.

• Define the tech partnership go-to-market: research which commercial models fit AIHR, propose the strategy, then test, validate, and build out what works.

You’ll report to the Team Lead for Channel & Strategic Partnerships, work closely with Marketing, Sales, and Product to get your partners what they need, and act as the partnership network’s advocate across the wider commercial team. You will regularly present proposals and results to AIHR leadership.

On a typical day

On a typical Monday morning, you start with your pipeline. Your existing partner book is quick to review: a few conversations need a nudge, two QBRs are coming up. The larger partnerships take more thought. Other companies in our industry have built significant revenue through resellers, consultancies, and universities, but these deals have a longer sales cycle, so you always keep several opportunities moving at the same time. Today that means a value-added reseller in the middle of a negotiation, a prospective university that wants to add AIHR’s courses to its 2027 academic year, and a consultancy that signed last month and now needs to get moving.

After lunch you speak with the managing partner of a German niche consultancy that does a lot of HR implementation work. Her clients keep running into the same problem: the new system goes live, and the HR team lacks the skills to get the most out of it. You talk through how capability building could become part of her offering, with AIHR as the partner behind it. She is interested, and you agree to work out a commercial proposal together. Next you work on an enablement session for consultants, covering what they need to know about our courses, how they bring AIHR into a client conversation, what a first joint win could look like, and you brief Marketing on the materials their consultants will need.

The next morning is for outreach. You build a sourcing list of potential partners in a segment you want to open up, and you contact them yourself. AIHR has a very good name in the HR industry, and that usually helps open doors. Later that week you run a QBR with one of your strongest commercial partners. You review their numbers together, agree on two concrete actions, and set a date to check back in. You identify where there is room to grow the relationship and push for more where performance has stalled. You also notice that a large part of their customer base works in corporate HR teams, so you bring in a colleague from Sales to explore a B2B opportunity through the same relationship.

On Thursday you are back with the value-added reseller. They want to bundle our courses with their own services. It is a model we haven’t proven yet. There is no standard agreement to pull off the shelf, so you work with our Sales Engineer to design the deal while you negotiate it: what they sell, how they are rewarded, how revenue is generated, and what would tell you both it is working. You treat it as a pilot and agree on a first version you can learn from. Some of these experiments will not work out. The ones that do become the programs you build the channel on, and you will be the person who figured them out.

You close out the week updating your forecast and walking your manager through where the existing book, pipeline, and new programs stand. Friday afternoon wraps with a quick team catch-up and, if you're in the Rotterdam office, our regular Friday drinks.

Your Target

This is a quota-carrying role. Your number is built from the revenue of the partner book you run and the new partner programs you launch. In your first year, that means growing revenue across the existing partner portfolio, a restructured reseller program, the first signed partners among consultancies, system integrators, and universities, and a tech partnership go-to-market strategy that has been proposed, tested, and started generating commercial opportunities.

We offer

• Competitive, benchmarked compensation, including a commission plan tied to your target

• A high degree of autonomy in a vibrant, result-driven, inclusive, and international team

• A beautiful office right across Rotterdam Central Station (Millenniumtoren), with a satellite office in Amsterdam

• 26 paid holidays per year

• Exchange any 2 public holiday days for 2 other days of your choice

• Work-from-anywhere policy: up to 20 days a year working abroad

• Pension plan

• Access to the OpenUp mental health platform

• Personal development budget, training, and we pay for the books you read

• All public transport expenses covered (NS Business Card)

• MacBook + all other equipment you need to do your work

• Daily lunch prepared by a chef, weekly drinks, and fun team activities

• Free access to the office gym

Get a taste of AIHR experience and check out our AIHR Benefits Guide!

Who you are

• 7+ years of experience in commercial partnerships, channel sales, business development, or strategic account management, ideally in SaaS, e-commerce, or EdTech

• A proven track record of owning and delivering against a revenue target, with direct responsibility for pipeline, partner acquisition, and growth

• A track record of building or restructuring a commercial partner program, not only running one: reseller, consultancy, system integrator, or tech partnerships

• Experience creating a go-to-market strategy for a new channel and taking it from proposal to signed partners and first revenue

• Experienced in sourcing, negotiating, and closing complex commercial partnerships with senior stakeholders

• AI-first mindset to drive & improve operational efficiencies

• A natural relationship builder — people trust you and want to keep working with you, from partner owners to senior executives

• Highly organized and execution-oriented, able to run an active partner book and build new programs at the same time without dropping the ball

• Commercially sharp, comfortable structuring and negotiating larger agreements, setting revenue targets with partners, and having direct conversations when performance needs to move

• Able to work with ambiguity and shape your own mandate where no playbook exists yet

• A strong, clear communicator in English, comfortable building business cases and presenting commercial proposals to senior leadership

• Available to work at least 3 days a week from our Rotterdam office

Nice to have

• Experience with HubSpot

• Background in HR tech, EdTech, or SaaS industry

• An existing network among HR consultancies, system integrators, resellers, or HR tech companies

Apply for the job

Are you excited to become our Senior Partnership Manager? Then we'd love to hear from you!

P.S. Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women tend to apply only when they meet 100% of them. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point above, please still apply. We'd love to consider you and see if you could be a great fit.

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