Join the staff—Sustainability Standards Integration Manager

Location: Montreal, Quebec (Canada) (with flexibility to work from home regularly)
Duration: Permanent
Salary: Competitive, plus benefits
Hours: 40 hours per week

About the role

Team: Earned Revenue
Reports to: Director of Product

On 3 November 2021, the IFRS Foundation Trustees announced the creation of a new standard-setting board—the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)—to help meet the demand from international investors for high-quality, transparent, reliable and comparable reporting by companies on climate and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters. The ISSB builds on the success of the IASB as well as the work of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board and the Value Reporting Foundation (formerly IIRC and SASB), which both consolidated with the IFRS Foundation in 2022.

The Sustainability Standards Integration Manager will be the go-to person to implement and refine our sustainability standards licensing program, which is a key product offering and the organisation’s largest source of earned revenue. The role will be a mix of internal-facing project implementation and sustainability standards subject matter expertise, as well as external-facing client engagement. The Sustainability Standards Integration Manager will have a vested interest in making sure licensing offerings are implemented well, reducing customer problems down the line, which is why they will invest the time in good product maintenance. Your knowledge of IFRS Sustainability Standards (including ISSB S1 and S2 and SASB Standards) will not be superficial: the Sustainability Standards Integration Manager will be able to reliably and credibly map sustainability issues and/or metrics to third-party frameworks or indicators. The role will be working closely with corporate reporting software providers to improve the ability for companies to measure, manage and report their sustainability risks and opportunities.

The role requires a diversity of skills to work across licensing product enhancement projects, complex content mapping files to connect our standards with third-party systems, client relationship management and people management with one direct report. The Sustainability Standards Integration Manager will need a problem-solving mentality with a resilient demeanor, as well as excellent communication, open-mindedness and trust.

Key responsibilities

Project management and IP integration efforts

• Lead implementation of product improvements on the licensing product roadmap, which will involve (a) taking a vision and rough project plan and turning it into a detailed implementation plan, (b) planning and conducting or overseeing QA processes and (c) post-implementation debrief.
• Develop and maintain intimate knowledge of ISSB and SASB Standards and lead or co-lead projects to map the ISSB and SASB Standards to third-party data sets or sustainability frameworks. Develop and implement processes to update mappings to reflect updates to the standards.
• Maintain licensing files in collaboration with research content and processes, product sales needs and customer experience management.
• Represent the customer voice in internal discussions and decisions about licensing product roadmap.
• Surface ideas for operational improvements to enhance the customer experience or refine backend product maintenance.
• Represent the sustainability earned revenue team’s perspectives with the standard-setting, technology and communications teams to (i) ensure other teams understand customer use cases and (ii) stay abreast of opportunities to leverage other teams’ work to support and enhance the licensing product offerings. This includes close collaboration with the design of file outputs from the software used to write and publish the sustainability standards.

Client engagement and service enhancement

• Lead support for corporate reporting software and related licensing customers by answering inbound questions and meeting customer needs, with a 24-hour response time to solve or, at a minimum, acknowledge the request.
• Lead the onboarding experience for corporate reporting software and related licensing customers with accuracy and an eye for efficiently maintaining good customer experiences.
• Manage a Client Success Manager who will support the large majority of licensing customers.
• Support client relationship stewardship, serving as one of the primary contacts for licensee email and phone communications (with the client success manager as the primary contact for most licensee email and phone communications).
• Play a key role in achieving high renewal rates among licensing organisations.
• Proactively engage with a sample of all sustainability licensing organisations in order to gauge satisfaction with the licensing program and assess ideas for future changes to licensing product roadmap.
• Maintain regular communications with existing customers to keep them up to date, including a regular licensee newsletter and as-needed communications to keep licensees updated on the evolving work of the ISSB and future of ESG reporting.
• Propose concise talking points and marketing strategies based on experiences about what resonates with customers.
• Identify ‘power users’ that strongly support the ISSB’s work and then connect them with other teams/initiatives to support our strategic goals.

Skills, experience and qualifications sought

• Proven product management skills, with the ability to reliability implement a product roadmap.
• Proven skills for managing a direct report, either from past people management experience or relevant experience that can be translated to people management.
• Complex thinking and analytical skills to effectively identify similarities and differences between our sustainability content and third-party sustainability content.
• Strong external communication skills, with the ability to understand client needs and translate our work into information that clients value.
• Knowledge of ESG and sustainability disclosure frameworks/standards is a strong plus.
• Execution-oriented, able to get things done quickly and with excellent quality.
• Strong process orientation; able to see how to improve things.
• Experience with Salesforce is a plus.
• Strong Microsoft Excel skills is a plus (eg pivot tables, conditional formatting, advanced formulas, etc.).
• Significant relevant experience (note that the most important qualifications are related to the skills mentioned above, and good candidates could be either well established in their careers or newer in their professional lives).

To apply

Please send a detailed CV/résumé to recruitment@ifrs.org. Please include the following information or your application may not be considered: 

• the job title/position you are interested in and the location of the job (in the subject line of your email); and
• covering email/letter detailing how you meet the specified role requirements and your salary expectations. 

Closing date: Ongoing

Interviews are held via video conference as part of our standard international recruitment process. Due to the number of responses we receive, we are unable to respond individually to each application. If you do not hear from us within four weeks of the closing date you may assume that your application has been unsuccessful.