Sr. Manager, Search Metadata

Description

About Corbis Corporation
Corbis is a creative resource for advertising, marketing and media professionals, providing a comprehensive selection of photography, illustration, footage, typefaces and rights clearance services. Through its branded web sites Corbis, Corbis Motion and Veer. the company helps the creative community make distinctive advertising and publishing for the Internet, magazines, newspapers, books, television and films. Corbis is based in Seattle, with offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia that serve more than 50 countries. For more information, visit www.corbis.com.

At Corbis we value innovation, creativity, teamwork and accountability. We have a results-oriented, customer-centric, fun and highly creative culture. Corbis employees receive a generous benefits package, and enjoy working with and learning from the best and the brightest in this dynamic industry. We recognize and reward outstanding performance, and we encourage growth through our ongoing learning and development programs. So whether you’re right out of school or at the height of your career, join our confident, winning team.

About the Position
This is a leadership position in the Metadata department at Corbis. This department is responsible for the quality of ingested key wording records. It oversees the metadata coming from contributors, outsourcers, and media partners, across collections. The Metadata department drives keywords and quality assurance of the data associated to every image we ingest, it owns the key wording guide, can add keywords to specialized sets or images or key collections, and should remain aware of image trends, marketing needs and how clients search on the website, in order to ensure relevant, appropriate key wording records.

The person in this position is responsible leading a team of highly skilled metadata professional and exploring news opportunities to improve the effectiveness of our search engines. This position must continuously align key wording standards with customer needs and other in-house initiatives including decisions related to the development of new metadata tools and workflows across multiple brands. This person also monitors key wording quality while ensuring fulfillment of production quotas. In addition to these duties, the person in this position is also in charge of hiring, training and leading Search Metadata Specialists.

Detailed Responsibilities:
•Developing the high-level vision, direction and structure of the Corbis metadata and controlled vocabulary   
•Development of new key wording tools, standards, and production process; including writing business requirements, creation of documentation, and planning, training and workflow development.
•Participation in strategic company initiatives related to metadata and key wording and recommending solutions.
•Key decisions related to the maintenance and improvement of metadata archive.
•Maintaining search relevancy across the archive and ensuring positive customer experience.
•Quality assurance of key wording/metadata by internal personnel, outsourcers and contributors across entire archive.
•Supervise the day to day operations of internal personnel who provide keywording imagery, metadata cleanup, outsource solutions and working on interdepartmental projects. Including goal settings, reviews, hiring, training and corrective actions as necessary.
•Oversight of metadata production workflow and adherence to cycle-time
•Oversight of outsourcer workflow: meeting targets, staying within budget, and continually improving quality of outsourced metadata.
•Budget responsibility for department wide costs, including personnel and outsource solutions
 
Contacts:
This position has contact with all levels of Corbis’ management and personnel, as well as contacts with vendors and customers.  Close working relationship exists with other technology teams and Corbis business employees.
•Department-wide: Overall leadership and decisions regarding key wording quality, key wording standards, and acts as a point of contact for all members of the key wording team.
•Division-wide: Works closely with Editors and Media Partner stakeholders to ensure that business objectives related to keywords and metadata are achieved.  The person in this position also works closely with Production Control, Sales & Research, Creative Intelligence and Marketing, creating and maintaining feedback loops to improve processes and workflows between departments.
•Company-wide: This position also acts as a point person for internal customers, solving search issues discovered on the web site by clients and members of Sales and Research. More generally, this position evangelizes the activities of the department, answers keyword and search questions and ensures the direction of the department as it relates to overall business goals.
•Worldwide: The person in this position is responsible for decisions and activities that have an impact on the Corbis search experience, which includes region-specific search in 11 languages worldwide. Along with ensuring the overall quality of key wording, the person in this position also works with Sales, Marketing and Technology to support keyword related strategies and marketing campaigns that target local and international clients.
Requirements:
•5-8 years of experience, including:
           - Online content search structures and organization
          - Overseeing metadata workflow processes
          - Managing direct reports
          - Working cross-deparmentally to achieve business goals
          - Experience key wording, indexing, or classifying imagery
          - Working with to meet or exceed production quotas
          - Developing metrics and measuring progress against key performance indicators
•Masters Library & Information Science degree or equivalent professional experience
•Strong understanding of customer needs and industry standards as they relate to image content.
•Understanding of search engines, IPTC, controlled vocabularies and auto mapping of metadata
•Familiarity with Mechanical Turk workflows
•Project management experience
•Establishing and managing vendor relationships, getting estimates, and improving vendor
•Proficiency in SQL and advanced Excel functions like pivot tables, macros, and bulk text manipulation
•Independent decision making and time management, and the ability to communicate high level updates
•Resource planning: distributing internal personnel’s time among multiple competing priorities. Hiring and managing temporary staff or freelancers to fulfill metadata projects