Manager, Recruitment

ROLE: Manager, Recruitment

POSITION REPORTS TO: Managing Director, Recruitment

LOCATION: Kansas or Missouri

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Teach For America (TFA) is seeking a dynamic Recruitment Manager to help drive the movement for educational opportunity by attracting top leaders to join the TFA corps. This role is crucial in addressing long standing educational challenges in the country by engaging top leaders who are committed to teaching and leading change. As a Recruitment Manager - External (RME) you will play a key role in executing a targeted recruitment strategy, particularly in understanding the unique challenges and opportunities within partner regions’ educational landscapes. This includes aligning TFA’s efforts with each region's specific needs, history, and the story of its communities.

You will actively lead recruitment initiatives by serving as the external lead for events, cultivation meetings, campus engagement, and key partnerships. You will work closely with the RT and regional teams to identify opportunities, engage prospects, and support the development of strategies that resonate with local communities while aligning with TFA's mission. You will initiate new partnerships, deepen existing relationships, and chart a path forward for successful recruitment efforts across different communities. Collaborating closely with Recruitment Managers - Internal (RMI), you will make data-driven decisions and employ innovative strategies that accelerate our field recruitment efforts.

The ideal candidate loves to collaborate with others, lead meetings and events, and create enthusiasm for Teach For America among a variety of partners. They demonstrate excitement around building and executing a long-term strategy for campus recruitment within their partner campuses. They can naturally build relationships with others and are particularly adept at developing and cultivating partnerships and networks, especially across lines of difference, in order to achieve results. They demonstrate strong interpersonal awareness and deep listening skills to build informed hypotheses of a potential partner’s motivations and barriers and can modify their approach to fit different settings and ensure their messages are tailored to their audience.

As a Recruitment Manager, you will be on the front lines of Teach For America’s most consequential work, directly advancing our Theory of Change and driving the broader movement for educational excellence and opportunity. You will receive robust training, ongoing coaching, and professional development to hone your leadership and innovation skills, ensuring you have the tools to succeed and help us reach new heights in our mission.

WHAT YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

Primarily responsibilities include, but are not limited to: 

Set and execute recruitment strategy at targeted campuses across the state (15%)

• Develop and execute a recruitment strategy that strengthens and amplifies the overall campaign landscape across subsets of schools, driving success at individual campuses and laying the foundation for success in future recruitment efforts.
• Build strategy for stakeholder engagement and empower key influencers (alumni, corps members, campus ambassadors, etc.) to steward the TFA movement and promote a stronger organizational brand across the state
• Work across teams to plan, execute, and improve strategy, using data-based tools to identify gaps, patterns, and opportunities within campaigns and develop solutions to achieve outcomes.
• Make strong decisions with respect to the Teach For America selection process through all stages of the application funnel.
• <if applicable> Hire and manage part-time student employees to meet campaign objectives and build awareness of Teach For America and the issue of educational opportunity across various campuses. 

Identify and conduct outreach to Corps Member prospects (35%)

• Source high-potential leaders and develop outreach strategies to connect them with Teach For America
• Identify campaign levers to explore due to their potential for significant impact (ex. partnering more closely with the Career Services Office, prioritizing social impact summits, etc.)
• Tailor communication to different audiences, crafting compelling and engaging messages that resonate with candidates' motivations and interests.
• Initiate and nurture relationships with potential network partners and external stakeholders, deepening their understanding of Teach For America’s mission and reinforcing their commitment to the movement for educational opportunity.
• Plan and execute high-quality recruitment events and initiatives that support campaign goals and drive candidate engagement.

Execute recruitment strategies to drive applications and steward candidates through the admissions process (35%)

• Leverage stakeholders and work alongside colleagues to plan and execute high-quality events, conduct individual meetings, and utilize other strategies to compel prospective corps members to join Teach For America. 
• Build and maintain strong, individualized relationships with prospective candidates, tailoring cultivation strategies to their personal backgrounds and experiences to ensure they complete the application process, confirm their commitment to joining the corps, and deepen their understanding of access to educational opportunity.
• Guide candidates through the admissions process, ensuring their continued investment in the organization’s mission and their readiness to contribute to systemic change.

Lead across the movement (15%)

• Actively participate in all organizational commitments, including selection, confirmation, RT-wide events, and team meetings to foster a sense of community and shared purpose.
• Stay deeply informed about the educational landscape of partner regions, including local news, regional happenings, and community needs, using this context to guide meaningful conversations with prospects and stakeholders.
• Adapt to the changing needs of the team, region, or organization, supporting various initiatives as needed
• Responsibly steward available resources through consistent compliance with all employee policies and expectations

A WEEK IN THE LIFE

As the Recruitment Manager - External (RME) your week will involve actively recruiting at college campuses or through nonprofit partnerships. This may include attending hiring fairs, recruitment events, or engaging directly with key stakeholders at local colleges and nonprofit organizations. You will focus on cultivating meaningful relationships with college and nonprofit leaders, while also connecting one-on-one with prospective candidates. Through these interactions, you’ll listen to their stories, inspire them with Teach For America’s mission, and motivate them to apply, building a pipeline of passionate individuals committed to educational excellence and opportunity. You will collaborate closely with your direct manager and partner Recruitment Manager - Internal (RMI) to analyze campaign data and adjust strategies, as well as personally ensure the accuracy and integrity of campaign and prospect data within our internal CRM.

YOUR EXPERIENCE

Your areas of knowledge and expertise that matter most for this role (minimum qualifications):

Prior Experience

• At least 2 years of professional experience
• Teach For America alumni and/or experience working in low-income schools strongly preferred

• Prior recruitment experience preferred

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

A strong candidate is:

• Proficient in planning, execution, and strategy design, thriving on creating and leading key initiatives (such as in-person events and campus partnerships) that attract top prospects to Teach For America.
• Exceptionally detail-oriented, with the ability to manage multiple projects and tasks simultaneously while maintaining high-quality results.
• Skilled at building and nurturing relationships, particularly across different groups, to foster strong partnerships and achieve meaningful outcomes.
• Able to communicate clearly and persuasively in a variety of settings, whether one-on-one, in small groups, or at large-scale events; can effectively tailor messaging to engage and inspire different audiences.
• Continuously striving for personal and professional growth, reflecting on experiences, seeking feedback, incorporating it quickly, and taking ownership of their development and success.

Work Demands

• Travel will be required. This ranges from week to week, based on the strategy or needs of the time.          
• Ability to travel independently to multiple locations for work and store/bring items to those locations.                      
• Occasional evening and weekend work is required.
• Ability to lift and transport up to 20 pounds for work purposes.

YOUR FUTURE TEAM

Teach For America’s Recruitment Team (RT) is charged with recruiting a high-quality and large corps that fuels the broader movement towards educational excellence and opportunity across our placement regions. In this pursuit, the Recruitment Team engages with leaders across college campuses and professional career sectors to discuss the challenges of educational excellence and opportunity in the nation and inspires them to choose the corps as a means of expanding opportunities for kids and developing a long-term commitment to the movement. 

YOUR COMPENSATION 

The applicable salary range for each U.S.- based role is based on where the employee works and is aligned to one of 3 tiers according to a cost of labor index in that geographic area. Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. New hires are typically brought into the organization at a salary between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint depending on qualifications, internal equity, and the budgeted amount for the role. The expected salary ranges for this role are set forth below. These ranges may be modified in the future.

• Tier A: $61,300 to $82,000 
• Tier B: $66,800 to $89,400

You can view which tier applies to where you plan to work here.

NEXT STEPS

If you think you’d be a good fit for this role, prepare a response to the following prompt in 750 words or less. You’ll submit your response along with your resume when you apply via Workday.

Initial Application Prompt:

Our most successful Recruitment Managers (RMs) have demonstrated strong achievement in their professional experience prior to taking on the RM position. Please describe the most ambitious goal you have ever set and achieved, and what actions you took to attain it. How did you engage others, if at all, to reach this goal? What challenges, if any, did you encounter while working towards your goal?

Your response should include all of the following:

• A professional experience supporting/leading a small group, large group, or complex project
• Explicitly state the goal you were working towards
• The action steps you took to achieve this goal
• How you involved different perspectives and/or invested partners (ex. colleagues, administration, parents, community members, etc.) to help you to achieve this goal
• Quantitative results that demonstrate your impact AND
• Qualitative results that demonstrate your impact

We have provided some “sentence starters” below to help guide your thinking. You can choose to leverage these sentences as you write your reflections, or you can write something entirely different! Both methods are encouraged: we want to get the most accurate information about your record of results as possible.

• At the beginning of the year, I set a classroom goal of X
• I set this/these goal(s) because of <X, Y, Z reasons>
• We achieved <Y results>. I know this because of <X, Y, and Z>.
• In addition to quantitative targets, I set a qualitative goal(s) of X