Founding Specialist, Family Recruitment

Position Description

The Founding Family Recruitment Specialist will be responsible for supporting and launching our newest campus in Rutherford County by leading essential family recruitment efforts, supporting school teams with new family enrollment, and creating a welcoming and seamless transition for families to our schools.

This position will execute recruitment strategies, including canvassing, community organizing, and directly engaging with families. Family recruiters must execute their responsibilities with passion, professionalism and a high degree of customer service. This position requires flexibility of schedule, including willingness to occasionally work weekend and evening hours as events demand.

This is a full-time exempt position on Tennessee’s regional team.

Essential Functions

Family Recruitment (65%)

• Canvass within recruitment areas specified by the recruitment plan you are helping to execute; includes but is not limited to knocking on doors, making contact with local community groups and businesses, and handing out pamphlets to prospective families at events/high traffic locations
• Make phone calls to new and prospective families
• Track recruitment work in target area to ensure all potential families are contacted
• Plan and market informational events for prospective families
• Support new and existing schools in enrollment
• Provide feedback to inform continued refinement of recruitment plans
• Analyze recruitment trends and data to create metric-driven strategy around new family engagement that meets recruitment and enrollment goal
• Engage external stakeholders with a focus on building new partnerships that will support the work of communicating educational options to families in the communities we serve
• Foster relationships and develop champions with community based organizations, faith leaders, elected officials, civic and community leaders that lead to positive engagement of the community and neighborhoods where Rocketship has and will have a presence
• Maintain, organize, and manage recruitment communications with interested families and applicants, including email, voicemail, Rocketship’s website, and social media
• Coordinate student application data entry and support of central efforts to ensure lottery system

Family, School, & Community Engagement (30%)

• Partner with founding principal to provide planning, training, and direct allocation of staff time/resources around family engagement and enrollment
• Support school leadership in developing plans for ongoing family engagement and events for building school community
• Cultivate external relationships with other community-based schools and nonprofits
• Work with community partners to identify family and whole child support resources
• Manage early family engagement with founding families to facilitate school-based decisions

Regional Team Engagement (5%)

• Represent Rutherford County in regional discussions and projects
• Provide input to inform enrollment modeling decisions
• Work with regional team to foster community among faculty and staff members across the region
• Collaborate with regional Family Recruitment team members across the Rocketship network to share best practices, develop strategy, and further Rocketship’s mission to close the achievement gap

Qualifications

Required

• A passion for Rocketship’s mission to eliminate the achievement gap and a belief that all families deserve high quality educational options
• Excellent interpersonal communication and customer service skills
• Genuine enjoyment of “on the ground” work, combining people and project management with direct execution of detailed processes.
• Skilled at building strong working relationships with people in both senior- and junior-level roles
• Experience managing through influence and driving results from multiple stakeholders without direct oversight
• Experience designing and conducting outreach and/or recruitment campaigns
• Absolute professionalism and customer service under all circumstances; ability to maintain strict confidentiality where required and discretion when involved in sensitive conversations
• High tolerance for ambiguity, changing work priorities and deadlines
• Demonstrated ability to be detail-oriented, organized, and resourceful

Preferred

• B.A. or B.S. Degree preferred
• Fluency in Spanish is strongly preferred