Teach For America is a nonprofit focused on expanding educational opportunity by recruiting and placing teachers in schools and communities that need them most. The organization’s team of approximately 100 field recruiters hires over 2,500 young professionals to teach each year, primarily Gen Z candidates just beginning their own careers.

I’ve been a fan of Teach For America and its mission for a long time, so this week I was excited to get the chance to talk to Erin Walker, the organization’s Vice President of Recruitment Marketing, who will be speaking at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in May. We discussed how TFA designed its recruiting process, the role that AI plays in their process, and what motivates Gen Z.

Walker joined TFA with a background in product marketing, and she has applied that mindset directly to recruiting. When the team identified overreliance on cold sourcing as a gap in their early funnel, they pivoted to a homegrown recruiting engine built around a nurture and scoring system to emphasize warm engagement, not just lead volume. 

That system now includes:

• A multi-channel lead engine that brings in 50,000 to 60,000 warm leads per year

• Automated nurture through channels like email and text

• A scoring layer to identify intent and readiness

• Threshold-based handoffs to route candidates to recruiters at critical points in the process

The model works because it is practical: help candidates understand the opportunity well enough to self-qualify, qualify earlier based on intent and actions, and make sure recruiters spend time on higher-intent candidates instead of building the entire journey from scratch.  

Walker also described a measured approach to AI, using it selectively to support sourcing, information gathering, and early outreach while keeping recruiter relationships at the center of the process.

Teach For America primarily recruits college seniors and professionals within five years of graduation, so understanding Gen Z is central to their recruiting strategy. Walker said this audience is highly sensitive to authenticity and strongly shaped by the environment they came of age in. Many were in high school during COVID and saw financial instability firsthand, which is one reason financial stability is such a priority for them today. She also noted that isolation during that period increased the importance of community, belonging, and identity in how they evaluate employers. As a result, many are more risk-averse about their first career move and want clear proof that a mission-driven role will also build long-term career options. They want impact, but they do not want to feel like they have to sacrifice career growth or financial stability to get it.

At the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, Walker will break down how TFA built this system, from values-based storytelling and warm-lead nurture to scoring and quality-of-hire signals. If you’re planning to attend, it’s also a good time to register: the Summit’s early-bird discount ends this week.

— David

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Sponsored Content

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Featured Story

Trump Cut Immigration. Native-Born Workers Still Lost.

Matt Charney argues that 2025 delivered a real-world test of the “cut immigration, help native-born workers” myth, and it failed: the foreign-born labor force shrank sharply, yet native-born unemployment rose and labor force participation slipped. He frames the outcome as a basic economics problem, cutting immigration does not “free up” a fixed number of jobs if it also shrinks demand and growth. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Market leverage shifts to employers. The labor market has shifted from worker scarcity to employer leverage: the BLS ratio of job openings per unemployed worker fell to 0.9 in December 2025, the lowest level since mid-2017 outside the pandemic. (Indeed)

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week. Cloudflare says it used AI to rebuild one of the most popular website frameworks in just one week. The early results it reports are striking: much faster build times and dramatically smaller “payloads” delivered to users’ browsers, and the AI computing cost was only about $1,100. For context, Next.js is an open-source project that took over 3,500 contributors years to build (granted, the AI was just mimicking something that already existed, not actually creating new features or functionality.) (Cloudflare)

Hiring is getting more expensive. New data from the Appcast Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report 2026 shows that both cost-per-click and cost-per application are bth trending upward. As unpaid search results become less and less effective, companies have no choice but to pay more for visibility and distribution. (Appcast)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)