Scaling a More Efficient Talent Pipeline

As this growing Charter School Network rapidly expanded across New York, their hiring needs grew just as quickly. Each new campus, grade expansion, and program rollout required a steady pipeline of high-quality candidates across teaching, operations, and school-based roles.

However, hiring in New York City presents a uniquely difficult landscape. A high concentration of private, public, and charter schools—often located within close proximity to one another—creates intense competition for the same pool of qualified educators and staff. Candidates are frequently evaluating multiple, similar opportunities at once, making differentiation and timing critical.

HEEDGROUP helped rebuild the talent marketing strategy around smarter channel expansion, targeting, and using performance data to make decisions.

Expanded Paid Advertising Avenues + Smarter Targeting
HEEDGROUP introduced new paid channels, including Reddit, while optimizing the targeting and audience segmentation across existing digital platforms, including:

• Google Search
• LinkedIn
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram)
• YouTube
• TikTok

We refined audiences around job types, location, and other relevant signals to reach candidates more efficiently in a highly competitive hiring market.

Connected Advertising Efforts to Actual Hiring Data
HEEDGROUP became extremely hands-on within the recruiting platform used during the hiring process. Each day, candidate and application reports were analyzed to understand where qualified applicants were actually coming from.

This is what gave a clearer picture of which channels were driving applications—not just clicks or traffic—and allowed us to make media decisions based on actual candidate volume, which in turn led to the 145% increase in job applications stemming from Digital Marketing, all while decreasing the cost per application by 68%.

Strategic Budget Allocation & Application Growth
A key unlock came from rethinking how a six-figure media budget was allocated. By analyzing where applications were stemming from, we were able to shift spend toward the channels, audiences, and campaigns generating the strongest results—making the budget work harder and driving more efficient application growth.