Kimmi Schonhorst - Nominee for Rising Star Award - 2022 Campus Recruiting Choice Awards

Kimmi is a Recruitment Manager at Venture For America, a national nonprofit and Fellowship program for recent college graduates interested in entrepreneurship. In her role, Kimmi spearheads lead generation strategy and execution with platforms like Ripplematch to ensure the organization recruits a diverse and high-quality applicant pool. Kimmi connects with and supports candidates in learning more about the Fellowship and all it has to offer. She is able to closely relate to the experiences of applicants because she was a Fellow herself. During her Fellowship, she served as a Project Manager at BioMotiv, a pharmaceutical accelerator based in Cleveland, OH. Kimmi is from Plano, Texas, went to Cornell University, and enjoys the outdoors, cats, and aerial arts.

Career Highlight

Kimmi launched, alongside peers, a regional recruitment strategy resulting in more than 160 university relationships, more than 70 recruitment events, and more than 40 accepted Fellows. As part of this strategy, she piloted Venture For America’s use of event sponsorships with various universities to target emerging entrepreneurs and tech students. She met with more than 200 candidates during VFA’s most recent recruiting cycle and garnered an application conversion rate of nearly 70%. Kimmi always aims to bring new ideas to the table to ensure VFA has an equitable Fellowship experience. For future cycles, she’s aiming to make their application process and webinar series more accessible to prospective candidates with neurodivergence and disabilities.