Campus Forward Award Winner:
Lead For America
About Lead For America
COMPANY SIZE:
Startup (20-99 employees)
INDUSTRY:
Nonprofit
The Pillars of an Award-Winning Program
The Highlights of Lead For America's Approach to Early Career Hiring
Building an Innovative and Multi-Faceted Approach to University Recruiting
Lead For America (LFA) is looking for the nation’s next generation of public service leaders, meaning their recruitment strategy is to identify the most promising talent from every corner of the country. With limited staff and low name recognition, LFA has been creative in its approach to messaging, focusing both on personalized and broad direct outreach methods. Using this combination, LFA is able to invest time into sourcing amazing talent with hyper-customized messaging while simultaneously engaging the broadest subset of eligible candidates with school-agnostic info sessions. This pairing optimizes the reach of LFA’s talent pipeline with the time investment needed to build relationships with promising candidates. Additionally, LFA manages a College Chapter Program that allows potential candidates to experience the work of a Fellow before graduating or applying.
Crafting a Standout Candidate Experience
Lead For America has always emphasized a personalized and transparent candidate experience. They take great care to ensure all communication is timely, caring, and informative, ensuring that candidates know they are talking to a real person and their expectations are accurate. The LFA team puts this into practice, by offering a personalized phone call at every stage of the application process, creating an interactive eligibility quiz, and investing in a rolling selection process. As a young organization, LFA continues to iterate and improve its candidate experience through candidate surveys, and a collaborative annual review process.
Moving the Needle on Diversity & Inclusion
Lead For America is committed to making its staff and Fellowship cohort representative of the country and communities they wish to serve. To accomplish this, LFA has built partnerships with HBCUs, HSIs, and tribal governments while also emphasizing diversity using recruitment tools like RippleMatch. LFA has also added new tips and resources on its website to assist all applicants as they traverse the application and interview process.
Supporting the Growth and Development of Entry-Level Talent
Lead For America aims to build the next generation of public service leaders and takes this role seriously. All LFA Fellows receive wraparound support and training throughout their experience including an all-inclusive two-week preservice training in Washington DC, monthly meetings with a dedicated Fellow Advisor, mentorship by a local leader, and the autonomy to develop a Community Venture of their choosing. After the Fellowship, alumni receive access to the AmeriCorps Segal Education Award, scholarships to our graduate school partners, continued access to online resources, and the encouragement to take the next step in their public service careers.
Congratulations to the team at Lead For America for being selected as one of the winners of RippleMatch's 2022 Campus Forward Awards!
RippleMatch's Campus Forward Awards recognizes the top early career teams and programs in the nation. Through a detailed application process, early career teams shared their approach to recruitment, candidate experience, D&I, and internship & entry-level programming. The programs picked for this award represent the best of the best, selected from applications submitted by campus recruiting teams across industries.
See all Award Winners for the category of Small Early Career Programs below
Learn more about RippleMatch, the company behind the Campus Forward Awards, by clicking here.