How City Year Reaches Young Leaders Across 29 Cities Using a Test-and-Learn LinkedIn Strategy
For 35 years, City Year has recruited diverse young people ages 17-25 to become AmeriCorps members who spend a year serving as tutors and mentors in under-resourced K-12 classrooms as student success coaches. It's a compelling dual mission: the students they serve show improvements in math, literacy, attendance and interpersonal skills, while the corps members themselves gain valuable leadership and career skills and take meaningful first steps in their professional journeys.
Allison Monro, City Year's SVP of Marketing and Digital Strategy, describes it simply: "When you think about what's at the organization's heart, we're about serving that student and serving that young leader."
But recruiting thousands of young people every year across nearly three dozen different U.S. cities—from Little Rock to New York City to Orlando—is no small undertaking. Each city has unique needs, different demographics, and varying levels of access to traditional college recruiting channels. For Katie Achterhof, who leads strategic recruitment initiatives on City Year's strategy team, this challenge required creative solutions.
"Every year our goal is between 2,000 and 3,000 young people that we're hiring to serve across 29 different cities, and they need to sort out into those cities in a very specific way based on the needs of the community," Katie explains. Finding the right people for smaller markets without major university populations proved especially difficult through traditional campus recruiting alone.
That's where City Year's marketing and talent acquisition teams began experimenting with LinkedIn products, taking an intentionally iterative approach to test what works.
One complex message for two paths
City Year discovered their ideal candidates fall into two distinct groups. "There are folks who already know they're either committed to service or committed to a career path, and City Year is a way to fulfill that," explains Allison. "We literally call those folks the Path Fulfillers."
The other half are the "Path Discoverers," young people who know they won't be in school next year but aren't sure what comes next. For this group, City Year offers a bridge year that builds soft skills employers value: high emotional intelligence, cross-cultural communication, and problem-solving abilities.
These personas directly influenced how the team used LinkedIn Recruiter's filtering capabilities. Rather than searching only for tutoring experience, Katie's team discovered that filters for summer camp counselors, resident assistants, or volunteer coordinators surfaced candidates with the mission alignment they needed.
Small steps and big learnings with LinkedIn Recruiter and AI features
Rather than rolling out LinkedIn Recruiter organization-wide, Katie assembled a small working group of recruiters to test the platform incrementally. The approach was simple: try something for two weeks, review the data, adjust, and try again.
"We started with our hard-to-fill sites and actually a couple of portfolio schools," Katie explains. The team began with broad filters and manual work, then progressively refined their approach—excluding advanced degree holders, capping work experience at four years, and targeting mission-aligned experiences like summer camp counseling or resident assistant roles.
The learning curve proved manageable. Within an hour or two of basic training, recruiters were comfortable with the platform.
The results were promising: a 21% response rate from their outreach that included InMail messages, reaching approximately 800 new people, and at least one hire now serving in New York City. Perhaps most importantly, the platform helped build employer brand awareness in unexpected ways. "We had a couple of people who showed up at our career fair tables and said, 'Hey, I received a message from you on LinkedIn. Let's talk,'"Katie recalls.
Embracing AI and automation
One of Katie's most significant learnings involved overcoming initial skepticism about LinkedIn Recruiter’s AI features. The team started by manually crafting most messages, wary of automated tools. But as they tested LinkedIn Recruiter's AI-generated message subjects and content suggestions, they found the features actually enhanced their efficiency without sacrificing personalization.
"Don't be afraid of the AI features because they actually really help," Katie advises other nonprofits considering similar tools. The ability to generate customized outreach at scale proved essential given the volume of recruiting City Year needed to accomplish.
Bringing the mission to life via a Company Page and LinkedIn Ad Grants
Recognizing that City Year requires multiple touchpoints before candidates fully understand the opportunity, the marketing team invested in building out a comprehensive Life page on their LinkedIn Company Page. It features blogs, articles explaining their student success coach model, and "day in the life" content showing what serving looks like.
The investment paid off with the page driving over 9,000 visitors, helping potential candidates grasp the complexity and benefits of a City Year experience before ever speaking with a recruiter.
"We did add blogs and articles to those pages that help people understand the complexity of what we do," Allison explains. "Then recruiters can more easily talk to people because they've had these snippets from that page."
While Dennis O’Mara, Marketing Director, notes the team is still working on streamlining their process for publishing content to City Year’s page, the foundation has been built for ongoing engagement.
One particularly valuable element of City Year’s advertising came through credits via LinkedIn‘s Ad Grants program for nonprofits. The organization leveraged brand awareness ads that helped them reach their targeted audiences without typical advertising costs.
"We got significantly enhanced brand ads through a grant as part of this process," Allison shares. "It's helped us drive our organic followers on LinkedIn—the rate of increase is exponential with those brand ads."
The ads' simplicity didn't diminish their effectiveness. Featuring just the City Year logo, they could target specific geographic areas while creating crucial top-of-funnel awareness that complemented other recruitment efforts.
Leveraging LinkedIn as one tool in the recruiting toolkit
"One of our learnings may be that LinkedIn isn't the perfect place for us to reach an entry-level service-based audience, and that's okay!" Allison acknowledges.
The platform's professional orientation means many users are seeking competitive salaries rather than stipend-based service opportunities. But that reality doesn't diminish LinkedIn's value for helping shape their employer brand building, recruiter outreach, and reaching the influencers who guide young people's decisions.
"We are experimenting with advertising to parents," Dennis explains. "Parents and word-of-mouth advertising can have a huge impact on us. A lot of parents of people ages 17 to 25 might be high up in their organizations and use LinkedIn to recruit or engage with their teams."
They also recognized potential for reaching guidance counselors and professors as key influencers in young people's post-graduation decisions. LinkedIn's network made it an ideal platform for these indirect recruitment strategies.
"LinkedIn may be the place where people who really want a competitive salary are trying to find their roles," Allison explains. "And yet there's still incredible opportunities for brand awareness, recruiter connection, and helping people understand all about us."
The key insight is that LinkedIn works best as one tool in City Year’s comprehensive recruitment arsenal, particularly effective for geographic targeting, hard-to-fill markets, and creating multiple touchpoints throughout a complex decision journey.
For nonprofit organizations considering similar approaches to leveraging LinkedIn, City Year's team offers three pieces of advice:
- Start small and iterate. Rather than overwhelming staff with a full rollout, their incremental approach with a small working group established buy-in and allowed for continuous improvement. "Small groups, incremental change, let them discover it, let them start getting their peers excited if they're getting success, and then the change management is just so much easier," Katie explains.
- Invest time upfront to understand the options. While the learning curve for LinkedIn Recruiter proved manageable, spending time with a LinkedIn representative to understand all available features paid dividends. Career Pages, advertising, and various product features became more valuable when the team understood their potential applications.
- Track attribution from the beginning. One challenge they continue to refine is tracking which candidates came from LinkedIn versus other sources. Setting up proper attribution tracking before launching campaigns makes measuring ROI much clearer.
The team emphasizes approaching new platforms with a test-and-learn mindset rather than expecting immediate results or perfection. "It tends to be a very year-by-year thing—make changes, see what works, see what doesn't," Dennis reflects.
As City Year continues refining its LinkedIn strategy, the organization's experience offers a roadmap for nonprofits with geographically distributed talent needs. By leveraging LinkedIn Recruiter for direct outreach, Life pages for education, and LinkedIn advertising solutions, they have built a multi-layered approach that complements traditional campus recruiting.
Their results speak to the value behind some of their experimentation: 800 new potential candidates, 9,000 visitors to the Life tab on their company page, and exponential growth in their organic followers. Most importantly, young leaders are now serving students across the country who might never have discovered City Year otherwise.