Strategy & Operations Associate - Talent

About Inspira Education

Inspira Education Group is one of the fastest-growing edtech startups in the US. We started with a simple mission to democratize access to high-quality coaching so that every student in the world has an equal opportunity to access the best opportunities. 

As the world’s leading network of top admissions coaches in medical, legal, business, and college studies, we’re building software and services in one place—disrupting long-entrenched application processes with products and experiences that strive to provide an equal platform for candidates from diverse backgrounds worldwide. 

As one of the fastest-growing edtech firms in the world, we are backed by some of the leading venture capital firms and investors in the world, including Zeev Ventures, Quiet Capital, Craft Ventures, Jeff Fluhr (Founder of Stubhub), and David Sacks (Former COO of PayPal and Founder of Yammer).

The Opportunity

This role will be hybrid in NYC (Union Square/Midtown East Area) - with the requirement of in-office attendance 4 days a week.

The Challenge: How do you systematically win the top 1% of talent in the most competitive markets when they're not looking for jobs?

Traditional companies outsource this problem to expensive recruiters or post jobs and pray. We're building something different - an internal talent acquisition engine that operates like the best sales organizations: data-driven, experimental, relentlessly optimized, and executed at scale.

The reality: A lot of great hires come from proactive outbound outreach, not inbound applications. The candidates we need - top-tier marketers, operators, strategists - aren't scrolling job boards. This is a sales and operations problem disguised as a talent problem.

Your mission: Build and own the relationships that let us compete for talent against companies 10x our size. You'll work directly with founders and leadership to design talent acquisition as a competitive advantage, not just a support function.

What makes this interesting: This role blends strategy with high-leverage execution. You'll design sophisticated targeting strategies and conversion-optimized messaging frameworks, then spend hours executing those strategies, analyzing what works, and iterating rapidly. Think of it as building and running a highly-optimized outbound sales motion - except you're selling careers and competing for talent against companies 10x our size.

Think of this role as:

• Strategy design: Who are the top performers in marketing, sales operations, recruiting? Where do they work? What messaging will resonate with them?
• Go-to-market strategy: How do we reach passive candidates at scale? What channels work? What messaging converts?
• High-volume execution: Spending hours daily in tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter designing Boolean searches and scaling high-volume personalized outreach messages.
• Conversion optimization: How do we increase response rates from 5% to 25%? What A/B tests should we run on outreach sequences?

What You'll Do

Build & Execute the Talent Acquisition Engine

• Run sophisticated Boolean searches in tools such LinkedIn Recruiter to identify high-potential candidates across different functions
• Review hundreds of profiles daily, assess fit against strategic Ideal Candidate Profiles you've built
• Manage multi-touch outreach sequences across dozens of candidates simultaneously
• Conduct quick screening calls with interested candidates to assess fit and maintain pipeline velocity
• Experiment with creative sourcing beyond LinkedIn - targeted email, Twitter/X, Slack communities, Reddit, conference lists
• Design role-specific acquisition strategies: who's the target market, where do they congregate, what motivates them to move?
• Build and continuously refine Ideal Candidate Profiles based on what patterns emerge in your best hires
• Create messaging frameworks optimized for different personas - test hooks, value props, personalization approaches
• Run structured experiments: A/B test subject lines, try different outreach sequences, measure everything

Optimize & Scale

• Build dashboards tracking the metrics that matter: response rates by message type, conversion through each funnel stage, time-to-engagement, source effectiveness
• Analyze what's working and what's not - which companies yield the best candidates? Which messages get responses? Where are bottlenecks?
• Document winning strategies into repeatable playbooks that can eventually scale beyond you
• Conduct market intelligence: where