Many of us in the camp world grew our careers from camp counselor to camp leaders to eventually full-time camp directors and operations managers. This often means that we have exceptional skills in running camp operations and building close relationships, but our time does not always prepare us on how to find the next generation of camp staff.

At Avid4 Adventure, we had this very challenge for years where our Talent Acquisition Team was amazing at hiring and keeping the right people — once we got them in the door. But sourcing great talent and moving them quickly through the process, especially when candidates are applying to dozens of seasonal roles at a time, can feel like a mad scramble. 

Having spent five years hiring seasonal youth development staff and another five years working in tech startups, I’ve had a chance to see both sides of the hiring landscape. I returned to the outdoor education industry with a toolbelt full of startup hiring lessons.  With the immense support and buy-in from the whole company, our Senior Manager of TA Cynthia Podrouzek and I had free reign to shake up our hiring process over the past year. Here’s how we went from being woefully understaffed two years before to hiring over 500 seasonal staff a full month ahead of schedule. This allowed us to be fully staffed by training for the first time in nearly eight years. 

Implement the Right Technology

Our camp operates across five different states and hires over 500 staff a year. Given our high volume hiring season, having the right technology is a must.

In the summer of 2023, we made the decision to implement Ashby as our applicant tracking system (ATS) because of its ability to give us real-time data, automate hiring processes, and its great user experience. It also allowed us to more efficiently transfer new hire information to our onboarding system WorkBright, saving us almost 100 hours of data entry over the year. 

We also were able to integrate Keeyora (formerly Rectxt) for real-time texting with candidates. By texting candidates we were able to get them scheduled for interviews ASAP, answer questions in real time, and send both template and personalized messages of encouragement throughout the interview and offer process! Example simple text messages included: 

• Hey! This is Tori with the Avid4 Hiring Team. I’m looking forward to chatting with you tomorrow during our virtual interview and answering any questions you may have about our programs!
• It was great chatting with you earlier :) I just sent over a formal offer letter for an Instructor role at our Boulder Camp. Be sure to read the offer letter over and let me know if you have any questions. Excited to have you join our team this summer!
• Hey! I saw you signed your offer letter — WOOHOO!! We’re so stoked that you’ll be joining us this summer :D Be sure to keep an eye out for an onboarding email from our HR Team in the next 2–3 business days. Welcome aboard — Tori 

With these tools, we were able to automate as much of the hiring process as possible. From scheduling emails to setting up follow-up reminders, our systems allowed us to remove the number of things we had to do/click through in a given day all while creating a fast, welcoming, and personalized experience. 

Change Your Internal Methodology

Our TA team has always been remote first and highly collaborative; however, it’s been a challenge to keep everyone in the loop on rapidly evolving hiring needs. We took lessons from high-performing tech teams to increase our efficiency and prevent things falling through the cracks. We cut our weekly hour-long team meetings by 30 minutes in order to add two 15-minute weekly standups. We use a modified version of Kanban boards in Asana to track projects and Ashby to track candidate notes.

We are a surprisingly complex camp program, so we began to talk a lot about cognitive load and decision fatigue on our team. We changed our team structure to allow members to focus on one or two hiring specialties (such as hiring camp leadership or supporting international candidates through the visa process), cutting down the number of decisions and tasks each person had to make. We were able to empower our staff to own the success of their assigned areas of focus while providing cross training to ensure their versatility in hiring across the company. 

A/B Test and Iterate

We weren’t always sure how our sourcing and hiring strategies were actually playing out with candidates. Did our job titles and descriptions work? Was our interviewing process optimized? Did the money we spend on sourcing actually translate into great people?

So in 2023, we looked back at all the people we sourced and hired using our candidate and employee records to see where people applied, who was invited to interview, hired, started the season, and finished. We plotted all of this information out into a spreadsheet and used it to see where our top hires came from. Unsurprisingly, our returning staff, staff referrals, and former campers were our top hires, but we also found that many of the job boards we heavily invested in resulted in no or few staff that worked for us the whole summer . . . that was a lot of budget wasted!

For 2024, we were able to invest more time, funding, and energy on our returning staff, referral program, and job boards that returned the most qualified candidates. Not only that, because we were able to track in real time the number and quality of candidates by source, we were able to test out different job titles, job boards, and descriptions to see if we were getting better results. By investing our sourcing budget more efficiently, we spent one-tenth on job boards and career fairs than we had two years ago.

We also had a chance to revisit our interview strategy. Our hiring process includes a one-way Spark Hire interview followed by a 30-minute virtual interview; about half of our candidates failed to complete the first step. We tested a small sample of candidates going straight to interview, but found that we still had one half drop out of the process, but this time either during the virtual interview, afterwards, or simply bailed on us before camp training! So we kept the Spark Hire interview step this year. With over 2,000 new applicants this year, that translates to nearly 550 hours we didn’t spend on uninvested candidates. 

And to that point . . . 

Data, Data, Data

The recurring theme throughout all of our strategizing was that data allowed us to make informed decisions. By continuously revisiting and analyzing historic and real time data, we made massive strides in our hiring season this year. We saved tens of thousands of dollars and significantly reduced stress for our teams. We also made sure to use a structured interview process to rate candidates on different competencies to determine role, location, and culture fit. By keeping our interview processes consistent, our candidate data is now allowing us to compare candidate scores with end-of-season staff evaluations to continuously improve our interviewing strategy and candidate quality! 

But what about small camps? 

Many of the changes made at Avid4 this past year were possible based on our scale. However, most camps are >50 person operations much like the one I led as a director. There’s still plenty of ways to implement startup-inspired practices with available (or free!) resources:

• Applicant Tracking: Don’t have an ATS in your budget? There are several affordable websites and tools to manage your candidate pipeline. This includes the free job board and ATS Get.It Jobs and project management tool Asana that has a free candidate pipeline management template. Both can be used to manage resumes, create deadlines for follow up, and document interview feedback. 
• Automation: You can automate much of your hiring process by creating easy-to-use email templates in Gmail, interview invitation scheduling with Calendly, and setting up follow-up reminders so that you never have someone fall through the cracks. Texting can also be completed with work or personal phone numbers (though beware giving away your phone number if you have privacy concerns). 
• Collaboration and Iteration: Our team meeting and collaboration strategies came from a mixture of Agile and Lean Six Sigma methodologies. By focusing on efficiency first, you will have more dedicated time and energy to do the work that brought you to the camp world: building relationships and inspiring campers. 
• Data Tracking: There are still ways to capture meaningful data without advanced data-analytics tools. We manually tracked our sourcing budget through Google Sheets and built out tables to easily analyze data in real time and year over year. 

The best part is that all of these practices can be implemented at any point and with minimal investment! What’s next for us at Avid? We’re taking lessons from our Customer Support Team to create a Candidate Help Center with loads of information about our programs. With staff testimonials, Day in the Life overviews for each of our camps, and plenty of resources to help candidates excel in our interview process, we are continuing to elevate our hiring game with a focus on transparency and candidate self service. Hiring is always evolving and by melding the scrappiness of startups with the incredible values of our industry, summer camps can pave the way for what great candidate experience looks like for a seasonal position. 

This blog was written on behalf of Project Real Job, whose purpose is to support camps in their efforts to recruit, hire, and retain staff.

Before coming to Avid4 Adventure in 2023, Tori Madsen (she/her, talent acquisition manager at Avid4 Adventure) gained a breadth of experience in youth development and recruiting. A former Boys & Girls Club Director and Recruiter for Denver City’s Parks and Recreation Department, she went on to spend several years wearing multiple hats in HR, Talent Acquisition, and Business Operations for tech startups. Tori has a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification and Master’s in Public Administration, Nonprofit Management from CU Denver. In her spare time, she enjoys SUPing, hiking with her young family, and the rare opportunity for international travel. 

You can reach Tori at torim@avid4.com to connect, network, and chat through any of the above blog content. 

Photo courtesy of Camp El Tesoro