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Transforming seasonal hiring across six overnight camps
Client
The Fresh Air Fund
550+ seasonal staff across six overnight camps
Role
The Fresh Air Fund
Through a multi-year partnership, CampHire has helped The Fresh Air Fund staff its camps so thousands of New York City children can attend each summer.
The Partnership
The Fresh Air Fund runs six overnight camps that serve over 2,000 young people from New York City each summer. That scale requires more than 550 seasonal hires—counselors, kitchen staff, lifeguards, nurses, and more. But each camp had been managing its own recruiting process in isolation. There was no shared system, no coordinated strategy, and little insight into what was working.
Directors were overwhelmed. Recruiting happened in spreadsheets and email threads, with no centralized tool to manage candidates or track progress. That’s when the CEO called CampHire.
We came in as a full-season recruiting partner—embedded in the organization, leading the process from start to finish. CampHire managed job boards, application flow, interview scheduling, and candidate communication, so directors could focus on evaluating talent instead of chasing paperwork.
The Search
We started with a full audit of Fresh Air’s hiring ecosystem: platforms, processes, and people. From there, we rebuilt the operation from the ground up. We introduced an applicant tracking system that gave real-time visibility across all six camps. We streamlined job board usage, implemented centralized interview scheduling, standardized feedback, and automated communication with candidates.
One of the biggest unlocks came from focusing on Indeed. We worked directly with their nonprofit team to target campaigns across NYC, optimize job titles, and test different formats weekly. The result: Fresh Air climbed to #3 in the country for nonprofit recruiting traffic on the platform.
The Hire
For the first time in recent memory, all six camps were fully staffed before the first day of summer.
Directors had access to a shared candidate pool and could schedule interviews faster. Stronger local pipelines meant reduced reliance on international hires and improved retention from the boroughs.
The system worked. It was easier, faster, more transparent—and ultimately, more mission-aligned.