44% Faster Coach Recruitment—With Potential for 91%
Streamlined coach recruitment and onboarding through a 60-day process redesign, reducing time by 44% (320 hours to 178 annually) and returning two weeks per year to four program leaders. Identified that future automation could cut time by 91%, saving up to 320 hours annually.
ROLE
Managing Director of Service & Digital Design
The Ask
Our team had hosted a service maturity workshop that unveiled the foundation of program was vulnerable - See maturity model of immature (red), developing maturity (yellow), and mature (green) services below. With the maturity model in hand, the executive team finally had a visual to explain why programmatic transformation was stuck. To unlock program outcomes, they requested that we mature Coaching as it was highly associated to student retention and one of the most memorable/highly rated aspects of Program.
The Ask: In a 60-day sprint, please improve the maturity of our coaching service so that it is easier to run, achieves the same student outcomes, and frees up capacity for our organization to re-invest in other efforts to mature program?
The Reframe
Rather than choose a broad but shallow scope across the end-to-end coaching journey as expected, we narrowed our focus to completely redesign the first third of the coaching experience, including the people, process, tools, governance, and intentional change management.
Design & Launch
LEADING WITH GOALS & PURPOSE
Goals and Purpose Statement enabled quick decision making, which was crucial to meet the 60-day design, build, and launch.
SOURCING
The first step was to develop repeatable insights about coaching demand to meet a 5:1 ratio, and coaching supply based on geography so that as many coaches as possible could be in-person with their coachees.
Image 1: Coaching problem, cause, and solution, Image 2: Total coaches needed for coaching following details analysis, Image 3&4: Coaching analysis charts
EXPERIENCES DESIGNED
A unified enrollment process, including:
A single interest form (as compared to redundant distinct geography based recruiting approaches)
Formal coach committee form
Training for all coaches
A Coaching playbook with all guidelines for coaching (Frameworks, Roles & Responsibilities, Processes, Communication Protocols, Resource Library)
Coaching resource hub unifying all coaching materials
COMMUNICATIONS & CELEBRATIONS
Our Business coaching lead proactively reached out and engaged with all leaders and functional teams to socialize, create energy, and significantly increase coaches for the next iteration of the service.
Image description: Single page communication about coaching enhancements and creating connection into the service
Results
Outcome | Status | Description |
1 Centralized Process |  | Moved from unique and redundant coach recruiting experiences across 20+ geographies to 1 coach recruiting experience across all geographies |
Time Savings | | Achieved a process that takes 44% less time to run coach recruiting, enrolling, and matching (320 hours annually to 178 hours). Identified opportunity to reduce by 91% so that it would only take 28 hours total annually |
Do no harm to Student Retention (four prior cycles 80%) | | 81% Student Retention |
From 3 to 1 Coaching Playbooks for the Organization | | One 18 page playbook (Intro, Frameworks, Roles & Responsibilities, Processes, Communication Protocols, Resource Library) |
Achieve a 5:1 coach to coachee caseload | | Unlocks ability to establish structured and predictive staff capacity models vs current state which requires program staff step away from other duties to fill-in |
Increase in non-student-facing staff applications for coaching | | 122 non-student-facing staff applied to be a coach for the July 2026 class. That’s an increase of 45% |
Coach Training | | 273 coaches trained in a repeatable 90-minute training (Purpose, Frameworks, Goal Setting, Responsibilities, Documentation, Privacy) |
Coaching Purpose Statement | | One Purpose Statement (see above) used across all coaching materials |