Social Media Lead

About the role We're hiring our first AI-forward social media to build our social channels. If you're obsessed with performance, love end-to-end ownership, and want to build an acquisition engine for a mission that changes lives, you'll thrive here. Who You Are You understand that content is distribution, and that for our audience that means social first. We capture some of the most powerful real stories in workforce development, and most of them never get told well. You change that. You can take a raw graduation clip or a five-minute student interview and cut three things from it: a hook for TikTok and Reels, a written story for SEO and AEO, and a referral asset alumni actually want to share. You measure content like a growth channel, not a brand exercise: reach, watch time, and how many of those views turn into an enrollment. And you've proven you can do it: you've personally grown an account to millions of views and 10K+ followers, and you can point to the content strategy that got it there. You believe everyone deserves a second chance. This isn't a cause you discovered in the job description. You've thought deeply about poverty, incarceration, and opportunity—and you want your work to matter. You understand that behind every campaign metric is a real person trying to change their life. That weight drives you, not burdens you. You have a genuine point of view on social marketing. You know what works, what's overrated, and what most teams get wrong. You don't default to best practices when your instincts say otherwise. You have opinions on creative, on channels, on messaging—and you're willing to defend them with data. Safe, hedge-everything marketing bores you. You are AI-native, not AI-curious. You've built real workflows that compress hours into minutes—automated creative testing pipelines, AI-assisted email systems, reporting dashboards that update themselves. You think like an orchestrator: breaking work into discrete tasks, routing each to the right agent, and stitching outputs together into something production-ready. You maintain your own repo of AI skills and workflows—version-controlled, documented, and shared with teammates—and you help others build their own so the whole organization compounds. If you're still at the stage of typing questions into a chat interface or don't know how to set up an MCP connection, this role isn't for you. The gap between a marketer who builds these systems and one who doesn't is now measured in 10x output, not 10% efficiency. You are data-driven and creatively rigorous. You don't guess about what's working—you measure it. You obsess over attribution: you want to know not just how many students enrolled, but which channel, which creative, which touchpoint drove the decision. But you also know that data tells you what happened, not why, and that the best creative insights come from human judgment. You hold both things at once. You are entrepreneurial. You're scrappy, autonomous, and low-maintenance. You don't wait for permission or perfect conditions. You run tests, see what works, kill what doesn't, and ship again. You're comfortable being the primary person accountable for acquisition—and you find that energizing, not scary. You roll up your sleeves and solve problems. No job is too small. You play to win. You stay optimistic when things are slow, keep moving when campaigns underperform, and don't catastrophize when a test fails. You're not rattled by ambiguity. You bring a "yes, and" mindset that finds a path forward instead of reasons to slow down. You work hard. You show up early, stay late, and do what needs to get done—no ego, no excuses. This isn't a 9-to-5. The average person at Emerge works 60+ hours / week because we care about the mission. If that sounds miserable, this isn't for you. If it sounds exciting, you'll fit right in. You are a straight shooter. You don't hide bad news or dress up underperforming metrics. You bring clarity, honesty, and accountability to every interaction—internally and externally. You are a clear writer. You don't need to write the next