At Teach for America, recruitment is deeply personal. It is about finding future teachers who see education as a lever for justice. Paulina Hernandez, one of TFA’s 200 Recruitment Directors, knows this well. Each season, she reaches out to thousands of college students across New York City.

Personalized outreach matters but it is also exhausting. Matching each student’s background to the right message took hours and was an emotional labor problem disguised as an administrative task.

Paulina’s answer wasn’t to scale back; it was to reimagine the infrastructure. She created a custom GPT, Captain Hook, and trained it on her library of message templates. With just a spreadsheet of names, schools, and leadership roles, the tool could generate individualized, on-target messaging in seconds.

She reviewed the outputs and they were accurate. Not only were they accurate, they weren’t generic or robotic - they were exactly what Paulina would have chosen herself.

Now she is expanding the use of her tool and preparing to share it with recruitment teams across the country. The result isn’t just saved time, it is enabling Paulina and the recruiters of Teach for America to have more time spent doing the thing no model can do: building trust, listening well, and helping young leaders imagine what they might become.