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Revolutionizing Recruitment: Intelligence Is the New Advantage
Parents are already using artificial intelligence to help them choose schools.
They are asking questions such as, “What are the best private schools near me?” “Which school would be the best fit for my child?” and “How do these schools compare based on what matters most to our family?” They can ask AI to summarize reviews, build comparison tables, identify strengths and weaknesses, and even suggest questions they should ask during a campus visit.
This is happening before many parents ever talk with an admissions director.
For years, we have talked about Google as an important starting point in the parent search process. That is still true, but the search process is changing. Increasingly, parents are turning to tools like ChatGPT and other AI platforms because they are not simply looking for a list of websites. They are looking for answers.
AI is quickly becoming part of the parent journey, and I believe its role will only grow.
That leads to Rule #8 in my Revolutionizing Recruitment framework:
Intelligence Is the New Advantage
Intelligence has always mattered. School leaders have always needed good information, sound judgment, strategic thinking, and the ability to understand what is happening around them.
What is changing is our ability to access, analyze, and use information at a speed and scale that simply was not possible before. Artificial intelligence is a major part of that shift.
The question for schools is no longer simply, “Should we use AI?” The more important question is, “How should we use it?”
That is a much more useful conversation because AI itself is not the strategy. The advantage comes from knowing where it can help us become more effective without losing the human relationships that make our schools distinctive.
Parents Are Already Changing the Search Process
Think about how much the parent search process has changed in just a few years.
A parent might once have started by asking a friend for a recommendation and then searching Google for schools in the area. Today, that same parent can open an AI tool and describe exactly what they are looking for.
Perhaps they have a shy middle school student who loves the arts. They want strong academics but also a school where their child will feel known. They may want a faith-based environment, a particular athletic program, or support for a specific learning need.
AI can take all of that information and begin helping the parent identify schools that appear to fit. It can then compare those schools, summarize what parents are saying in online reviews, organize strengths and weaknesses, and recommend which schools the family should investigate further.
That changes recruitment because your school may now be evaluated before the family ever reaches your website.
What does AI know about you? Is your value proposition clear online? Does your website contain substantive information about the questions parents care about? Are there stories, reviews, articles, and other sources that help AI understand who you are and what makes your school different?
If prospective parents are changing the way they search, schools need to change the way they think about visibility.
AI Should Strengthen Relationships, Not Replace Them
As excited as I am about the possibilities of AI, there is something I believe very strongly: AI should never replace relationships.
There will always be a place for the Head of School, admissions director, teacher, coach, and other people who bring a school community to life.
A parent may use AI to discover your school, but an AI-generated summary cannot look a parent in the eye and listen to the concerns they have about their child. It cannot provide the reassurance of a thoughtful conversation with an admissions professional or replicate the connection a student feels when another student takes time to welcome them during a visit.
Trust is still built through people.
Where AI becomes valuable is when it helps us spend more of our time doing that human work. An admissions director might use AI to summarize notes from a family conversation and prepare more thoughtful follow-up. A Head of School might use it to organize information before an important parent meeting. A marketing director might use it to accelerate a first draft that once took an hour.
The question is what we do with the time we get back.
AI should make us more efficient so we can become more relational.
AI Should Help Us Tell More Stories
The same principle applies to storytelling.
AI should never replace authentic stories. If anything, it should help schools tell more of them.
Imagine that you interview a student, parent, or faculty member and capture a meaningful story about the impact of your school. In the past, that interview might become one article and stop there.
Today, AI can help you take that same authentic source material and develop a blog post, several social media posts, an email newsletter feature, short video scripts, website content, and other ways of sharing the same story.
The efficiency is remarkable, but the source still matters. The story has to be real, the people have to be real, and the experience has to be real.
AI can help us organize, develop, and distribute those stories more effectively, but it should never tempt us to manufacture experiences that never happened or create a voice that does not sound like our school.
AI should multiply authentic content, not manufacture authenticity.
That distinction is going to become increasingly important as AI-generated content becomes more common.
AI Should Give Leaders More Time to Lead
One of the possibilities of AI that interests me most is not simply that it allows us to produce more. It is that it can give us back time.
School leaders spend countless hours writing, researching, preparing for meetings, organizing information, analyzing feedback, drafting communication, and completing routine administrative work. AI can accelerate many of those tasks.
It can help you prepare a first draft of an email, summarize a lengthy document, organize meeting notes, identify themes in survey comments, develop questions for an upcoming conversation, or research an issue before a leadership meeting.
The goal should not simply be to fill the saved time with more tasks.
I like to ask school leaders this question:
If AI gave you an extra five hours every week, what would you do with them?
Would you spend more time talking with prospective families? Visit classrooms? Connect with parents? Coach someone on your team? Finally spend meaningful time working on strategy instead of constantly reacting to what is urgent?
Those may be much more valuable uses of your time.
AI should never replace leadership. It should give leaders more time to lead.
Use AI to Sharpen Your Thinking
Some of the most valuable ways I use AI have very little to do with writing.
I use it to think.
I can describe a challenge, provide context, and ask the tool to identify things I might be overlooking. I can ask it to challenge an assumption, identify weaknesses in a strategy, suggest questions I should be asking, or help me consider an issue from another perspective.
For a school leader, that might mean asking: What are we missing in our enrollment strategy? Why might inquiry volume be increasing while applications are declining? What patterns are present in these parent comments? What assumptions are we making about why families choose us? What questions should our leadership team be discussing that we have not considered?
You should not blindly accept the answers. AI can be wrong. It does not know your school the way you do, and it does not replace experience, judgment, or discernment.
But it can be a remarkably useful thinking partner.
The value of AI is not that it thinks for you. It is that it can help you think better.
Better Information Should Lead to Better Decisions
Schools already have enormous amounts of information.
We have inquiry and application data. We track conversion rates. We conduct parent surveys. We collect exit feedback. We have website analytics, marketing results, open-ended comments, and years of enrollment history.
Often, the problem is not collecting more information. It is finding the time to make sense of what we already have.
AI can help leaders work through large amounts of information much faster. It can identify themes in hundreds of parent comments, compare results across groups, organize qualitative feedback, and surface patterns that deserve a closer look.
That does not mean AI should make the decision. It means leaders can spend less time sorting through information and more time determining what it means and what they should do about it.
More data is not the goal. Better decisions are the goal.
That is where intelligence becomes an advantage.
AI Can Help Us Personalize at Scale
Personalization is another area where AI can make a significant difference.
Admissions teams are often managing dozens or hundreds of prospective families at the same time. Each family may have different interests, questions, concerns, and priorities.
Used thoughtfully, AI can help a school tailor communication without requiring an admissions professional to start every message from a blank page. A family interested in the arts may need different information from one focused on athletics. A parent concerned about academic challenge may benefit from different stories than a family asking about belonging or student support.
AI can help identify those connections, suggest relevant resources, draft personalized follow-up, and make communication more meaningful.
But the standard remains the same as it was in Rule #4. The goal is not for a parent to think, “What impressive AI this school is using.” The goal is for the parent to think, “They listened to us. They understand what matters to our family.”
Technology should support that feeling, not get in the way of it.
The Advantage Is Not Having AI
There is something else school leaders need to understand.
AI itself will not be a competitive advantage for very long. The tools are becoming widely available, and the capabilities are improving rapidly. Before long, almost every school will have access to powerful AI systems.
The difference will be in how schools use them.
Some schools will use AI primarily to create more content faster. Others will use it more strategically to understand families, improve communication, analyze data, sharpen thinking, create better processes, personalize experiences, reclaim staff time, and make stronger decisions.
That is a very different level of use.
I believe the future belongs to schools that learn how to use AI well, not because AI replaces what makes a school great, but because it can strengthen the work of the people who make the school great.
The advantage will not come from having AI. The advantage will come from knowing how to use it well.
Stay Human
The more powerful AI becomes, the more important this principle will become.
We need to harness the power of intelligence without forgetting who we are as human beings.
AI can draft, summarize, analyze, brainstorm, compare, organize, and automate. Those capabilities will continue improving, but families still need trust. They still need someone to listen. They still want to know that their child matters.
They still need authentic stories, meaningful relationships, thoughtful leadership, and experiences that help them feel confident about one of the most important decisions they will make for their child.
The point of using AI is not to make recruitment less human. It should help us become better at the human part of the work.
Use AI to understand families more deeply, tell more stories, communicate more effectively, reclaim time, sharpen your thinking, and make better decisions. Let technology amplify what is best about your school rather than automate it away.
The advantage will not come from having AI. The advantage will come from knowing how to use it well.
Ready to Put AI Into Action?
If you would like to go deeper and begin applying these ideas to your enrollment and marketing work, there are three upcoming opportunities to learn with us.
September 17 at 1:00 p.m. ET
Andy will explore practical ways AI can support enrollment marketing teams and help schools work more effectively. This session is a great opportunity to see how AI can be applied strategically to the work school leaders are already doing.
September 24 at 1:00 p.m. ET
I’ll share practical examples of how AI can strengthen admissions and marketing work, improve communication, support research and content development, and help teams work more efficiently. I’ll also look at how prospective parents are beginning to use AI to research and compare schools and what that means for your enrollment marketing strategy.
November 11–12 | Orlando, Florida
For those ready to go deeper, Andy and I will lead a two-day, hands-on experience at The First Academy in Orlando. We’ll explore how AI is changing the parent search process, how schools can improve their visibility in AI-generated results, and how enrollment marketing teams can build practical AI skills, workflows, projects, and systems they can use every day.
