Creative Director (Video)

Who We Are:

Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers.

Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708.

By contrast, our ten-person team has locked in 9 figures in government contracts and outperformed the job centers across 9 states. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren't just getting jobs—they're launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we're just getting started.

Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue.

Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale.

Why We Do This:

Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment

CONTEXT

Every year, thousands of people leave incarceration ready to work but with no clear path to a career. Emerge Career exists to change that. We train justice-impacted adults for high-paying trades and place them into jobs that change their lives and their families' lives.

We've trained hundreds of students. 89% graduate. 92% land jobs. $77K average starting salary. We've outperformed job centers in 9 states. We've placed graduates with 84+ employers and secured over $50M in government contracts.

But here's the problem. We're terrible at telling that story. Not because the stories aren't extraordinary. They are. Because no one owns the system that captures them on camera, packages them, and puts them in front of the people who need to see them: legislators deciding whether to fund us, employers deciding whether to hire our graduates, future students deciding whether to sign up.

You will fix that. With a camera in your hand, not a brief in your inbox.

THE ROLE

This is not a marketing manager job. This is not a hands-off creative director job. This is the job for someone who gets on the train, walks into a yard with our students, sets up a shot, runs the interview, drives back, cuts the piece, and ships it the same week.

It's also the job for someone who can do that, and then come back to the office and run enrollment interviews with the next 12 students starting Monday. Camera in one hand. Audit-ready paperwork in the other. Both, every week.

Interviewer

Chronicler

You sit across from someone who did 10 years inside and you get them to tell you something they've never told a camera before. Not because you're performatively warm. Because you listen like it matters. You ask the second question. You wait through the silence.

You can run a 45-minute interview, walk out with the three soundbites that will carry the piece, and know it before you sit down to edit.

You write the questions. You don't read someone else's. You know the difference between extracting a story and earning one.

Compliance

You interview every student before they start a program. Every one. Not as a bureaucratic checkpoint. As the first real conversation where someone tells you who they are, what they've been through, and what they want to build. That conversation is also where the story starts, which is why this role owns it.

You make sure every enrollment is compliant and audit-ready. Government contracts demand it. You verify IDs, releases, eligibility documents, partner school submissions. You flag compliance gaps before an auditor does. You know whether we can stand behind every number we report to every agency. If you can't, you don't submit it.

Not everyone you interview gets in. You hold the hard conversations. You tell people "not yet" when "not yet" is the right answer, and you do it with directness and respect. Some applicants will be angry. Some heartbroken. You handle it. And you treat every rejection and every objection as signal: if the same complaint keeps coming up, that's not a difficult applicant, that's a broken process you escalate to fix.

Videographer

You shoot. You don't brief a videographer and review their cut. You own the camera, the lens, the audio, the lights, the gimbal. You know what footage you need before you walk in because you've already pre-visualized the edit.

You shoot a graduate early in the AM loading their first truck. You shoot the moment a student passes their CDL skills test. You shoot the welding sparks, the HVAC gauge, the diesel mechanic's hands. You get the shot because you're the person holding the camera, not because you sent someone else.

Your work doesn't look like a generic company promo. It looks like a documentary. Real light. Real audio. Real people.

Editor and Shipper

You cut your own work. Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, doesn't matter. You ship a 60-second vertical for social, a 3-minute documentary cut for a funder meeting, and a 15-second hook for paid acquisition off the same shoot. One day in the field. Three weeks of assets.

System Builder

One field day should produce 10 assets, not one. You build the playbook. Shot lists by program (CDL, HVAC, Diesel). Interview question banks by audience (funder, employer, student). Release form workflow that doesn't take three weeks. Metadata and tagging so we can pull "any graduate from MA earning over $80K" in 60 seconds.

You build the AI-assisted pipeline that turns one hour of raw footage into a written profile, three social cuts, a pull quote for an RFP, and a 30-second testimonial for paid. Not because you're cutting corners. Because you've designed a system that gets maximum yield from every shoot without ever making a student feel like content.

You treat their stories the way you'd want yours treated.

WHO YOU ARE

• You've shot real video for real audiences. Not student film. Not weddings. Documentary, brand work, journalism, agency. You've worked under deadline pressure with real stakes.
• You own your gear or you know exactly what you'd buy on day one with our budget. You can tell us why you'd pick a Sony FX3 over a C70 for our use case, or push back and tell us we're wrong about both.
• You've done at least one role where you carried a project end to end: pitch, shoot, edit, deliver. You don't need a producer to staff your shoots. You don't need a colorist to ship a cut. You can if we have the budget. You can also work alone in the field.
• You write fast and well. Captions, scripts, voiceover, the email that goes with the video. You understand that good storytelling is specific, not sentimental. Details land harder than adjectives.
• You're comfortable on the inside of a prison, the inside of a diesel yard, and the inside of a city hall briefing room. Same week.
• You think in systems. When you realize you're cutting the same intro graphic for the fifth student spotlight, you build a template. You use AI tools to accelerate transcription, rough cuts, caption generation. You're always looking for the next repetitive task to automate.
• You're obsessive about accuracy and compliance. Student data is sensitive. Government contracts have real reporting requirements. You don't approximate, you don't round up, you don't submit anything you haven't verified. You understand that one sloppy enrollment can jeopardize a contract that funds hundreds of students. Operational work doesn't bore you. It's the foundation that buys you the right to tell the story.
• You hold the tension between speed and humanity. You'll shoot hundreds of students. You'll never treat one like B-roll. Every interview is someone trusting you with their story at a vulnerable moment, and you honor that, while still hitting your shipping targets.
• You act like an owner. If a story is too good to sit on a hard drive, you don't wait for marketing to ask. You cut it and send it where it needs to go. If a graduate just got hired and we don't have footage, you book the flight.

THIS IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF

• You direct but don't shoot. We're not hiring a creative director. We're hiring the person with the camera.
• You think operations work is beneath you. Half this job is shooting and editing. The other half is running enrollment interviews, verifying documentation, and submitting compliant paperwork to government agencies on a deadline. If you see that work as administrative busywork rather than the infrastructure that protects our students and our contracts, you'll resent half your week. Storytellers who only want to tell stories should not apply.
• You avoid conflict or crumble after hard conversations. You will reject applicants. You will sit across from someone who wants this badly and tell them no. If those interactions drain you for the rest of the day instead of sharpening your resolve, the weight of this role compounds fast.
• You need a crew. Most shoots are you and a student. Some are you, a student, and a sound bag in the back of an HVAC van. If you can't run lean, the calendar will eat you.
• You're a perfectionist who can't ship. We need cuts out the door. Funders have meetings next week. Social moves daily. Legislators want a 90-second piece by Thursday. If you can't ship good work fast, the backlog will bury you.
• You treat student stories as marketing material first. These are real people rebuilding real lives. If your instinct is to optimize for engagement over authenticity, you'll produce content that feels hollow. And students will stop opening up to you.
• You're uncomfortable with sensitive subject matter. You'll hear about incarceration, addiction, family separation, violence, poverty. If that overwhelms you instead of motivating you, this isn't the right fit.
• You need clear lanes. Some weeks you'll spend Monday in a Bronx training site, Tuesday in the edit, Wednesday on a funder pitch, Thursday in a yard at 6am, Friday writing the captions. If "that's not in my job description" is a phrase you reach for, you won't last here.
• You wait to be told what to shoot. If you see a graduate's first paycheck story, an employer testimonial we should've captured last week, a moment in class that's quietly the best thing happening at Emerge, and your instinct is to flag it instead of fix it, the pace here will frustrate you.