Solving for Scale: Rethinking People Strategy in EdTech

4 Must-Have Approaches for the EdTech Leadership and Recruiters

The approaches that edtech leadership and recruiters must take to navigate this talent landscape are the main focus of this article.

1. The Talent Gap Challenge

New disruptions are quickly taking over the edtech market, and companies are being forced to build up specific capabilities.

Today, education isn’t just digitized—it’s diversified. There are new platforms. New formats. New learner expectations. Suddenly, the same team that built interactive PDFs last year now has to deliver gamified mobile lessons.

Product leaders are under pressure to deliver faster than ever before. Without the right workforce, edtech companies will struggle to scale. The inability to secure the right talent can be costly. This is because while you rush to hire, the existing teams may have to cover the gaps.

Why is it so hard? For several reasons.

• Technology is evolving faster than the talent pool can catch up.
• Skilled candidates are in high demand across sectors like finance, healthcare, and SaaS.
• EdTech’s global nature requires readiness for distributed work and tight compliance.
• Hiring is often slowed by funding cycles, visa rules, and shifting education policies.

Which is why, instead of scaling headcount, edtech organizations need to scale capacity.

2. How to Scale Talent Capacity

Given the pace of technological change, the window to build and adapt is shrinking. Hiring the right talent to drive an edtech transformation in the age of AI is not as simple as luring a strong team of data scientists and machine learning specialists. It requires a multi-disciplinary mix of skills: people who can build scalable infrastructure, understand pedagogy, ensure accessibility, and empathize with end users.

Start by developing a taxonomy of the skills you need to deliver your product vision, and then figure out how best to acquire those skills. Most edtech companies begin in the standard fashion where engineering handles infrastructure, content leads focus on curriculum, and so on. But as companies mature, this model often falls short. Cross-functional capabilities and agile resourcing models become essential.

Zooming out to the broader labor market suggests that boards and investors are encouraging leaner models. With salary inflation in hot roles climbing up to 40%, full-time hiring is no longer the only—or even the best—way to build capacity. In response, companies are increasingly embracing contract-based hiring to fill critical gaps without the overhead of long-term commitments. Deloitte’s 2024 HR-tech outlook points out that over a third of the U.S. workforce now consists of contingents — employees with specific skill sets working on a contractual basis.

This is in motion in the edtech space, too. Crossover, a recruiting platform used by Course Hero and Guild Education, openly states it “mostly recruits independent contractors, not employees,” to avoid the complexities of multi-state compliance. Similarly, Upwork’s Freelance Forward 2023 reports a 47% year-on-year increase in spending on instructional design gigs and a 61% rise in accessibility remediation projects. These are two areas of growing importance in modern learning environments.

At the same time, it is important to understand where this structure can provide a clear opportunity for advancement. For instance, EdTechJobs.io lists approximately 2,000 U.S.-based roles, of which 15.3% are tagged as “Contract.” These roles heavily feature emerging and high-demand areas like AI prompt engineering, curriculum development, and ERP project management.

By thinking creatively about how skills are sourced and organized, edtech companies can quickly build a strong team and hit the ground running.

3. Flexi Consulting – A Smarter Way to Augment EdTech Teams

This learning is the foundation of our Flexi Consulting model, where you can tap into experienced consultants, instructional designers, curriculum strategists, AI/ML engineers, and project managers who understand learning strategy, edtech tooling, curriculum frameworks, and how to plug that into your workflows with minimal onboarding.

Recently, a client needed a front-end developer urgently for a 3-month project. At MagicEdtech, we had someone ready to deploy within 48 hours — already vetted, interviewed, and aligned to the tech stack they were using. That’s the kind of turnaround that only works when you’ve built a talent pool in advance and have a fast, well-designed decision-making process with the client.

Let’s look at how this solves your real problems:

• Faster time to value: No need to hire, train, and retain full-time staff for every possible requirement. You get skilled professionals onboard in weeks, not months.
• Specialized expertise: You bring in the right people for the right stage, whether it’s a curriculum audit, accessibility revamp, or platform migration.
• Cost-Efficient Scaling: You scale only when projects demand it and cut overhead without losing quality.

We use AI-powered tools to screen and filter résumés, match keywords, and identify top candidates faster. Every shortlisted candidate is then reviewed by experienced recruiters who understand both the technical fit and the cultural nuances our clients are looking for. Some of the roles we help fill are:

• Instructional designers who can create pedagogically sound microlearning for mobile-first platforms.
• Accessibility specialists who are well-versed in WCAG, EAA, and ADA standards.
• Developers who don’t just ship features, but ask, “How will this support diverse learner needs?”
• Security professionals who treat FERPA and COPPA compliance as table stakes.
• AI/ML developers, data scientists, and learning scientists, not just with technical skills but who also understand how to apply those skills in a learning context.

4. Measuring the Returns on Human Capital

Here’s something worth asking: when you’re working with external resources, whether for instructional design, content QA, or accessibility, “How do you actually measure if it’s working?”

Obviously, it’s not enough to just track cost. The real value lies in understanding what the person or the team brings to the table. Are they helping you release faster? Are engagement metrics improving? Is the team spending less time fixing rework?

But for that to happen, the goals need to be clear. KPIs like time to release, learner engagement scores, or even volume of content delivered vs. reviewed give you something concrete to evaluate.

This is how teams are starting to make sense of ROI in human capital. You look at:

• Time to close a role, especially the hard-to-fill ones.
• Dropout rates—are people sticking with the project? If not, what does that say about fit and expectations?
• Feedback from internal teams—not once, but continuously. A simple 30-60-90 day check-in model often tells you more than any dashboard.
• And maybe the clearest signal: do you need to extend the contract or bring in more of the same talent? That usually means the model’s working.

Defining success upfront and then consistently checking how close you’re getting to it is how you start turning talent into outcomes. Not just for HR or procurement’s sake, but because content teams, product managers, and delivery leads all benefit from knowing what’s working and what’s not. And in this kind of setup, measuring people’s impact starts to feel a lot more like tracking product velocity because, in a way, that’s exactly what it is.

At Magic EdTech, we work with publishing and edtech leaders to tackle their most important scaling challenges. Through the right temporary and contract staffing solutions, we help them bring highly skilled talent to their teams. Today, we have an extensive pool of candidates that covers the entire spectrum of education and technology. Check out our Flexi Consulting Services to know more.