I worked within the recruitment and people management field for the last 14 years where I specialised in niche and bulk recruitment across various industries. The exposure I gained at big corporate companies allowed me to understand the value of having good processes and systems in place, and to be adaptable to constant change.

A fast-changing market is especially true in the online education industry, so when joining The Really Great Teacher Company in 2021, these skills helped me to set up a recruitment department that is resilient and grows with the demand.

I believe that the traditional way of recruiting is a thing of the past. Recruiting remotely as opposed to in-office has tons of benefits. Technology and video capability allows us to connect with candidates in the same way as meeting face-to-face, with an added advantage of reducing the time to hire. It also connects us with a global pool of candidates, which is amazing!

In our team, we have 3 ultimate objectives:

• Meeting and exceeding client needs and expectations both from a teacher volume and a quality perspective,
• Building excellent relationships with all candidates that we meet with to establish a memorable reputation and,
• Constantly pushing limits within the team. This includes building strong connections amongst each other and expanding our own knowledge and skills within the education industry and recruitment discipline.

We operate in a very fast paced industry where great teachers are in high demand. Because of this, time delays during the recruitment process can be a huge challenge.

Furthermore, candidates are often ill prepared for their online interviews. We do not only assess a candidate’s answers to our interview questions, but also assess things like their teaching environment, teaching equipment, use of grammar, intonation, word stress and overall fit for a position.

We do a lot of research before embarking on niche recruitment drives to gain a good understanding of the target audience as well as geographical areas to target.

Social media and referrals from our existing teachers are great ways to expand on our global talent pool. I also believe that it is important to continuously nurture a talent pipeline. We have been able to do this successfully because of the strong relationships that we have with teaching talent in the industry.

The world is your oyster. There are basically no geographical limits to reach talent across the globe. This is a big hurdle still when following more traditional methods of in-office recruitment.

Ahh, this is so important within the recruitment realm! You cannot be an effective recruitment team if you do not invest in a proper recruitment system. It ultimately answers the “how” of achieving our recruitment objectives.

A good recruitment system will allow you to track important measurables such as lead utilisation, hiring velocity, candidate pipelines and team performance to name a few.

The use of technology within a recruitment system such as built in video and other assessments reduces the need for human intervention, enabling the recruitment team to focus on the important things.

I do think that AI in recruitment plays a big role, opening doors to possibilities for better prediction analysis and can possibly take over the role of manual headhunting.

For us it is all about attracting the right talent and reducing the amount of manual intervention for recruiters. Time is a very important factor during the recruitment process; therefore, we want to make our processes and systems as efficient as possible, both for recruiters and candidates applying.

The important metrics that we track during a month would typically be things like application ratios and sources, time to hire, and our submission to hire ratios.

These metrics tells us a story about the volume and quality of teaching talent, and the time it takes to complete the recruitment process.

The sophistication of our recruitment processes and systems allows us to manage the talent attraction component on behalf of the client completely.