5 Tips for Mass Recruitment of Online Language Teachers

Build an Efficient Recruitment System that Delivers High-Quality Online Teachers

As language Schools move to Online teaching the recruitment of large numbers of high-quality teachers has become critical to rapidly growing an online language teaching business.

While recruitment used to be the domain of the HR department or Academic Managers, recruitment at scale needs a new approach when recruiting large numbers of independent contractors. Language schools will find that old methods and recruitment channels are not suitable for recruiting large numbers of online teachers.

This article will give you our top five tips on how to set up a cost-efficient and streamlined recruitment process that delivers quality online teachers quickly when your student demand starts skyrocketing!

Buy an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before building one

An applicant tracking system is the key component of an efficient recruitment system but they are complex to build. There are many “off the shelf” systems you can buy. Buying an ATS has several advantages over building one:

• Development resources can be focused on student-facing products

• Learn how ATSs work before committing to building one

• Deploy scaled recruitment quickly

The downsides of buying an ATS, like with any software as a service (SaaS), are:

• You may need to build your processes to fit into the ATS

• They usually cant be customized

• They can be expensive

When choosing an ATS for a language school there are some key features to look for:

• Cost and channel efficiency tracking

• Integrations. Will it integrate with other systems such as your LMS, LinkedIn etc?

• Security and Compliance. What are its security features and does it support things like GDPR?

• Application forms and knockout questions

• Automatic applicant interview scheduling

• Automatic stage changing and reminder emails

• Support for affiliate marketing so teachers and agents can promote the teaching job

• Cost. Is it a flat monthly fee or cost per applicant etc?

Choosing the right ATS is a critical decision and it is worth spending some time evaluating different options.

Understand and Manage Your Recruitment Funnel

Optimizing the recruitment process is critical to recruiting online language teachers quickly and cost-effectively.

The recruitment funnel is a way of visualizing the recruitment process to ensure that teachers are tracked effectively. The recruitment funnel follows a very similar model to your sales funnel. As you develop new recruitment channels such as social media, agents, referrals, your website, external job boards etc., you generate leads. These are then sorted into valid leads (teachers that meet your requirements in terms of qualifications, experience etc.) These teachers are then invited to interview, then complete training etc.

Your recruitment funnel measures the total number of teachers at each stage in the process and the % change. For example, you may notice that only 20% of your valid leads are booking an interview. With this data, you can start looking at initiatives to increase the interview booking rate such as automated reminder emails.

When designing your funnel you will give each candidate a stage tag that indicates where they are in the process. You may find that over time you have a lot of tags for both teachers in the funnel and those that have dropped out. Examples of tags at the top of the funnel may be:

• Incomplete Application

• Applied

• Applied - Rejected

• Interview booking

• Interview Scheduled

• Interview Passed

These tags are tracked through your ATS either automatically as teachers perform actions such as completing applications, or manually by your recruitment team, such as when they pass or fail an interview.

The ultimate goals of effective funnel management are:

• Constantly increase Total Funnel Efficiency (TFE) (% of teachers moving from Lead to hire)

• Reduce Cost Per Hire (CPH). The more efficient the funnel, the lower the advertising cost of hiring each teacher as Cost Per Hire = (Advertising Costs + Recruitment Team Costs + Training Costs) / Total Teachers Hired

• Reduce Time To Fill (TTF). Time to Fill is the amount of time it takes a teacher to move through your recruitment funnel. It is usually measured as the average time teachers take to move from Application to Agreement signing. The more efficient your funnel the more responsive the recruitment team is to increases in demand and the fewer teachers are lost due to waiting in the process. When you start this process it may take 3 weeks for a teacher to get hired. Over time you may be able to get this down to only 1 week.

Build Automated Application Pages

Recruiters only spend an average of 30 seconds reading a resume but the high volume of invalid leads (candidates that don’t meet your requirements) can be a huge time cost that can be more effectively used interviewing qualified candidates.

To overcome this you can make an online application form that screens candidates for you. Include ‘knock-out questions’ which automatically sets an applicants status to ‘Failed application’ if they don’t meet your requirements. For example, if you require teachers to have a degree, candidates that select ‘High School’ will automatically fail and receive an automated notification email thanking them for the application but rejecting them.

Additionally, you can build logic that assigns points to an application to give a general indication of the quality of the candidate. In the example, the higher the level of education, the more points the candidate is awarded. This allows you to adjust the number of teachers entering the recruitment funnel when demand for teachers changes. In periods of high demand, you can reduce the threshold to allow more teachers through to interview booking. If demand falls you can raise the threshold to only allow higher scoring teachers through to interview.

Set up a Teacher Referral System

One of the best sources of new teachers is recommendations from existing teachers. Referral programs allow you to pay teachers and agents for teachers. This both gets your existing teachers to promote your teaching positions on social media but provides a great additional source of income for them.

A simple way of doing this to add a ‘referral source’ field to your application page. Each teacher and agent is given a code that they promote to new teachers. Once the new teacher is hired the referral code is used to track the lead source and pay the teacher or agent their fee. This method does require some manual work, so if the program is successful you can set up an affiliate linking system. This gives teachers and agents a unique URL that when clicked on by a candidate automatically records the lead source and adds the payment to the teacher or agent when the candidate is successfully hired.

It is important to note that successful referrals are usually defined as when the new teacher signs their agreement or teaches their first class. This means that you are only paying for successful hires rather than invalid leads or teachers that are lost during the recruitment process.

A good example of an agent that will send candidates through these kinds of systems is our sister company Teach From Home.

Accurately Predict Online Teacher Demand

How many teachers do you need to hire next month? How many in the next six months?

Accurately calculating the number of teachers you are going to need is vital to knowing how much to budget for marketing and how big you need to make your recruitment team. Hire too many teachers and they will not get enough classes, complain on social media and potentially leave, increasing your teacher churn rate. Not having enough teachers is worse as will mean that you cant provide classes for your students and student retention will drop.

Ideally you want to recruit slightly more teachers than you will need, but not too many! A good target to aim for is having a booking rate of around 85% of your peak class times. This means that there are more than enough teachers to fulfil your student demand but not so many that teachers leave due to lack of work.

Predicting student demand and the necessary teacher supply is one of the hardest things to get right in an online language school. Student demand is not static and will change over time such as during busy summer months or when there is a large marketing push. The teacher recruitment team has to work very closely with the sales and marketing teams to base future recruitment on predicted sales. Keep a close eye on the sales targets and adjust your recruitment as sales rise and fall.

This is why it so vital to have an efficient recruitment funnel so you can quickly ramp up recruitment if sales spike. As you go through this process you will adjust your recruitment target modelling to make it more accurate. Check past year’s data to try to predict demand spikes based on historical data.

Need More help?

Recruiting large numbers of online teachers is a complex task. If you need more help check out our E-book ‘Language School Recruitment’ That goes into a lot more depth about setting up ATS systems, channel management, Funnel management, Online Recruitment Team KPIs and a lot more

If you have something more specific you need help with why not book a one-hour consulting session with Peter?