Background
Modern Knowledge Schools in Bahrain offers American Diploma and International Baccalaureate program options for Bahraini nationals and expat children alike. While the school adheres to an American curriculum, they’re also committed to balancing local culture with a global mindset. Core cultural subjects are taught in Arabic, but all other subjects are taught in English and 90% of the school’s staff is international.
With 2,700 Bahraini and international students, and a staff of more than 160 teachers, the job of keeping the school running is no small feat. When new Executive Director Daniel Hollinger arrived last year, he found himself needing to hire 35 new English-speaking teachers from around the globe.
The Challenge
Since Modern Knowledge Schools is committed to hiring experienced and certified teachers from the US and Canada to deliver their US curriculum, increasing competition for international educators has made this difficult.
The school’s only visa requirement is for international teachers to hold a bachelor’s degree in education. But they’ve found that their comparatively low compensation package significantly narrows the pool of candidates who are interested in working for them, since experienced teachers are able to make more elsewhere.
So, they got creative by widening their net to include more inexperienced teachers and those from English-speaking countries outside the US and Canada. But for Daniel and his staff, providing the best education for their students still meant spending a huge amount of time and energy to find the best teachers possible.
Searching for the right candidates, Daniel tried attending recruitment fairs, but found that Modern Knowledge Schools struggled to compete for teachers’ attention against schools offering more money. On top of this, he had to pay an attendance fee for the fairs, and extra fees for any hires he did make there. He also tried working with a variety of other online recruitment platforms and agencies, but found they were complicated to use and didn’t yield enough applicants to make them worthwhile.
Our Solution
Teach Away’s annual subscription provided the cost-effective, large-scale access to the candidates Daniel was looking for.
Following a recommendation from the school’s previous hiring manager, Daniel used the annual subscription to post the school’s vacancies on Teach Away’s job board. Given the high volume of positions they were recruiting for, Daniel opted for an annual subscription which enabled him to post as many jobs as he wanted and hire as many teachers as he needed throughout the year for one set fee; a far more cost-effective solution than purchasing job postings individually.
He found that posting ads on Teach Away’s job boards gave him access to a large and diverse candidate pool of qualified teachers from all over the world, who (most importantly) were interested in working for Modern Knowledge Schools.
And our user-friendly platform helped him implement an efficient hiring process: “Teach Away’s site is so easy to use. First, I quickly screen candidates for the required qualifications, then I’m able to get a good initial glimpse of qualified candidates from their profiles. If they seem like a good fit, I can download their resume for more information and go from there,” he told us.
With access to so many candidates on the Teach Away platform, Daniel found he no longer had to pay for other recruitment solutions, such as going to job fairs.
The Impact
Daniel was able to fill 86% of his teaching positions for the year through Teach Away, with exactly the kind of teachers he was looking for.
Daniel says, “working with Teach Away has been really beneficial. I’ve relied almost exclusively on Teach Away to help me fill the positions that I need to fill because I’m able to find qualified candidates from many different countries in the world on their platform.”
On top of this, Teach Away’s annual subscription saved Modern Knowledge Schools over 40%, compared with what they would have spent on individual job postings. And that’s before they factored money saved from being able to give up other, less successful, recruitment methods.
Daniel is already thinking about how he can leverage Teach Away to further streamline his hiring process and recruit new teachers for the projected 15–20 roles they’re going to need to fill in the coming year.
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