Georgetown Hill Early School Hires Smarter With iHire’s HR Services and Consulting

The full story:

Background

Georgetown Hill Early School is a locally owned and family-operated childcare provider with 13 campuses in Maryland. Founded in 1980 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Georgetown Hill works with over 1,000 children per year, providing a safe, clean, and fun educational environment. The organization offers programs for infants through first graders, as well as summer camps and elementary before and after care. With more than 400 employees, Georgetown Hill operates with a mission to join together teachers, children, and their families to create an unsurpassed early childhood educational experience.

Challenges

Georgetown Hill has been experiencing a period of rapid growth, opening two campuses in the past three years. To ensure it continued to hire the most qualified childcare providers and maintain the right student-to-teacher ratio, Georgetown Hill began re-evaluating its recruiting practices. However, recruiting in the post-pandemic climate made hiring childcare workers from an already small talent pool even more complex.

For example, many childcare professionals now prefer to work remotely and changed careers after COVID-19. Others applied for teaching roles out of desperation for a job and lacked the right qualifications and experience. Georgetown Hill needed to hire fast but could not compromise candidate quality in an effort to fill roles quicker.

Solutions

Georgetown Hill connected with iHire, an industry-focused recruitment platform that also offers customizable HR Services and Consulting. Georgetown Hill first participated in an in-depth recruiting training course with iHire’s HR consultants, which gave its directors hands-on insights into resume screening, interviewing, and other best practices for evaluating candidates.

Approximately a year later, Georgetown Hill partnered with iHire to further streamline its recruitment initiatives – iHire’s HR Services and Consulting team began posting Georgetown Hill’s jobs on iHire’s talent communities, including iHireElementaryTeachers, iHireSecondaryTeachers, and iHireSchoolAdministrators. iHire manages the entire process, from posting positions via its Job Slots (flexible, interchangeable job ads) to proactively sourcing talent from its Resume Search database.

Most importantly, iHire’s team is screening applicants, which involves reviewing resumes, messaging applicants, and holding brief phone interviews. Those that iHire deems qualified are passed along to Georgetown Hill’s regional directors for formal interviews.

Prior to conducting screenings, iHire worked closely with Georgetown Hill to best understand the qualification standards, requirements, licenses, and behavioral competencies needed for various education roles as well as the organization’s culture. That way, iHire would share only the top candidates with Georgetown Hill, and ensure qualified applicants don’t slip through the cracks. iHire’s HR consultants also perform reference checks for front-runner candidates, saving Georgetown Hill additional time and effort.

Plus, iHire has provided sample interview questions to help directors gauge candidates’ competencies, conducted strengths assessments of Georgetown Hill’s directors, and regularly discusses industry trends and topics with Georgetown Hill’s team, which they can apply to their HR practices.

Results

In just six months, Georgetown Hill has hired 17 qualified candidates (and counting) through iHire, including teachers, assistants, and a campus director.

With iHire’s assistance, Georgetown Hill is saving valuable time and resources by ensuring the right candidates are shared with its directors for further evaluation. In fact, iHire’s team estimates that it has saved Georgetown Hill over 500 hours.

“The candidates Georgetown Hill has found through iHire have been extremely impactful,” said Kelly Cromwell, SHRM-CP, Human Resources Director, Georgetown Hill Early School. “We usually know within the first week if a teacher will be a good fit, and this has been the case with all of iHire’s hires. The time savings and the quality of candidates have been the two biggest benefits of our partnership.”

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