Hiring Workers in the Micro or Hybrid School: The Process

Now that you know whether you are hiring employees or contractors and you have a job description and a good idea of what qualities you are looking for, it is time to actually start looking and then making your offer.

Advertise

Unless you already have someone for the position (in which case, I would STILL recommend the job description, skills, etc all written down, even if it is your best friend!), you will need to advertise. You can use Craigslist, a local paper or publication, community boards such as college boards, church bulletins, or community center boards, social media (personal or local groups), or pay for a service like Indeed.

You will want your advertisement to be a shorter version of that job description you wrote earlier. It might say something like “Montessori Micro-school seeking aide with love of kids to help in classroom Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 3. $14 an hour).

It doesn’t have to be long, but it should have the essential logistics and the top two things you want from the person (openness to Montessori and love of kids).

Application

It is usually best to have a short application that the person will then fill out. You can just use a Google Form for this. Ask a few basic questions, the purpose of which will be to ‘weed out’ poor fits. Open-ended questions usually do this best. You might ask “Tell me about your philosophy of education” , “What do you think is the number one thing children need to thrive in a learning environment?” If you are faith-based, you probably want to ask about their faith. Again, use open-ended questions! Don’t forget to also include some practical questions such as “what is your experience with kids?'“

As you review the applications, you can choose your top candidates and ask them to come in for an interview. Applicants you do not want to interview, you can send a form response to that acknowledges the application. Remember that if they are a ‘maybe’ you can just delay until you’ve interviewed a couple people, or just go ahead and interview. The only loss to you is your time in the interview, but you will never regret having met someone. More than once a candidate fell through for various reasons, and it was good to have met more people and be able to call on them rather than having to start the process all over again!

Interview

If you have never interviewed anyone before, don’t be intimidated! You have your vision and your job description and you know what you are looking for at the most fundamental level. You know a little about the person from their application. Now you are just getting to know a person.

Have some more in-depth questions ready. You will want to introduce yourself and your vision and how you got where you are as a founder. Tell them you have a few questions to ask (this helps to avoid awkwardness with them wondering how this is going to go!). Ask them for a little background next and their interest in the position. Then go through your prepared questions. Depending on your personality, you can be pretty casual about this. It is a conversation. You want to get to know this person! Give them a chance to ask questions as well and you may want to have a good idea of any shadowing and/or training times you would like them to do as well as if these will be paid (this can go either way. People always appreciate pay for training time, but it can be a set daily rate that might be lower than their pay rate will be or a set total stipend) and it is not necessary, depending on how much time you will be requiring.

I would recommend a good 45 to 60 minutes. 20-30 minutes is usually not long enough! You can meet at your house, or a park, or a library, and another tip is to line up a few interviews in a row one morning or evening. Not necessary of course, but it can be logistically easier. Tell the applicants you will get back to them within a couple weeks (or whatever).

Offer

Don’t forget to respond to all your interviewees in some way (never fun to turn someone down, but it can be done diplomatically-and don’t do it to your second choices until you are 99% sure your top choice is in!) and then offer your top choice the job through phone or email. You will really just be telling them they’ve got the job, making sure they respond to you at least verbally, and telling them what the next steps are.

Contract and paperwork

You will want a basic contract ready. There are many templates you can draw from. Ask them to sign this (in person or through something like Adobe or Jotform) by a certain date. Make sure any clearances required are also understood clearly and have a date for submission. Deadlines and writing things down are your principles to operate by!

Training

However you decide to train, shadowing or meetings, or both, you will do that next. You might have the person spend a day with you in the classroom and then also meet with them several times to go over pedagogy and curriculum and safety protocols. A good 6-12 hours, depending on the size and complexity of your program, is good to plan for this.

Payroll

Once you are the point of having the person start (this might all happen in short order, or it may happen between April of one school year and over summer for a start date in the fall. Hiring at the end of one school year so the new employee can shadow is a good goal to shoot for), you will make sure your new employee has instructions for how to onboard with your payroll system. This is usually fairly user-friendly nowadays with most systems and might just involve an email invitation for them to set up their account. Many systems will also be able to host the contracts as well as tracking things like time off.

Remember that as you work with your new hire, especially if they are in a position like teaching a classroom on their own, that you want a system going forward for accountability and support. You will want regular staff meetings and a yearly semi-formal review. In a small program, this doesn’t need to be a scary formal process. It shouldn’t be! But having a regular system in place is always a good idea. For instance, you will let the hire know that you will have a proactive meeting to check in each month or week or whatever, and that you will also do a yearly review where they give you some feedback, do a self-evaluation, and you give them some feedback as well. This should all be done in a culture of respect and honor. But more on that another time!