Who are you leaving your children with?
Yesterday we commenced our 2nd batch of educator recruitments. It entailed a long day of 40 minute interviews split between my co-founder and I. We both took turns to individually speak to everyone who came.
A 40 minute interview meant we could only do about 10 interviews a day. With an aim to grow our educator pool to triple digits by the end of the year, this process would seem highly impractical. Frankly speaking it was a process we could have easily outsourced to a part-time staff or even automated, but I am glad we didn’t. We took the time to talk to every single educator who came because we believe that to do things that scale, we had to first do things that did not scale. (N.B not our words, pretty sure someone at Y-combinator said that first).
Running these interview sessions completely changed what I thought our primary value proposition was. We had a vision to be the fastest childcare fulfilment service in Australia. To achieve that we had to quickly gain critical mass in certain localities. I thought we were supplying a commodity — every educator was the same and all we had to do was get the nearest one out to the childcare centres when they needed them. It was as simple as that. This entailed a plan to sweep up every and any educator living in Melbourne, or so we thought…
Yesterday, I met women with genuine passion for childcare. Esmeralda who wants to publish a children storybook on folklore said she wants to use play in teaching children about cultural diversity. Hema believes that children are born curious and educators have a duty to encourage that. Under her care, children are provided with science based activities to experiment with. Gai was a lovely lady who showed us hand written notes from parents thanking her for her care. One parent wrote “ I cant believe how much my son has changed in just one month of being in your room”.
Listening to their experiences and stories ascertained that delivering exceptional educators should be an equal priority for us. Hiring educators with mandatory qualifications and check are merely hygiene factors that give us the ability to compete but not the ability to win. At Shiftsimple our educator hiring criteria extends beyond these mandatory checks and qualifications. We are in the business of caring for children and finding the right educator to care for children will remain our focus. Once we get that right, it wont be hard to get our educators in all the childcare centres in Melbourne.
Never underestimate the power of compound growth
Doing the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time, but if doing so could set the right tone and make our first group of users absolutely love us then we are on the right track. Everyone we spoke to believed in the vision we were trying to create and personally said they would tell their colleagues about us. So yesterday we might have only spoken to 10 educators but we convinced them to share our vision with 10 other educators. Good news is we have a pool of 27,000 educators in Australia that we have yet to speak to.
The reality is we will be doing things differently when we are acquiring users hundreds at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually. But we believe by then delighting our users would have permeated our culture that it wont be hard to scale that process.
We cant wait to get back into work today to find more Esmeraldas, Hemas and Gais to join our community. So if you know of a childcare educator who looks at childcare as more than just a job, send her our way! We are currently recruiting in Melbourne.
