Organisation’s Mission

Now Teach provides a route for people with significant life experience to successfully re-train as teachers. They believe that older people bring wisdom, perspective and valuable careers advice to the classroom, and that to the system they bring knowledge of other sectors and fresh ideas that may in time offer solutions to some of the more intractable problems schools face.

Now Teach supports individuals to apply for suitable teacher training, find a provider that suits them and offers guidance throughout this training period and beyond.

The Challenge 

Now Teach holds an annual application cycle and runs a detailed recruitment process, consisting of an eligibility check, a digital application, an interview assessment and training offer. In order to run the different stages of their recruitment process, Now Teach was having to contact applicants individually to notify them of possible interview times, and staff members had to update their calendars when slots were confirmed and then manually send video conferencing links to interviewees for their online interview. Not only was this proving increasingly inefficient, but it also meant that it wasn't easy to view or report on interview outcomes, as staff were having to record interview scores outside of Salesforce. As the next application cycle approached, Now Teach knew it needed to increase the efficiency of its recruitment process.

Our Solution

First, we met with the recruitment team to understand the different application steps and their major pain-points in more detail. Working together, we mapped out the different stages and the actions that needed to happen within each, including a discussion around which processes might be possible to automate.

Based on these conversations, we designed a system that would allow staff to indicate within Salesforce 'blocks' of time in which they would be available to host interviews, from which individual, hour-long 'interview session' records would automatically be generated. We then embedded the interview script and scoring fields within the sessions so that they could be used as live and dynamic documents while interviews took place.

Interview questions and scoring embedded within the page provide a helpful real-time script for staff

Using Zapier, we connected Now Teach's Salesforce to its GoToMeeting account in order to automate the population of a unique video conferencing link on each session record, removing the need for Now Teach staff to generate these manually.

The Zapier integration connects Salesforce with GoToMeeting

To increase the efficiency of organising a suitable interview time with applicants, we built a custom interview booking site for applicants to access, which would display all of the available sessions created by Now Teach staff. By setting up email automation, we ensured that applicants would be automatically invited to the site to book an interview session once they had passed their screening, providing a smooth progression through their application journey. Once booked, the status of the session would update within Salesforce and remove it from the page. This triggered a confirmatory email to be sent to the person who booked the slot, which included the unique GotoMeeting link they would need to access their interview.

The booking site provides a professional platform for teachers to select a suitable interview time

The Impact

• The recruitment team no longer need to spend time manually sending interview details or links to applicants, freeing up their time for other tasks and making scaling the programme a more feasible option.

• For the first time, they have a central overview of upcoming interviews, as well as of the scores and ultimate outcomes of past interviews. This will allow Now Teach to report on and analyse the results to provide further insight into pass rates

• Prospective teachers applying to Now Teach can access a professional platform that accurately reflects the expertise of the organisation.

It was great to have people who know Salesforce well working with us to devise solutions, because they had ideas we couldn’t have thought of! They were great at discussing the project with us as it developed and made changes quickly. We now have a smoother flow of data through our application process which is automated and saves us time.

Becky Jones, Operations Manager, Now Teach