Achievement First cuts 35% of time spent scheduling each interview

Achievement First + VidCruiter

We had the pleasure of working with Achievement First in 2017 to help them manage their high volume of applications. After a brief hiatus, Achievement First came back to VidCruiter in 2021 for assistance with their "reference check" process. To learn more about their story, we sat down with Nibette Aning, Achievement First’s Director of Recruitment Data and Operations. Nibette has been working with Achievement First for 11 years and she oversees the full recruitment process, making sure it’s streamlined and equitable for all candidates.

About Achievement First

Achievement First is a network of charter schools, operating in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, USA. The non-profit network started out with a single middle school. Two decades later, Achievement First has 41 schools serving over 15,000 students—and this number continues to grow.

The Challenge

A small team manually interviewing and evaluating a growing number of applicants

Due in part to their continuing growth, Achievement First recruits a high number of school leaders, teachers, teachers-in-residence, and operations staff. “We typically place upwards of 500 new hires in our schools, every year,” Nibette explains. And for 500 new hires, the recruiting team has to manage approximately 5000 applications.

For the thousands of applicants that need to be screened each year, there are just 11 team members talking to the candidates. “It was time-consuming to talk to all of those people and a challenge to find times that worked for both our team and the applicants,” Nibette adds. The situation was even more challenging during COVID-19 when many team members (and applicants) were juggling with kids at home or a disrupted schedule.

Nibette recalls that phone screenings had limitations. “There wasn’t always enough information that we could collect in those 30-minute phone calls, and inevitably we’d schedule live interviews with anyone that showed promise.”

Additionally, Nibette tells us that there wasn’t a clearly defined standard on how to evaluate each individual, so the evaluations risked being inconsistent. “We only had notes from the recruiter for each applicant, and they weren’t in a centralized location. It was onerous to get the data to begin with, and impossible to be able to finetune an evaluation process.”

Achievement First also had challenges with their reference checking process. Their previous solution wasn’t able to integrate with their new applicant tracking system (ATS), Greenhouse. Nibette explains how, for a short while, her team had to manually reach out to hundreds of references. “We were sending a form to our recruiters, who had to go in and call all of those references which was a huge drain on our time.”

The Solution

VidCruiter’s pre-recorded interviewing and automated reference checking

When Achievement First opened an additional four schools last year, Nibette knew it was time for a better hiring solution. “We realized that it won’t be feasible to serve 50+ schools with 11 people doing this volume of phone screening. There literally aren’t enough hours in the day,” Nibette summarizes.

To manage their growing number of applicants, Achievement First now uses VidCruiter’s pre-recorded video interviewing and automated reference checks.

With pre-recorded interviewing, Nibette’s team is able to allow all candidates applying for specific roles to record themselves answering pre-set questions, eliminating the need to conduct interviews themselves. “For our teacher-in-residence and operations candidates, everyone starts with an application, and then everyone moves to the pre-recorded interview,” Nibette tells us.

Achievement First also uses a structured rating system which is built into the pre-recorded interview process. The rating system helps to ensure that all recruiters are evaluating to the same standard. The pre-recorded interviews allow Achievement First to re-watch and share video interviews for insightful evaluations. “The video interviews are recorded so we can have another teammate weigh in, too.”

The automated reference checking allows Achievement First to collect references without the need for recruiters to contact the referees. “​​We moved from a very manual process to using the VidCruiter’s referencing tool”, Nibette shares. Now, candidates simply send their references a survey-style set of questions about themselves, and referees answer in their own time.