From Startup to Success: The Schrole Story.
Running international schools is big business. With parents expecting their child to receive the very best education money can buy, principals need to hire leading educators from around the world. There is no lack of prime candidates available, but leading an international school is an extremely busy role. With 700 students, 70 teachers, and 1400 parents to manage, principals don’t have time to look at every email inquiry about work.
While recruitment agencies did a lot of the vetting of teaching candidates and held recruiting fairs attended by teachers and schools, ex-international school principal and associate for international schools’ education recruitment, Rob Graham, felt he was still missing out on good quality teachers who were falling through the cracks. Rob just needed a system to manage the flow of applicants while ensuring the best quality teachers were getting in front of the schools who needed them.
Rob started with a very simple yet effective app idea. What if you could take the same approach as Trip Advisor to find the right teacher for your school? Imagine having access to a platform where you could apply numerous filters to find your perfect applicant – already properly referenced, credentialed with all the information required for the school to make an informed decision. Rob had no idea at the time that what he was creating in his mind was an ATS (Applicant Tracking System).
Now he had the idea, he had to find the right people to bring his platform to life. A mutual contact connected Rob with The Cohorts’ Director, Reuben Reid, and the development of a clever solution began. Rob spent a week with Reuben developing his initial idea, “I consider myself relatively smart, but it was really interesting watching Reuben who is really good at discovery sessions, teasing out my ideas and eventually coming up with a coherent plan”.
The Cohorts worked alongside their creative collaborators, Unsworth Shepherd, around brand strategy, marketing and tradeshow collateral design, and naming the new start-up. Schrole is a mashup of School and Role, and although Rob wasn’t sold at first, he’s now a fan of the name.“It was staggering how quickly the name became known around international schools around the world, and it’s also a great conversation starter”.
Reuben and The Cohorts took on the significant task of designing and developing the Schrole ‘Connect’ bespoke SAAS recruitment platform, bringing Rob’s vision to life. The substantial project launch took 9-12 months to get to market, with ongoing improvements rolling out over the next 2-3 years. Rob has a vivid memory of his first experience interacting with the design training in Mongolia, “I sat down with a couple of my staff and as we went through we were going, oh my god, this is amazing!”.
The company wouldn’t be here, in this context if it wasn’t for Reuben and his team, they were fantastic at coming up with a coherent platform everyone loved.
Schrole Founder
The Cohorts successfully established the Schrole brand and Connect platform as a market leader in the education recruitment sector that continues to grow and develop, reaching new markets and getting the right candidate in front of principals at schools across the globe.
Although Rob is quick to point out he doesn’t believe Schrole is a recruitment company, “I believe we were providing a solution to help schools get the right teachers and we didn’t charge placement fees like recruitment agencies did and we didn’t manage candidates.”
Within the first year, Schrole had 12 international schools on board and 10,000 loaded candidates. Eventually, The Cohorts handed the platform over to Schrole’s in-house development team, who continued to build and innovate, enhancing the product and staying ahead of the competition.
Eventually The Cohorts handed the platform over to Schrole’s in-house development team, who continued to build and innovate enhancing the product and staying ahead of the competition. Rob is forever grateful for the vital role The Cohorts played in the success of the system, “Reuben and the team had a lot of foresight in terms of conceptualising how the whole environment would work, and the community would look”. And it’s the initial concept which has allowed the platform to grow and develop over the years.
While it wasn’t an overnight success, 10-years later Schrole is one of the top two platforms for teaching placements in the world and has hundreds of thousands of teachers in their system, successfully placing educators in over 450 International Schools everywhere.
The success of the company didn’t go unnoticed with education technology company TES Global approaching Rob and Schrole’s shareholders with an 18.5 million offer they couldn’t refuse.
With TES supporting 19,000 UK, Australian and international schools with various digital solutions, there was a strong synergy between the two entities, and it made perfect sense to incorporate the Schrole platform to enhance their offering with an established ATS (applicant tracking system) to their clients. And Rob couldn’t be happier, “I think being recognised by another company, that you’re good enough that they want to buy you is a really great outcome. I set out to provide a system that would help schools find the best teachers and make sure every kids gets a great educations, no matter where they are, and absolutely did that”.
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