Many manuals have been written about job interviews. Students of human resources management faculties take part in workshops lasting many hours to be well-prepared for the job of a recruiter. During those workshops, they create various scenarios of job interviews or other forms of meetings with candidates for the offered position. Nevertheless, none of them seems to have become an expert in the recruitment of foreign language tutors for private language schools.
Who should be such an expert? You are the expert as regards language school management. And you don’t need to have completed studies in human resources management. It suffices if you are supported by a good methodologist and a few of our guidelines.
The first and most important piece of advice: do not over-philosophize.
Do not create an expert recruitment tool you know from corporations, outsourcing companies or movies. You don’t need piles of tests with questions or case studies. You can just ask politely, and your school really does not have to use the cutting-edge recruitment tools to select the best candidate.
The second piece of advice. Prepare a profile of a foreign language tutor you are looking for, based on the group/person they are to work with.
You will be looking for different features in a teacher educating a group of seniors, for different ones in one teaching a group studying for high school graduation exam, and for yet another set of features in an instructor teaching an individual business client. What is the point of someone having excellent education-documenting papers and unique references from above-primary schools, if they have never taught five-year-olds and you are just launching a course for kindergarten kids?
Set his papers aside for some other time. And during the job interview with a selected candidate try to obtain as much info as possible about their previous educational experiences with the profile of people you are currently looking for a teacher for. Ask about their feelings, difficulties, funny situations. You will immediately grasp if they felt comfortable teaching a given group. This is also a good moment to ass indirect psychological questions, which will help verify the educational and got to didactic predispositions of a candidate.
The third piece of advice. Ask about details.
Anyone knows the generalities. Even if they are not foreign language tutors, they can guess those general rules.
So don’t wait and if a candidate says a truism like kids should be taught through fun, immediately ask specifically: what specific game would you recommend for a group of kids aged 5-6 to help them remember new names of colours?
Or: What exercises aimed to consolidate listening comprehension competencies would you apply to business language classes of B1 level?
Answering questions of this type sometimes require a moment of reflection, so take into consideration the time you need devote to the interview. If you decide to hire a student or a graduate with short experience, don’t be afraid to ask such type of questions also to them.
The answers (which they will have to make up because they are unable to present the result of their prior observations) will let you assess if you are dealing with someone passionate about this kind of work, a person having some potential, or if this is an accidental person.
Fourth. Imagine such a situation: a few candidates meet your expectations, and you can afford hiring only one.
Confront them with each other. Invite them to the second stage, this time of group recruitment, during which they will be able to prove their didactic skills working with a chosen group of students. Of course just warn them beforehand how they should prepare for that. Assign a part of the lesson to prepare to each of them.
And if you don’t have a group they can be working with, perhaps you can assign to the formulation and presentation of some methodology? Tasks for some specific issues? Exercise materials? See them working live in a situation that is slightly stressful and watched by their rivals. Will they be as self-confident as during the one-on-one interview?
And last but not least, the fifth piece of advice. Talk with candidates politely and warmly.
Even if you ask a difficult question and they don’t know an answer, don’t let them feel non-great. This is not about proving they are not prepared or reveal their shortcomings. This is about finding the best candidate. So during those personal contacts with candidates, you should always be guided by this positive goal, not by a negative one. Also, remember that anyone you meet is a potential carrier of the advertising of your school. So just like the candidates, you also need to leave a good impression.
In the next entry, we will be developing the topic of effective recruitment. We will try to advise you, the managers and owners of modern language schools, how to effectively hire native speakers.
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