Fabio Cerpelloni speaks to Hadar Shemesh about the importance of teacher recruitment and retention for her school, Accent’s Way English.
Q: How did you start your journey in creating your team at Accent’s Way English?
I started on my own in 2014 as a teacher and content creator on YouTube. I used to teach one-to-one and then started teaching groups. At some point, I felt I was at capacity and realised I needed someone else, so I had to shift my marketing a little bit.
Two years later, I found my first teacher. She had a linguistic background, but I wanted to make sure my students would still get the same quality of teaching even if they didn’t learn with me. So I created the outline for my training curriculum for my new employee and trained her to do what I was doing back then, which was mainly pronunciation teaching. Now it’s more varied, and I have several coaches who do different things. But back then, I was only training her to be a pronunciation coach. That’s when it all started.
Q: How did your team keep growing?
In 2017, I started my online business and hired another teacher who used to teach one-to-one with me. As the business grew, the number of students grew to the point I wasn’t able to manage it all by myself. I needed administrative help too, so I hired people here and there.
The business grew even bigger in 2020 when I developed a training program for teachers. It was called ETA, English Teachers Academy. It was a program to help teachers understand how to teach pronunciation in a simple way and how to build their own online business. I opened it right at the beginning of the pandemic, which was good timing because everyone was shifting to teaching online.
Many different educators from around the world joined.
I started approaching those who stuck out and asked them to work for my online school. I was lucky because I got to meet a lot of incredible people who trained with my content. So, all the other teachers who work with me today come from the ETA. Jelena, my head of training, is someone who used to be a student of mine. Marcela, who is our grammar queen in one of my programs, was a member of that community, too.
The training process was an opportunity for me to see if they were really committed. It allowed me to see how much effort they put into really learning or relearning what they knew so they could work with me.
Q: What qualities do you look for when recruiting educators and staff for your team?
Emotional intelligence. Passion and compassion. I hire people who can actually see who’s in front of them. If a teacher can understand what the person in front of them needs and can adapt to and facilitate the content, that is so much more important to me than just delivering the curriculum. The bar is really high. If I want the quality of teaching to remain the same as if I were to teach, then I need to be very strict about what I expect from my teachers and how I want them to show up.
Q: Do you require candidates to have any specific qualifications to work at your school?
I don’t because our focus is pronunciation and I feel the way we teach it is more intuitive than other language aspects. So if you were to apply to work at our school, we would first want to see if you can hear what we hear, and if you can recognise and explain the most important things. For me, that is critical. If we see that the candidate has that, then we move them into a paid training process.
But I would definitely require qualifications from teachers who would teach grammar or more theoretical aspects of the language. Right now, we’re not hiring for those, so we don’t have a process for it.
Oh, and I highlight non-native speakers as well. I would never, ever have ‘native speaker’ as a requirement, even for pronunciation teaching.
Q: Do you have specific strategies to retain educators and staff members?
I think my coaches love to work here. Okay, the salary is good, but it’s not just because of that. I think it’s because of our students. Our community is very, very engaged, and I think this is something critical for teachers.
Teachers like to serve. They want to have an impact. I used to go to companies and teach students who were not interested in learning, which made me wonder, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And I had teachers who came to me saying they used to teach students who would keep their cameras off in class, students who didn’t ask or answer questions. You really lose the passion for teaching when that is the case.
But when you have a group of passionate people who are motivated and show up because they want to learn, then you get reminded of what your purpose is, and you feel like you make a difference. That is really why people love working in our company.
Q: Do your students join your school with this high level of motivation or do they get motivated by doing your programs?
Yes, the program is designed to get them motivated. However, I attract motivated students with my specific content, which includes pronunciation, mindset, and transformational thinking. That alone gets them excited. And I attract the right people also because I repel a lot of people. I’m a non-native speaker, I don’t teach grammar, and I’m okay with making mistakes. For many, this is a big no-no. So, all of that is really what ends up leading to engagement.
Q: What opportunities for professional development do you offer to your team members?
We have a lot of processes in place. We run surveys all the time in our community and have a process for reviewing the work of every single coach we have. We give feedback and make sure they implement it. We also have a lot of check-ins with our coaches. We ask what they struggle with, and mentor them to make sure we provide them with what they need.
In addition to all that, we run quarterly training. I coach my teachers once a quarter and make sure they have a space to connect with me and ask me questions. I give feedback. I teach them a new topic. That’s something really important as well.
Hadar Shemesh is an online entrepreneur, teacher, and content creator with over 1M followers across all content platforms. Her mission is to make English communication simple, effective, and clear for speakers of English as a second language. Hadar and her team serve thousands of students from around the world in her online courses, and she has trained teams in large global organizations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and more.
