Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Stealing teachers away from kids!
The story I read this weekend that spoke to me the most about education was in the business section of the New York Times and it wasn’t even about schools.
The Times wrote about companies like Starbucks and Quicken Loans and Southwest Airlines — fast growing companies in need of top talent to keep their profitable momentum going.
And they’re eyeing your child’s teacher for their newest coffee shop manager, loan officer or flight attendant.
Unlike the competition, these companies won’t sit back and wait for resumes to roll in. They take action. Here’s an excerpt:
To be sure, “people are our most important asset” is the most ubiquitous platitude in corporate life. But organizations that have spent years reinventing their supply chains and turbocharging their computer systems seem oddly content to keep hiring the old-fashioned way: by posting open positions in newspapers or on Internet job boards, hoping that enough candidates see them, and sorting through the résumés — what Mr. Warner calls the “post and pray” school of recruiting.
The story quotes Michael G. Homula, director of talent acquisition for rapidly growing Quicken Loans, the Internet’s biggest lender, who says the company’s leadership is constantly asking “where is our next great mortgage banker going to come from?” The story continues:
The primary answer, it turns out, isn’t help-wanted ads, Web site postings or job fairs. Mr. Homula and his 34-member department have mastered the art of discovering talented candidates in unlikely places. This month, for example, they organized a “road rally” in which teams of recruiters blitzed a carefully selected group of shopping malls.
They spent hours inside stores like Best Buy and Circuit City and restaurants like T.G.I. Friday’s. They walked the aisles, bought merchandise, ordered meals and hunted for employees and managers who stood out by virtue of their energy, enthusiasm and rapport with customers.
“Too many companies focus on industry experience when they recruit,” Mr. Homula said. “We’re after certain kinds of people, not people from a certain business. We’ve turned waiters and waitresses into great mortgage bankers. We’ve hired soap-opera actors and electricians. We can teach people about finance. We can’t teach passion, urgency and a willingness to go the extra mile.”
It may sound like an exotic strategy, but it’s not without precedent. The free-spirited Southwest Airlines has made it a point to recruit flight attendants, gate agents and baggage handlers from the ranks of, say, schoolteachers and police officers rather than limiting itself to industry veterans.
I was struck by the specific mention of looking at teachers to find energetic, enthusiastic people with passion that can be trained for OTHER jobs!
Isn’t this crazy? Shouldn’t this work just the opposite? Shouldn’t school districts, states or perhaps even the federal government be the ones sending teams into malls and restaurants, looking to steal away potential teachers to a more fruitful and rewarding career?
This put me in mind of a Realtor I met recently. As we rode in her Mercedes, she told me how she used to be a kindergarten teacher. She was Montessori trained, she told me, and she loved it. So why did she leave teaching? Her husband was a mortgage broker and it was his idea, she said. He thought they could grow his business quicker if they worked together and his friends in the business convinced her it was too lucrative an opportunity to pass up.
What would it take for education to begin stealing back Realtors and mortgage bankers?
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