People often ask us how we hire our language coaches at Rype.Over the past year, we've experimented with several different methods, and had to revise these hiring processes as our company outgrew each strategy. For example, our initial few coaches were language coaches that I personally have had lessons with, while traveling South America.And even when we began to see some growth, we decided to keep it an invite-only community, where coaches had to be referred by our current coaches in order to get an interview to join Rype.

A human business

A lot of businesses have built a product around software, fabric, or raw materials. But Rype is a human business, and our product is the quality of the coaches we put in front of our students.Sure, we have every intention to scale our business to its full potential in the long run, but just like Apple obsesses about the quality of every single iPhone that gets released, we are obsessed about bringing the best quality of coaches.

The best way to ensure this is to structure a rigorous hiring process that weeds out the coaches with little experience or those that don't represent our values and brand, leaving only the best to choose from.After vetting through thousands of coaches, we've learned that the coaches that are the best fit for us are coaches that meet these 4 criterias:

1. Love learning languages and is in the process of learning a new language

2. Passionate about meeting people from different cultures and is an avid traveller themselves

3. Have previous professional experience teaching online

4. Knows how to motivate and encourage people

Notice that previous professional experience isn't the only requirement needed to coach for us, because learning a language requires so much more. One of the biggest reasons why people never reach fluency in a language is lack of motivation and purpose, and just because you're working with a professional teacher does not guarantee results.It's likely that our hiring process will only continue to improve for quality, as we experiment, iterate, and optimize the process, but we thought we would give you an inside look at how we hire at Rype.

Rype's 3-step Hiring Process: Filter, Vote, Connect

On average, we receive over 30 applications per day, and over 5,000+ people have applied to work with Rype so far. While we're incredibly honored to have so many amazing individuals who want to work with us, it's nearly impossible to go through all of these applications.

This is why the 1st step of our hiring process is...

1. Filter: Making the first cut

After studying companies like Zappos and other companies that are world-class at hiring the best, we've found that these companies have mastered the filtering process. In other words, they made it incredibly difficult and challenging for initial applicants to make it to the next round.We transferred that process into our initial application process by having interested coaches to put some work upfront. We ask several open-ended questions that require creativity and effort (i.e. sharing activities they would do with beginner students, etc.), and even have coaches prepare and submit a 60-second video introducing themselves.

By asking applicants to invest a lot of time, effort, and creativity in the initial round of the application, we have seen that the level of commitment and dedication increases upon the future rounds.As a final step, we add a filtering process on our backend to only bring in applicants that fit our specific criteria, like minimum years of professional experience, minimum amount of hours available per week, sharing an introduction video, etc.

This filtering process usually filters out 80-90% of the applicants, leaving the top 10-20% for the next round.

2. Vote: Putting our students in power

The next step gets our students involved. By having our own students tell us which coaches they prefer through voting, it helps us:

 
1. Know what types of coaches resonate most with our students (to improve our filtering process)
 
2. Discover talented coaches that we may have missed during the initial application (we are human after all!)

Here's an example of what our video submissions look like:

3. Connect: Getting personal

As a final step, we get on a one-on-one video call with our finalists to perform a final evaluation of their language skills, professional teaching background, and personality fit with our brand.While most other language learning websites have left this part out of their hiring process for scalability purposes, we believe this is what truly differentiates our brand and product. It's one thing to evaluate a candidate on paper, but we've found there's so much you can learn about a person through a live interaction.

What will the future look like

Everyday, we're finding ways to improve and optimize our hiring process, and we know we're not perfect.As we continue to grow our student membership, we don't know if this hiring process is scalable. But we'll always make it a top priority in our company to deliver the best quality coaches to our students. Not just in terms of credentials (i.e. years of professional experience), but in terms of personality, adaptability, and social fit.

We'd love to hear from you

What do you think about our hiring process? Is there any suggestions you have to improve our process?