We are looking for a talented Childminder Recruitment Associate to join Koru Kids and help us grow our brand new childminding service (known as Home Nursery) from the ground up!
Our new Home Nursery service will pair families looking for excellent quality and great value childcare with passionate and skilled childminders that we’ve recruited and trained. This is where you come in – we need someone who is great with people and who has a strong intuitive understand of what great quality childcare looks like, to help us find the next generation of outstanding childminders.
You’ll be the face to of Koru Kids to anyone thinking of becoming a childminder with us – answering their questions about what it’s like to be a childminder and interviewing potential candidates to see if they’re a good fit for our training program.
Why this role is important to Koru Kids:
Making our new Home Nursery service a roaring success is a key focus for Koru Kids, and that starts with making sure we have lots of great people training to become childminders.
We have lots of of people applying to join the Koru Kids childminder training program but only a small percentage are the right fit. We’re looking for people who have a genuine passion for helping children flourish, who love being outdoors and who are committed to making their business a success. It’s not easy to become a childminder – there are around 50 hours of training to become qualified, so we’re also looking for people with a passion for learning, grit and determination.
We need you to help identify who these people are amongst the hundred of applications we get each week – you’ll be a crucial gatekeeper to maintaining our exceptionally high standards, and a warm and encouraging influence to great candidates who are on the fence!
And now about you:
- You’ll have a strong intuitive understanding of what great early years childcare looks like – perhaps as a parent yourself, or ideally as a nanny, childminder, primary school teacher or from working in a nursery. When you speak to a great candidate you’ll be truly excited to have them on our training program.
- You’re confident speaking on the phone. You quickly build genuine rapport with people and your passion and energy mean you find it easy to make a compelling case for something you believe in.
- Your written communication is excellent – you can succinctly explain complicated things and can judge the right tone when replying to people with difficult questions.
- You take pride in ‘knowing your stuff’ – you pro-actively fill gaps in your knowledge and enjoy finding opportunities to put it to good use.
You should also be:
- A People Person – you have a natural talent for building relationships and trust quickly. You’ll get energy from being on the phone and interacting with people all day.
- Humble – You take ownership of successes and mistakes. You value experiences and feedback that helps you learn.
- Fast-paced & Hungry – You’ll be thrown in the deep end straight away. We’re getting hundreds of applications a week and we need expand our team quickly – you’ll have to pick things up fast!
A Typical Day
9am – grab a cup of tea and join the company-wide (video) standup to hear what’s been going on across the business.
9.10am – you start the day by checking the applications inbox – the email campaign that went out last night was a big success – you now have a dozen email enquiries from potential candidates to reply to! These vary from someone wanting to know whether they’ll need to pay income tax on their earnings to someone asking if they can work s a childminder from their houseboat in Little Venice!
11am– quick team brainstorm on how we can improve our application form – you’ve been noticing a few people getting confused about the question on pets, so you suggest we remove it altogether to make things simpler for applicants. Susie, one of the operations team, is able to edit the form and make the change before the meeting has even finished! Fingers crossed we see an uptick in the conversion rate on the form now.
11.30am – the first of several scheduled ‘find out more’ phone calls with potential childminders who want to know how the application process works, what training and support we provide, how they’ll fill their spaces and what advice we can offer on setting up their home so it’s suitable for looking after children. You’re an old-hand at these calls now, and come away with a good feeling about each of the four people you spoke to – they’d all be great childminders – hopefully they decide to apply.
1.00pm – a welcome break after a hectic morning! You grab a sandwich and then head out to the park with your favourite podcast to make the most of the good weather!
2.00pm – you’ve got a busy afternoon ahead with 7 phone and video interviews for applicants to our childminder training program. 4 of them are shorter introductory phone calls where you run through the basics of their application and 3 of them are longer video interviews. Here, you ask candidates to do a video tour of their house and talk about why they want to become a childminder – you really enjoy speaking to candidates who have a genuine passion for helping children to flourish, and thankfully two of your video interviewees today really hit the mark.
5.30pm – Now you’ve wrapped up your interviews, you tidy up your notes on the system to make sure all of your thoughts are logged. One of the candidates you spoke to earlier was borderline – whilst there weren’t any ‘red flags’, you just didn’t feel their passion for looking after children: it felt like ‘just a job’ to them. You ask one of your colleagues who spoke to them previously for a second opinion, and between you, you decide the candidate wasn’t quite right for Koru Kids. You spend five minutes drafting a polite rejection email explaining your decision.
5.50pm – You quickly glance at the applications inbox to make sure there’s nothing urgent that needs replying to this evening before you wrap up. Thankfully there isn’t so you close your laptop and head downstairs to enjoy your evening!
Important things to know…
- Flexibility: we are happy to consider applicants looking to work either full-time or part-time.
- Salary & Benefits: The salary for this role is £22,600 and you’ll get 25 days paid holiday (plus bank holidays) – these will both be pro-rated if you work part-time. You’ll also get a MacBook Air and generous allowance for home office equipment. For any parents thinking of applying – we also offer 50% off Koru Kids childcare (up to a value of £7,000 per year).
- Location: this role can be done fully remote from anywhere in the UK, but you’re also welcome to come into our London-based office as often as you like if you prefer not to work from home.
About us
Koru Kids is building the world’s best childcare service, starting in London. We believe that every family should have the perfect childcare for their family to flourish.
We’re growing like crazy, are backed by fantastic investors, including top venture capitalists and business angels such as Michael Pennington the founder of Gumtree, and have won a ton of awards for our technology, people and social impact.
Our culture is informal, hard-working and kind. The team is an A++ when it comes to talent but our “no dickheads” rule means we’re also a humble and supportive bunch.
We’re also really committed to working with integrity, doing the right thing and building a company we are truly proud of.
We have always promoted flexible working and are currently working remotely but we will have the option of an office space to work from next year.
We can’t fully capture what working at Koru Kids feels like, but here’s our best attempt to give you a sense…. Every new starter in the Koru Kids team meets with our founder and CEO Rachel in their first week, to talk about our company values and what they really mean in practice. We recorded one of these sessions, and here it is. In this recording, Rachel meets with Adam, a software developer on Day 5 of his job with Koru Kids. She outlines our commitments to transparency, quick decisions, humility, continuous personal growth, recognising that we are humans and not robots, respecting each others’ time, and our no dickheads policy.