How (and Where) to Recruit Associate Tutors

Growing your tutoring business involves bringing on more brilliant minds to share the workload. Here’s a guide to how and where tutors can look to find the best talent for the job.

So you’re an independent educator looking to expand your tutoring business? When the workload gets too much for one tutor to handle, it might be time to consider hiring an associate tutor.

There are many great reasons to hire an associate tutor:

• Scale your business. Associate tutors are your employees, which open up ways that your business can grow by attracting more clientele, and save on your business taxes.
• Develop multiple tutoring specialties. With associate tutors, your tutoring business can start to offer your clients a range of different subjects, test prep, or other specializations.
• Improve the quality of your tutoring – and of America’s independent educators. By supporting other tutors entering the profession, you’re not only growing professionally yourself, but helping raise the quality of, and students’ access to, one-on-one personalized learning.

You can recruit associate tutors from a number of places: for instance, place ads on job boards at your local universities or community colleges, or via digital postings on popular job websites like Craigslist and Indeed.com.

Another fantastic resource is your local teaching fellowships, like Teach for America.

What is TFA?

Teach for America is a nonprofit teaching corps that has been attracting bright young college graduates since 1990. Now with more than 50,000 corps members and alumni, TFA operates in 53 high-need urban and rural communities nationwide.

What makes TFA recruits good candidates?

Teaching experience. TFA recruits are a diverse group of students who undergo teacher training provided the summer before they begin in the classroom, as well as, in most placements, state teaching certification.

So, as an independent educator running your own tutoring business, TFA recruits make ideal candidates with a track record of assisting and managing students, crafting lesson plans, and handling administrative matters.

Where can you find TFA recruits?

In addition to checking the job postings around your local colleges and those digital jobs portals, tutors who are also former TFA recruits themselves have access to the TFA’s own job postings site and alumni network.

That said, your options aren’t limited to TFA. For instance, New York City boasts its own nonprofit teaching corps, the NYC Teaching Fellows program. NYC Teaching Fellows likewise receive pre-classroom training before they head to one of the city’s high-need neighborhood schools.

What’s more, the NYC fellowship helps put its teachers through a Master’s Degree and professional development programs. And like their TFA counterparts, NYC teaching fellows receive one-on-one mentoring during their period in the classroom.

Other alternate teaching corps unique to NYC include:

• The NYC Department of Education’s own NYC Teaching Collaborative
• Queens-specific New Visions for Public Schools
• Columbia University’s Teaching Residents @ Teachers College

You can check out each teaching corps’ website for more information on reaching out to prospective job applicants.