Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors, driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech company.Jess Weems Thibault is the VP of growth at higher edu, a talent recruitment firm dedicated to the EdTech
industry. Jess is also an educator, a marketer and entrepreneur who has an MBA from the University of Wisconsin, a master's in secondary science education, and a Bachelors of Science in resource economics and Plant and Soil Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before moving into marketing and growth leadership, just spent over a decade working with middle and high school aged youth in various capacities, and giving herself a crash course in small creative business
management. Jess, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Thank you, Alex. Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you here. So you have worked as an artist, you've been an classroom educator, you've been an entrepreneur, and you've done a lot of different things before moving full time into ed tech recruiting. Can you give us a little you know, origin story of how you got into this field and what your educational background is like?
Absolutely, yeah. Early on, in my recruiting days, I saw this excellent. GIF, GIF, whatever you call it on LinkedIn, where it was like a guy sliding on ice. And it was like, This is how everyone gets into recruiting. And I was like, it is stuck with me. Like it will stick with me forever. Because I was like, it's true. Like no one chooses to go into recruiting. It's just you kind of just fall into it. It's fascinating. But yeah, so let's see, I went into classroom
education. After my undergrad, I did an intensive one year master's teacher prep program. It was awesome. went right into the classroom, taught middle school science. I did my five years and much like the statistic I was very burnt out by then. So I left, I took a hiatus, I had never really done much traveling, I was a painter on the side. So I kind of just did that for a little while. It was not necessarily the most
smart financial decision. But I did a three and a half month road trip around the country running free art making events in cafes bars, I did an artist residency in Spain, it was very nice. It was really important. I was also in a business mentorship program at that point in Western Massachusetts, which is where I lived at the time and learned a lot about business, but also learned that there was
so much more to now. So that's kind of I think, where I started to get this idea that, you know, maybe I wasn't gonna stay in nonprofits forever. But I did go back to teaching, I taught one more year in public school. And then I moved across the country and joined a private school, which is very different experience, pros and cons on both sides. I kept teaching middle school science, but then I also started teaching computer science. But then I finally wanted to get back to those
business roots. So I did an MBA program and became the Director of Communications for the private school that I was at. And then I decided I did finally want to leave nonprofits. And Mark Phillips gave me my big break to come over here. And I started as their marketer, but then it quickly became evident that I could do more things. So now I do a lot more things than just our marketing.
So you know, I think that story, you know, the way you got into this business reflects so many different things that our listeners will be very familiar with, you know, moving from the classroom into non classroom roles, moving from being a classroom teacher into administrative roles, like the director of communication, private versus public schools, there's so much, you know, unpack in there, and at higher ed, you you get such a front row seat into all of the talent
world in relationship to EdTech. And, you know, I wanted to dig down because I think that talent world is not that, you know, recruiting and talent is not that familiar to, to some don't it? Maybe you can just give our listeners some ideas about how recruiting firms like higher ed work, and some of the sort of industry terms that they might find useful in navigating that and in our conversation today.
Absolutely. Yeah, I'm glad you're asking that question. Because I think there's a lot of education to do around this. So there's different types of agencies, but I actually think that, you know, there's staffing agencies, which are much more focused on, you know, filling lots of roles for short time, stuff like that. And then there's firms like ours, which are sometimes called permanent placement. You know, it's not staffing, right
permanent placement firms. But in terms of recruiting firms, there's kind of a wide array range and it's not very cut and dry. As far as you know, stylistically, a lot of recruitment firms are what our founder Mark likes to call a lifestyle business, which is like you kind of have one main recruiter and maybe a couple support people. And that's it, you know, it's just kind of one person's deal. There are larger companies like ours, and then there's obviously, really,
really big firms. Those are the ones who tend to work with Fortune 500, companies, international, big corporations. So all of those types of recruitment agencies are what we would call a third party or an agency recruitment firm, we work with multiple companies. So that's kind of the big divide in this world is agency recruiting versus what is usually known as talent acquisition, which is like an internal recruiter and a
company. So we become valuable in a couple different circumstances, startups, right, after a series of funding, they need a concentrated amount of help, right, they don't need a full time recruiter to join their team, they need to build a sales team, for example, or they need a VP of marketing, or, you know, they need a customer success team. And so that's a really great opportunity for us to jump in and provide that.
Then, also, we see bigger companies that have HR talent acquisition teams, but they for whatever reason, either are struggling with a search, because it's just really, really specific, which that's where we shine is finding those unicorns, or they're trying to fill like four roles at once, or 20 roles at once. And they just, they don't have the bandwidth. And so then they'll outsource them to
us. For bigger companies, we tend to run more executive level searches, so kind of director and above, typically management, sometimes individual contributor, like if it's a marketing demand gen director, sometimes it's an individual contributor. And that's some lingo, too, that I had to learn coming in here, you know, just like the individual contributor roles, you know, it just means you don't manage people. And then you have managers, which can have all different titles.
And then you've got kind of that executive level, which is typically managers of managers, right. So there's all these kind of different tiers, but it totally depends on the structure, some companies are structured pretty flat, and some aren't. And it you know, the size totally depends on kind of
what roles are looking for. So that's kind of some of the ways that we can be valuable to companies, I will say to, you know, one of the core pieces of our value proposition is that we do see the back end of hundreds of companies, right? So a lot of what we find ourselves doing along the way is offering consulting, right? I mean, clients often come to us, and they're like, We don't know how much to pay this person, or, you know, we're not sure how to
structure our sales team. And we're like, well, we can give you the five different, you know, structures that we typically see. And, you know, let's talk through what might be best for you. So it's definitely interesting, having so much knowledge of so many different types of companies. That's something that internal recruiters, you know, don't necessarily have. And what
are the business models of recruiting firms like higher ed, do you know, when companies decide to use an external agency versus an in house Talent Acquisition team for any of the reasons you just said, you know, how did the financials work?
That's a great question. Because I've had people even when I say it, people get confused. So there's two types of searches, you can run a search contingency or retained. So contingency means that we don't get paid anything unless the client hires one of our candidates. So that also means that 100% of the risk is
on us. So we might spend three months on a search and not make a penny, because our client doesn't select our candidate in the end, then there's retained searches, which are typically it's a shared risk model, right? So they're either paying a deposit, or there's milestones that are reached, that they're paying, you know, along the way, with that shared risk, you know, we can also pour more resources into it because we know, you know that we're not possibly
going to make nothing. So those are the two types of searches. Some firms do more of one than another. We do more contingency than retained, but it totally depends on the situation and the client and their needs. In terms of fee structure. That is important to understand, because I have literally had candidates who haven't worked with recruiters before saying, wait a minute, like, do I have to pay you? Were like, no, no, you don't. So our fee is paid by the client, the candidate pays
nothing. And our fee is calculated as a percentage of that candidates first year base salary. So say the candidate makes 120k base, and our fee is 30%. You know, we're charging 36,000 to run that search.
Gotcha. I think that's really, really helpful. It's a world that people have had extensive experience in and others have had almost no experience in so understanding other companies work together how the fees structures work, what the different types of searches are very useful for I think anybody in the tech field especially because you do have to spin up teams quickly or find those unicorn candidates that happens
a lot. So we have to talk about at this moment, we are having this conversation on a day in which Silicon Valley Bank failed, in which the tech world as a whole is a little bit in some thrashing kind of time period that profitability has become the new watchword, which has led to many, many layoffs over the last year or two, according to layoffs at FYI, which is, you know, database that tries to track tech layoffs
as carefully as possible. There were 160,000 layoffs last year in 2022, which was a very high number. And already in 2023, in the first three months of the year, we've seen 127,000 more people being laid off. That is a crazy numbers. And, you know, as you know, that also has extended to tech companies, you've seen a lot of layoffs, often regardless of performance, just to sort of streamline the companies Pluralsight outschool, Coursera, Instructure masterclass. By
juice. There's many, many Big Ed techs have been streamlining this year. First off, I just want to get your reaction to that at a high level, what have you seen from your front row seat in the talent pool for tech and Ed Tech?
Great question. So, you know, I mostly lean on the long term perspective of our founder, Mark Phillips, he's been recruiting an ed tech for 15 years. So, you know, as we like to say, from the beginning of Ed Tech in a lot of ways, and, you know, he
is nonplussed. We actually just wrote a blog article about this is just, it's not unusual, you know, he's seen it come and go, he saw, you know, a big dip in 2010, you know, which was kind of the aftermath of 2008 attacks tends to have a delayed reaction to big financial, macro economic changes, and trends come and go, you know, it's all kind of a cycle. And, you know, yes, there have been some layoffs, I think Ed Tech has been more sheltered
than other types of tech. But I think, you know, we still have plenty of people who are hiring. And, you know, I think it really like the analogy that kind of comes to my mind is thinking about, like, the micro versus the macro, is on a macro scale, like, that's kind of the view
that we have, right? We see layoffs, we see reorg we see acquisitions, you know, there's a lot of consolidation happening, we see people get nervous, because there's an acquisition, we see layoffs, we kind of see it all, but from a really, really macro perspective. So it's like, I don't want to seem insensitive to those, you know, in the middle of this, right. And they're like, What do you mean, layoffs are real? It's just, you know, from our 10,000 foot view, it just kind of looks like waves
going up and down. You know, it's just kind of the natural rhythms and cycles, people are still hiring people are getting acquired, yes, there is a lot of consolidation happening. And I do think that that, you know, is the source of a lot of this. But that comes and goes to, you know, that happens in waves as well.
Yeah. And this is happening at a time when we're also in record low unemployment. Right? Uh, you know, it's just, you know, the macro economic trends are kind of contradictory in some of these ways. So you mentioned that there are and tech companies still hiring, you know, we just named a few that
have some layoffs. I'm curious what that looks like, if there's, you know, a lot of people moving out of their current roles, and then others looking to hire, are you seeing, you know, amazing talents go in and out and transfer between different edtech companies?
That is definitely an interesting question. Yes, we do, and we don't. So, you know, kind of back to our role, our typical role in the company. The other trend that we see is that we are typically hired to find sales reps, right? Account Executives, account managers, directors of sales, VPs of sales, that makes a lot of sense, because, you know, sales, people have a direct impact on revenue. Right? Their ROI is really clear. So I think most companies feel like that's a good use of a
recruiter. So in terms of just looking at sales roles, yes, we see companies, particularly companies that had kind of a boom during COVID really scaling back, because now they're facing the normal realities of, you know, schools not needing all those remote learning services and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we definitely see that
but all the same. There's still a demand and I think stuff whether it's ESA coming out, or as their funds, you know, becoming available or you know, starting to dwindle, maybe but it doesn't seem like they're going away anytime soon. And emphasis on SEL right now, especially coming out of the panda In the UK, like schools still need solutions, schools
still have problems. And, you know, yes, the focus of those change, but we still see companies that, you know, project based learning SEL software, this, you know, huge push to try to make special education services and testing more accessible. Like, it's just how have we gotten this long without this problem? Literacy? Huge right now, you know, and then all the workforce development, micro credentialing, there's so many problems, and so many innovative
solutions right now. And those companies are still growing, because those needs are still real. And the funding, yes, has to come from somewhere, but it's not going away. Yeah,
I want to ask you, because higher ed has been around for, you know, 15 years, as you said, and it's really
grown with the EdTech. Industry, give us a little bit of an inside view about how hire edu follows these types of ad tech, you know, sub fields, the trends, the investments, the acquisitions, you know, obviously, you're very familiar with the ins and outs of the ad tech world, tell us how a company like hire edu continues to evolve alongside the ad tech industry being created right at the beginning of you know, Ed Tech, quote, unquote,
yeah, that's definitely an interesting, you know, Mark, our founder likes to say that we are often struggling with the exact same problems and challenges and, you know, innovation, right, trying to create this same innovation that our clients are, because we're also a small business, you know, we have 11 employees right now, the company itself has grown and shrunk over the years, you know, I think Mark was interviewed on a podcast called the resilient recruiter a couple months back
and talked about that entire journey, which is an interesting story, for sure. But you know, there was a time where our company did not have kind of the emphasis on culture that we do now. You know, we have three meetings a week where we're not allowed to talk about work, we talk about food, we talk about our children, we talk about TV shows, which I don't watch and have no idea what anyone's talking about. But, you know, we have a really strong team
really, really supportive. And so, you know, we're constantly trying to invest in the right tools invest in the right people, to continue to serve this industry. So we're kind of right along with them in a lot of ways. In terms of our own company, like when I came on board as almost two years ago, part of my kind of call that my charge, as a marketer was to bring in more data based
decision making. And that led us to migrating our whole database, and really drilling down on conversion rates and all that kind of stuff, right. And now we have a much more data driven organization, we can really make decisions based on the trends we're seeing, you know, and on our end, right, that's like, how many phone calls does it take to get an interview? So you know, those are the numbers that kind of different KPIs or benchmarks that makes sense for our
business. So, you know, I think in a lot of ways that follows the trends of the industry, right? It's like, there's so much better data, there's better software now, so we can make better decisions.
So you mentioned that Ed Tech is sometimes in the lagging side of different trends. And indeed, you know, totally, when you look at the number of, of layoffs at different places, the number of you know, the reorg that are happening, yes, you have, you know, a couple of 100 people, which is a lot in ad tech for certain companies. But for big tech companies, these numbers are enormous. We've seen more than 10,000 people laid off at Google, Amazon and meta, each of them more than 10,000 at each
company. And Microsoft is starting to be up there too. So one thing I'm curious about from your perspective is, Are you starting to see people coming out of big tech companies, and looking at all those problems that you mentioned earlier? The, you know, credential space and mental health crisis and problem based learning and the science of breeding? And are people starting to look at ad tech as their next role coming out of companies like Amazon, Google Mehta.
Sometimes, I would say maybe at that, like mid career level, but honestly, one of the most interesting pieces of insight that this role gives us is insight into salaries. And tech still has much higher salaries than edtech. So for the most part, people are trying to stay in big tech companies, even those that are focused on education, you know, Google for Education, you know, Netflix, right, their whole education side of their production, their salaries are still a big jump ahead of the
small tech companies. So you know, I think we see less of that than I would like, but I think you know, mid career wise, absolutely because the other dynamic that We hear a lot is in those really big companies, there's not necessarily a clear path to growth, or if there is, it's slow. And if you can handle ambiguity and risk and want to join a small edtech company, there's a lot of room for growth, right? There's a lot of room for you to put your fingerprint on a company or on
strategy. So we do see those conversations happen sometimes where people are like, you know, I would even take a pay cut to have an impact in a mission driven organization with growth potential, but that takes a certain type of person to and most big company people don't make good startup people. They don't like it. It's just, they're like, What do you mean? Wait, what do you mean, there's no system for this? Like, I don't file this report with somebody? No, that's you like
you do it all. So yeah, it's
always interesting to hear engineers from companies like meta and Microsoft, they talk about, you know, l seven, and M L five. And, like, they just have this enormous structure really, really set structure for you know, how everybody's hierarchy and who does what, and when things happen. And as you say, it's sometimes slow, but it's
very clear. And then they get to a startup and say, Oh, my gosh, you know, nobody's even thought about something like this, you know, it's wild west in some ways, but also, I get to really make a difference, I get to drive this product. And it's, it's helping people in a way that people are less and less convinced, I think that the Amazons, you know, Microsoft's of the world are necessarily, you know, always helping, although your offer those companies do have education
arms, of course. Absolutely. So, you know, I've talked to a founder last week, who said he had received 1200 resumes for one open Ra. And a number of people we've talked to have been, you know, totally dated, when they put job listings out, is this par for the course right now? Is that normal? What do you see in terms of how hiring managers, either internal or external, can make their way through this forest of applicants for certain types of roles?
Yeah, so you know, the first thing that comes to mind is, this is why you should hire a recruiter. You know, we even have clients who have us go through those applicants, we did that recently, a client had received, I think it was only like four or 500 applications only for still a lot. Yeah. They were like, so overwhelmed, they pass them all on to us, we have a full time researcher, that her sole job is
to keep our database clean. But that also means then being able to find everyone really quickly, and she can very quickly look at somebody and be like, they have what the client wants, or they don't, she went through all those applications and found one person, one person worth interviewing. And like, that's how high our standards are. But this is why we spend like an hour or two with our clients right off the bat learning everything about them.
Everything about you know, kind of like what's not in the job description, regarding you know, what you want, who's successful, that kind of stuff is, you know, it's just, it enables us to have very high standards, and to really drill in on what they want. So it's easy for us, because this is our job, it's easy for us to like, look at profiles and resumes and know if it's a match or not. But I would say, you know, I've seen people use a couple different
techniques. You know, I've seen hiring managers open applications for 24 hours only. But I just, you know, I'm not sure that there's a way necessarily to get higher quality, like, yes, you can have questions, right? The more you ask somebody to fill out, the less likely they're going to do it, if they're, you know,
applying to 100 places. But that doesn't necessarily mean you get better quality, right, you might just get somebody who is laid off and has 20 hours to fill out your application, as opposed to somebody who doesn't. And again, this is where recruiters come in is, you know, when you have an open application, you're getting people that are actively applying to jobs, most of the time your ideal candidate is not going to be applying, they might have put out feelers to their
network. Lots of them call us and say, Hey, I'm good. But if you hear of anything that checks these boxes, let me know. Right? So we know who's kind of open to
new opportunities. So that's, you know, really different, but we do hear these numbers, and we do see them and I don't entirely understand it, because it's like, given the low unemployment rate, I'm just not, you know, and dubious, that issue of kind of being under employed, right, or, you know, people just wanting something better for themselves something with more work life balance with more flexibility, right. I mean, those are all huge concerns to
candidates right now. And I think also the pandemic really highlighted those needs for families, especially, you know, so, yeah, I don't know, it's hard. It's hard to deal with kind of that many applicants and no, I don't think there's a clear answer to getting only high quality people to apply.
So, you know, I think a related trend to this inundation of candidates and of people sort of swirling around the EdTech industry. And they may not be coming from big tech because of the pay cuts as much as we'd like. But one place they are definitely coming from in droves is the classroom, there's been a rapid rise of classroom educators who are either have already stepped out of the classroom, or are planning to step out of the classroom. And they're looking for all sorts of
different kinds of work. But adjacent fields are obviously very appealing. And if you already care, enormous ly about education, you already have a degree in it. Ad Tech can be a very appealing field. Last year, we talked to Eva Brown, has written a book about you know, that transition from teaching to EdTech. And there are a few other folks, especially on LinkedIn, who are really trying to support that community, you must be seeing tons of classroom teachers who are looking to
break into edtech. So my question for you and you are one. Right, so my question is, what would you recommend educators do to make this transition? How might they stand out in this sea of resumes? How might they become an appealing candidate for all sorts of edtech? Roles?
datafile Yes, and I have a very well rehearsed speech on this. Since Yes, I do talk to a lot of transitioning teachers. And you know, I've given this a ton of thought, you know, and when I was in the middle of trying to get out of the classroom, it really felt like I was clawing my way out, it was, you know, it's definitely disheartening to, you know, have people look at your resume, see, teacher and be like, Ah, no, that's not going to be a fit, right, just kind of that, like quickly being
disregarded. Transferable skills are a real thing. But I think what I've also realized being on the other side of stuff now is, you do need more than just transferable skills. But there's a lot of ways to get that experience. But the number one thing, and I'll talk a bit more about kind of that in a second. But the top thing that I actually tell people is, the number one thing that teachers have to do is wrap their brain
around revenue. When you work in nonprofits, for as long as I did revenue, money, it's kind of a dirty word. You know, people don't like to talk about it, you know, fundraising makes people uncomfortable, you know, teachers are so far removed, and their work honestly doesn't
change revenue, right? It might, right, you might have families leave a private school, if you're not a great teacher, but like, for the most part, like the money's not increasing, if you teach better, or if you teach in a certain way, right? It's just, it's so disconnected. And that's fine. That's not a problem. But if you want to enter the private sector, is a
huge mind shift. And so basically, early on, in my recruiting, I started noticing that I could tell who had come from business, and who had come from any sort of nonprofit background. And they might even be working at the same company at this point, right. This might even be like director level people, but I could tell where they came from, by the way they
talked. And because people with a true business background, who understand the role that revenue plays, they know exactly how they impact the numbers, right? Like a marketer will tell you 30% of the revenue growth last year was directly due to campaigns that I ran, you know, a product marketer is going to say, this new product, you know, took this percent of the market, right? Or, you know, they're gonna be looking at usage rates and renewal rates, right, like, we have a 98% renewal rate.
Great. That means that people are using liking and finding your product. Effective. That's awesome, right, like, so they think in terms of metrics, and people that come from nonprofits just kind of don't. And it's not a bad thing. When you're in a nonprofit, you talk about impact. You talk about the difference that you're making.
You talk about legacy, you talk about the stories, right, it's much more story based, as much as you know, tech and products can be like when you're in a nonprofit, it's about the lives changed, right? And it's about those individual stories. It's not about big numbers, typically, unless you're a really big nonprofit, and it's definitely not tied to money. You know, the work is besides money. So I totally get wanting to move from the classroom to private sector. I did it. I love
it. You know, it was a really good move for me. But I think that it's a big mental jump. And the way they I made that jump, well, first of all, I'd always had my own side hustle. And you know, being in a year in that business mentorship program was wonderful, really helped me learn what I didn't know. But then I went and got an MBA, which I tell everyone is complete overkill. You do not
need to do that. But like, I love learning and I was like, I'm gonna do this and you It was like, my brain loved learning all of it. Like it was so good for me to see how all the numbers fit together, right? And like an understanding of like operations and supply chains, right. And you know everything about marketing strategy, and, you know, positioning and I just loved it. And it really gave me that perspective. But that's not the only way to do that. Right.
But I would say that, when I look at the LinkedIn profiles of teachers that want to transition out of the classroom, I really look for evidence that they've done something, maybe it's during the summers, they help run a family business, right. Maybe it's, you know, they've done some retraining, some, you know, micro credentialing in other areas, honestly, even just like HubSpot certifications, tell me that they're at least, you know, investing in
themselves. The way that I really started to get out of the classroom was through committee work in my school. Right, I ran was part of like this marketing committee, and then I ran two of the subcommittee's, you know, I got the school to send me to a social media marketing training that final site was putting on in the Bay Area. So not too far. I'm in Nevada now. And so, you know, it was a driving distance. And, you know, I just tried to
learn everything I could. So, you know, I think that there's a lot of different ways to learn, but it does take some different skill building, you know, you can't rely on transferable skills alone.
Yeah, really
wise words. And I think it's something that a lot of people listening will recognize some of the, you know, many of the pieces of, but I've never heard it articulated in quite that way that, you know, moving from being a classroom teacher, or working in a variety of different, you know, institutions for which human impacts, you know, outcomes is your core goal to companies where, even if they have an educational mission, which, you know, hopefully most edX do, they are still very concerned
with, you know, for purchase cycles, again, funnels and annual recurring revenue, and that is a world that you just are never exposed to, in certain classroom positions. And I'm a huge fan, of course of microcredentials of all kinds. And it is, I think, easier than ever before, to find quality, low cost, you know, education, retraining skills, upskilling. So it's really powerful to hear that advice, for sure. mind shift, and a little bit of a behavior shift, go seek out the
thing. Yeah, so speaking of, you know, skills and in formal education, you know, we're in an interesting moment in hiring in the world, which is that, for the last few decades, more and more jobs have required a bachelor's degree, just to get in the door. And you know,
that's happened. But at the same time, the number of people with a bachelor degree, percentage wise has not been rising all that fast, you know, 60% of the country in the US still do not have a bachelor's degree, which is fine, but out if you can't get a job. Recently, there's been a pretty public backlash from a lot of different angles. The tech companies like Google and IBM have said, we don't require bachelor's anymore. We're gonna provide alternative
methods. Places like Amazon Web Services are creating whole suites of credentialing that are totally outside of the college system. Recently, Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, declared that, you know, Bas are going to be stripped from a lot of different jobs. And even the US federal government has been trying to ensure that most federal jobs do not require a BA. And you know, as you know, very well, this is an edtech
trend. I mean, a lot of the way this is happening is by a tech company, providing boot camps or alternative credentials, or micro credentials or other avenues of mobility. It's a core mission. So I'd love to pass it to you. Have you seen this start to happen in the EdTech? World? Have you seen a rise in skill based hiring or people with alternative credentials being able to compete effectively with those with a bachelor's degree?
It's a great question. I think we don't see as much as I'd like to, you know, be able to actually comment effectively on this. We work with experience people, right. So we get hired to find people who have done the job before. So in some ways, that is much more about skills, right.
You know, we often have jobs that the JD in the job description doesn't say they need a bachelor's degree will often confirm that just in case, but absolutely, like we do see people you know, with 1015 years, especially in in sales, which you know, it's just, I don't know, much more side to whatever sales training you've been on. We'll see people you know, without Bas and it's just no issue. So I think that's probably one And we actually we
don't run technical searches. So we haven't seen the impact that that attitude has had on programmers, right? Computer software programmers? Absolutely. You know, as an industry, I think that's a major trend. There's just so many other ways to learn computer science, we do see a gap, where we work with both K 12 and higher education companies, right, companies were selling into both of those markets, companies that sell directly to higher education, usually still
want a bachelor's degree. And I think it's just one of those situations where it's like, well, yeah, you gotta have the thing that you're selling sort of, or the, you know, the thing that your client is selling, right, so we definitely see more required Bas, on the higher ed side. And a lot on the K 12. side, you've got a lot of former teachers, which means that they mostly have master's degrees.
So, you know, I feel like kind of were a little skewed in that, you know, because of those two dynamics, like, honestly, most of our candidates do. We also, you know, we're hiring for more experienced positions. But I definitely, you know, so many of the companies that we work with, you know, are really leveling up the whole micro credentialing. And, you know, we work with, you know, a couple of companies that focus specifically on postgraduate health care, training, right. And some of
that's credentialing. Some of it is, you know, test exam prep. So you can, you know, get all these different certifications. But, you know, we definitely see it on that side, there's a lot of people in that space, and a lot of good things coming out of it. Let's dive a little
deeper into the sales aspect of it. Because, you know, you mentioned that one of the core things of higher ed, you and with many of its clients is, you know, quickly spinning up or even building a whole sales team or finding sales
leaders, marketing leaders. And as you mentioned, I think our listeners will be very familiar with the fact that, you know, in coding world, this decline in the need for a full Bachelor's degree in Computer Science has been progressing for a long time many people can break into coding through alternative means, just like you just said, I've seen an increase in boot camps for digital marketing, in boot camps for social media marketing, there's like sales academies, tech sales, is
something that is increasingly being looked at as an alternative credential. It is something that is very popular with alternative credentials. I'm curious if there are roles, this sort of relates to both of our last questions. You know, from your perspective, you mentioned sales, for sure. Are there roles? This is not for educators, but are there roles that people can really break into purely through alternative means, in a way where it sort of just evens the playing field
completely? Or is it really still a focus on bachelors throughout many different roles,
sales is definitely one of those roles. And I know people shy away from sales, people associate sales with all sorts of, you know, fun stereotypes and 1980s comedy films, but sales, one of my favorite books, and when I first started to try to understand the private sector, it was recommended that I read Daniel
Pink's to sell as human. And I still recommend that book all the time, it is so true, like we sell all day long, especially teachers, teachers have to motivate children to do all sorts of things they don't want to do, like all that selling.
So, and especially selling ad tech, you're really, especially as a former teacher, like you are walking into an environment, you know, with problems, you know, with a solution, like, it's not so many teachers that I talked to, they want to go into instructional design, they want to go into curriculum, and then some, you know, want to go into customer support, which really is just the flip of their role, right? It's helping teachers helping exactly who they just
were. But I think sales is a huge area that teachers specifically overlook, there are some excellent sales boot camps out there. And you know, it won't lock you into a director of sales role. So, you know, if you, you know, I would say there's a much bigger gap between educators who have gone into school administration, and then want to switch, right, because they have found a way to
increase their income. And with sales, you do so to kind of start at the bottom, you know, I think for the most part, so, and I run through this a lot with transitioning career picketers a lot too. And that is kind of the hierarchy of sales roles. So typically, when you're doing a sales bootcamp, you're coming out and you're looking for a role either as a sales development rep, or a business development rep, also known as SDRs, and BDRs. They're slightly different. BD ours are more
about research. So they're kind of doing that research into, you know, prospective clients or prospective customers. sales development reps are what Getting more from lists that other people have made, maybe qualifying leads, stuff like that. But those are two entry level, you know, top of the funnel sales roles. They're
passing those leads. And those conversations on to typically an account executive, account executive and account managers are the roles that you know, are kind of responsible for revenue. account managers, most of the time are responsible for renewals, and account executives are responsible for new business account managers, we also call farmers because they're harvesting what has been right,
they're renewing. And Account Executives we call hunters, they are out there, you will hear this a lot with clients are like, I need a pure Hunter. And you know, in some ways, that role is where kind of some of the stereotypes might come from in sales. Even that I mean, in edtech, so much of what they do is so consultative, and is really about long term relationships. Definitely nowhere near kind of the the
used car salesman vibe. But I so some of that terminology, I think helps when you're talking to people who are considering a career pivot is, you know, yeah, you might start at the bottom, you might start with an SDR BDR role, but you know, that's just to get your feet wet, like a lot of DVRs and STRS only stay there for a year or two. And then, you know, there's so much so much potential, so much room for
growth. And, you know, a lot of companies have really strong commission structures, a tenured salesperson can make double their base in commissions. Like, that's a pretty solid career. Yeah,
I've always been really amazed and impressed by the sales, people that I have worked with within the ad tech world that's both STRS. And, you know, sales account executives, they're a special breed when they work in education, because they tend to care not not always, but they tend to care more about education than other
things. And as you say, it's totally consultative, it's going into schools that have very specific problems to solve, and being able to really match the solution to the problem with inside knowledge. If you've already worked in education, in any capacity, you have various types of inside knowledge to be able to make that work. It's
good to hear. And actually, it's something that Eva Brown said last year as well that people have these stereotypes about sales, and they don't think about it, but it could be an interesting path. So, you know, we are coming close to the end of our time, I have one final question for you before our sort of closing remarks, which is really about, you know, ed tech world is at a really interesting
moment. And I have seen more recent graduates, you know, coming to look for their first jobs in edtech, than I've ever seen before. It used to be like, you know, people from all sorts of backgrounds are saying, I really want to be an ed tech entrepreneur, I really want to join one of these impactful companies. Do you talk to a lot of recent graduates who are sort of finding the EdTech field on
their own? Or, you know, I'm curious basically, how, why there seems to be at least from from an anecdotal perspective, so many more, you know, recent grads who want to enter this field versus FinTech or investment banking, or consulting or some of the other things that have traditionally been popular,
that is just so funny that you bring that up, because I was just telling our founder, Mark, about this experience I had at South by Southwest, which at the time we're recording was earlier this week, I met a bunch of very young founders, and heard more than once. I love this industry, everyone is so nice. Everyone wants to help me. Like, I'm never gonna go into any other type of tech. Ed Tech is the only industry that I want to
build a company in. And it was so genuine, because that was like, Yeah, I had one young founder say like, I just don't want to be a bother to anyone. And I was like, literally, this is what people are here. They're here just to like, listen to you and, and hear about what problem you want to solve and give you advice. Like, that's why we're all here. And it's just it is, you know, anytime people who care about human potential get together, I think just you know, there's some magic there.
There's and yes, these up and coming generations like they do you want to have an impact. Like, you know, I think more and more the younger generations are frustrated with lack of progress on so many social issues. You know, that doesn't really surprise me. We don't get a ton of them just because of the nature of the roles we're filling are usually people who you know, have been in the
industry 810 20 years. On that note though, one thing I did want to mention, one trend that we see a lot of is and it kind of goes along with this, you know, younger people There is this desire for diversity in edtech companies. It's a wonderful mission, it's a wonderful initiative, you know, we thoroughly support that the analogy that our founder Mark uses a lot is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
The second best time to plant a tree is today, when companies come to us, and they ask for people for 1520 years of experience, and they want it to be, you know, have check some sort of diversity requirements. First of all, we always cover the legality of those sorts of requests. But then also, the thing that we often come up against is 1520 years ago, there wasn't a huge push for diversity
initiatives. And I thought of that, just because, you know, you're talking about young people, you know, coming into
this industry excited. And, like, there's nothing better in particular, because we finally have a more diverse population, from all different types of diversity coming up and feeling okay with themselves, right, and putting themselves out there and like that, like, you got to invest in that, because, you know, that's where your leadership is going to come from in 15 years, you know, so we give that advice a lot for what
it's worth. And, you know, I think it really is a beautiful thing, these kinds of younger generations wanting to dig in and be involved, and they bring such rich backgrounds and experience and to the industry. So it's good stuff.
I really appreciate that, that overview, it makes sense that for many of the roles that you're filling, if their executive searches or you know, that you may not be talking to as many recent grads as some other other types of recruiters, but it has been really exciting to see, as you say, these generations start to look at ad tech as not only a viable career, but like a really, really, you know,
exciting career. And I make up policy, I don't know if this smart to say on on the air, but I make a policy that basically whenever somebody reaches out to learn more about a tech or more about my experience, and more about anything I know about I pretty much open door for anybody in any any background any age, because I just feel like that niceness that you mentioned that idea that people in tech are genuinely nice there, we have to keep that at
reputation. We have to be nice, because yeah, otherwise, people away. And I think as social particularly gets worse and worse rap, you're gonna see more people instead of having that dream job of Instagram or, you know, they may have the dream job of Duolingo. And that's like a world. So just to finish up, so a little bit of a monologue there. So to finish up, we always close the podcast with two questions. One is what is a trend you see rising rapidly in the EdTech landscape right now?
What's something you're just hearing more and more about, that our listeners should definitely keep an eye on?
I think the hot topics that I see are literacy and social emotional learning. So as far as topic goes, I think those are some of the heavy hitters right now. And for very obvious reasons. You know, we have major gaps in both areas that are, you know, more and more we're understanding have a massive impact in future lives. And in the overall economy long term. I would say, you know, the other thing, too, is just there's a lot of consolidation happening in the industry right now. So as like
an industry trend. You know, we see a lot of that. And I think some of that is just, you know, getting back to normal in a lot of ways. We're really kind of in this post pandemic era. Now. You know, I think schools are making decisions, not based on a pandemic anymore. So Right.
So it's shortening the runways for some smaller companies. We've definitely talked about this on the podcast. I like to think of it as you know, the let 1000 Flowers bloom and now we're making bouquets. Multiple offerings under this. And our last question, what is a resource that could be a book, blog newsletter, anything you'd like that you would recommend for somebody who really wants to learn more about any of the topics we talked about today?
That could be recruiting, that could be the EdTech fields evolution that could be alternative credentials? What would you recommend?
so broad? So, again, I think a book I recommend to everyone is Daniel Pink's to sell us human, great, especially if you're thinking of transitioning into a different career or, you know, want to understand the role of revenue in business. But otherwise, you know, we get a lot of people kind of asking this question and generally We point to some of the major sources of business
news. So there's ASU GSB, which, you know, is a big conference, but also they have a great newsletter to subscribe to talks about, you know, major shifts, either articles or issues or acquisitions and mergers, fundraising rounds. So it kind of covers a bunch of different topics, you actually turned me on to Matthew towers? Newsletter, substack, I guess it is. And that's a great source
also of big changes. We love EdSurge at week pitches, getting on all those newsletters, that's generally like keep your, you know, get these company names in your head, you know, start to understand some of the trends of you know, what companies are being acquired, what companies are doing those acquisitions, what does that say? Right? Like, what areas what problems are each of those companies solving, because I just think that gives the best insight into the macro
trends of the industry. And I often recommend, I don't know if you've ever talked to Lindsay Reno, she runs the transitioning teachers blog, she's got some great resources, hashtag transitioning teachers on LinkedIn, that will kind of connect you with everybody in that space. So we have
been communicating with Lindsey Reno to bring her on the podcast because I think the work she does is so so interesting that transition teachers, 11, people and counting. So we will put links to all of these amazing resources in the show notes that's to Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink, the GSB newsletter, ASU GSB news in general, Matthew towers, Ed Tech thoughts that he's a big friend of the pod EdSurge and all terrific recommendations. And yeah, I like your idea of you know,
consolidation is happening. If you're looking to learn more about the field, look for the consolidation, who's buying, for what reason, and lots of big things happening in that space? Just lose Tebow. This has been a really, really interesting conversation from a perspective we've never had before
on the show. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more and Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.