Project type:

Company profile story

Written for:

SchoolSpring

Backstory: 

Originally appeared in the 2/9/2012 Burlington Free Press, attributed to a SchoolSpring staffer. The goal was to market SchoolSpring to potential buyers by telling their success story from an insider’s point of view. My title played off the Vermont adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” 

Copy: “If It’s Broken, Fix It”

When people ask to hear the SchoolSpring story, we sometimes get a bit tongue-tied. Tooting your horn just doesn’t come naturally to Vermonters. But this is a special story, and we’d like to share it with you.

Just 10 short years ago, the way schools hired was slow, cumbersome, and fast becoming dated. We set out to bring it into the modern age. The goal seemed simple: make the hiring experience more fun for everyone — more human. But the reality was widespread reluctance to change the “tried and true.” We forged ahead anyway (stubbornness: another trait common to Vermonters).

Back then hiring was slow, stressful, and unpredictable. Schools would place a newspaper ad and wait for applications. At some point, they’d decide whether to run another ad. There were no hard deadlines, so no one really knew when a job would be filled. In other words, hiring was inefficient — and schools were paying through the nose to do it.

As for job seekers: maybe a school had received your resume and cover letter but was still waiting for a transcript. Maybe not — you had no way of knowing! And if you did get an interview, it wasn’t uncommon to hear that you hadn’t landed the job through the local grapevine. Word traveled faster than the U.S. Mail, after all.

Now, with SchoolSpring, everything is streamlined and in one place. Job seekers create a complete electronic dossier: references, transcript, cover letter — the works. Schools know right away who has applied, and job seekers know as soon as their application is being reviewed. And when staff meet to discuss candidates and make a hire, what used to take two evenings now “takes two hours and a pizza,” in the words of one principal. [...]

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