The best places to find homeschool teachers

At Modulo, we’re master teacher scavengers. We’ve tested all the job sites and marketplaces for teachers. Here are the four main places we use today to find teachers:

LinkedIn LinkedIn is our favorite place for finding teachers because it’s possible to laser-focus on specific archetypes and reach out directly. Search in the “people” category for local actors, child life specialists, current alumni at your college and university majoring in the subject area you want them to teach, educators at your local museum, or favorite summer camp.

When you hit “connect,” there’s an option to add a note. In the note, introduce yourself and briefly explain what you’re looking for. LinkedIn will send them automated reminders to reply to you, so you’ll often get a response! If they’re not available themselves, they may know someone who is.

On LinkedIn, it’s possible to connect with 200 people every week. However, exceeding a certain number of searches requires a premium subscription. It’s a numbers game here. If you reach out to 50-100 people, you’re likely to get a hit or meet someone who can refer a friend.

Indeed Of the job sites we’ve tried, we’ve found we get the largest number and highest quality of applications on Indeed. Plus, it’s free to make an unsponsored post!

When creating a job description on Indeed, we’ve borrowed a “hack” from the Y Combinator application (Y Combinator is a highly selective program famous for investing in and accelerating early-stage startups, such as Airbnb). In our job description, we request that prospective teachers send us a one-minute unlisted YouTube video. This helps us ensure that:

1. People are serious and excited about the position (not just applying to everything)

2. They have good organizational skills

3. They know how to use technology

4. They have a high level of warmth and enthusiasm

5. They are flexible and go with the flow

6. They are interested enough in the job to have read the job description and know how to follow written instructions

For online teachers, it helps to see if they present themselves well on-screen. It saves us a ton of time vetting candidates. We can usually tell within the first 15 seconds if this person is a potential candidate. Our next step is to do a longer 20-30 minute interview.

If a prospective teacher refuses to do this step, sends us an attachment instead of a video, or has a lot of questions about how to send a link to an unlisted YouTube video, they’re probably not going to be very easy to work with down the road.

Here’s a job post we created on Indeed for virtual tutors (using the remote location feature on Indeed) that got hundreds of applications, including many top-notch candidates. Please feel free to use any of it that you like for your own job postings!

Facebook Parenting & Homeschool Groups Once you’ve joined a homeschooling or parenting group, there are lots of opportunities to find homeschool teachers, programs, and other resources. You can search in the comments section for keywords such as “math tutor” or something more generic like “teacher.” This will generally lead to other posts and comments from parents asking for or recommending teachers. When reviewing the comments, read them carefully and see if it’s from a parent who seems to share similar qualities to you and needs that reflect your own.

Group etiquette suggests you search for existing recommendations before requesting more. However, if you don’t see any good recent recommendations, you can also make a post yourself saying you are looking for a teacher and asking if anyone has recommendations. Add a photo or visual to the post from Canva to grab attention!

Yelp and Google Maps We have a special technique for finding teachers via reviews on Yelp and Google Maps.

First, we search for the best afterschool classes, summer camps, and museum programs on Yelp and Google Maps. Next, we read the reviews. We don’t just look at the stars. We read all the comments to see if there are any teachers in particular who stand out, teachers mentioned favorably multiple times in the reviews themselves.

If the teacher’s last name isn’t mentioned, we go to the website of the program and see if there’s a list of team members. Once we’ve identified the name of the teacher everyone seems to love, we go back to LinkedIn, look for employees directly, or if we only have a first name, search for employees at that program (this can be done by searching in the “companies” category and then following the “employees” link).

We invite them to connect and ask if they’re interested in our teaching opportunity.