Saving Explore Learning over £16,000 in staffing costs per year
Explore Learning are the go-to tutoring service for Maths and English for children aged 4-16. They operate in over 90 tuition centres across England, Scotland and Wales, and offer online tuition via their Explore at Home service.
Challenge
- Reduce a 20+ step process
- 75 task KPI per day
- Reduce the amount of time spent by team chasing tutors
- Reduce a 3-6 month turnaround to fully onboard a tutor
- Reduce the 4-6 extra team members needed to help during peak season, increasing staff cost
Approach
- Implement one screening system to ensure a smoother screening process
Results
- Huge savings on reduced staffing costs
- Decreased DBS costs
- Reduction in non-starters thanks to faster and more efficient onboarding
- New starters ready to work in several days or weeks rather than months
Meeting the Explore Learning team
Our Access Recruitment team spoke with Jennifer Waddell from Explore Learning to understand how Access Screening has transformed their onboarding process.
My name is Jennifer and I work for Explore Learning.
I work as our Onboarding Coordinator and manage the tutor Screening and preboarding process for our new starters.
We usually recruit at least 2000 tutors per year and for each tutor we must ensure they are fully screened and suitable to work with young children.
This includes making sure candidates have a clear DBS/PVG, right to work in the UK, obtain two suitable references, ensuring they have the required qualifications, and any medical history disclosures.
What were the objectives that Explore Learning wanted to achieve?
The requirements for Explore Learning were very clear from the beginning of their project.
Firstly, they wanted to streamline and enhance the onboarding experience for new employees. By implementing an automated screening process, Explore Learning aimed to ensure a smoother journey for new starters, minimising delays and removing hurdles that could slow down the onboarding process. They focused on efficiency, not only in order to improve experience for new hires, but also to reduce the amount of time and manual effort involved for the screening team, allowing them to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.
One of the main objectives for Explore Learning was to optimise their current resource within the department and ultimately achieve cost savings while still ensuring the timely and thorough completion of preboarding processes.
And finally, the implementation of automated screening was driven by a commitment to upholding safeguarding standards and compliance requirements. That meant no new starters would be able to work without their full checks being in place.
What our customers say
We were amazed that we have required 50% less staff for the screening process which was a massive reduction in costs. But it also allowed us to increase our department performance at the same time!
Have you seen performance improvements since transitioning to Access Screening?
Access Screening has allowed us to both reduce staffing costs and improve our performance, especially during our busy summer months when tutor recruitment is at an all time high. For example, with our old process, we would require 3 full time members of staff and then around 6/7 staff at our busiest time. In summer of 2023 using Access Screening, we only had 2.5 full time employees working in tutor onboarding and managed to remain at a 70% completion rate (this is the percentage of candidates who have been fully screened). Whereas, in summer 2022 with our old process, we had 7 people working in our team at the busiest time and were working at around a 50-60% completion rate.
Our time to screen process has therefore reduced dramatically. We have used the Screening Reporting tool to download a report on our time to screen figures and on average, it only takes 21 days to fully complete a new starter including having the DBS and 2 references returned. Compared with our old process, we would often have employees in the process for up to 6 months still chasing them or waiting on checks to return, requiring hours of manual input from our team.
The reference process has been particularly smoother for us as we would normally spend around 15 mins per tutor trying to get reference details from them, manually send the reference requests, wait for references to be returned and have to spend time chasing referees. Once returned we would then have to download and save the document then upload it to the candidate file. Whereas now, the process is instant, and the self-serve function means when tutors add the reference details, the request is sent automatically (as well as reminder emails) and when completed, it appears on the candidate’s page for us to review. This has more than halved the time spent on references compared to before.
Providing and sustaining growth for the future
By implementing Access Screening, Explore Learning has had a 50% reduction in non-starters/reneges, helping to keep contact high and getting new starters joining their roles quicker and more efficiently. Not only that, due to the time savings on manual admin, the internal team now have more free time to support the HR team, allowing the whole department to grow the business at a faster rate.
As Explore Learning look to the future, Jennifer said:
We are constantly trying to expand our business and grow our membership rate and to do this, we are always hiring new tutors to teach those members. Using Access Screening means that we can screen and onboard our new tutors quickly and efficiently to ensure members needs are being met so we are looking forward to continuing to use Access to ensure the efficiency of the process and saving staffing costs to do so.
We feel the reporting elements in Access Screening could be utilised better or provide more functionality to us, but this is something we will work with the Access team to achieve in the near future.
How do you find the Access Screening support?
I think the Screening support team are brilliant and extremely helpful – they always respond quickly and help us with any issues we face. When we initially started using Access Screening, they were a fantastic help, and we definitely asked a lot of questions which they were very patient with. The Manager of the Screening Support team (I believe her name was Kate) also took the time to set up a Teams meeting with me to explain a part of the system that I was confused about, and she was lovely.
Explore Learning has seen a wide range of benefits since implementing Access Screening
Here are some of the key stats:
£
The amount of money saved of reduced staffing costs
%
The reduction in non-starters due to the speed of their screening process
%
Less than half the staff required during the busy months of the year
