Both sides are being judged by machines they can't see: An international teacher Recruitment Agency owner's perspective
Eight-plus years in the International Education Recruitment field. CEO and Owner of Totally Teach.
In this open conversation, Rowena gives her honest take on AI in hiring: what's working, what isn't, and why she's building an AI recruitment platform that explains its decisions instead of filtering people out in silence.
Last week a teacher told me she'd applied for forty-one jobs since June and heard back from four. Not four offers. Four replies.
The same week a Head of School told me his last advert brought in 212 applications. He'd read eleven of them properly.
They're describing the same thing from opposite ends. And at the moment, neither of them can see it.
When a teacher applies today, she isn't writing to a Head of School. She's writing to a filter. Somewhere between her PDF and his inbox there's a piece of software reading her CV for words it was told to look for, giving her a score, and deciding whether a human ever sees her name. She doesn't know what the words were. She doesn't know her score. She gets silence, or an email that says "we've decided to move forward with other candidates", which nobody actually wrote.
So, she does what you'd do with a locked door. She tries keys. She rewrites her CV for every post, pads it with phrases from the advert, applies to forty-one jobs because she has no idea which of them she was ever really in the running for. Every one of those costs her an evening. Every one of them makes his pile of applications taller.
And the Head of School isn't lazy; he's drowning. 212 applications land, and the only honest way to read 212 applications is not to. So he searches. "IB". "A Level". A passport that will get a visa. The school he used to work at. Whatever the search finds, he reads. Whatever it misses never existed. He's running a filter too, by hand, with a coffee going cold next to him, and he can't explain his verdict any better than the software could. Ask him why candidate 140 was never opened and he'll tell you, truthfully, that he didn't know she was there.
That's the bit nobody says out loud. Both sides have handed the first decision to something that can't explain itself. Even her choice of where to apply came from an advert, a Glassdoor page and a rumour in a WhatsApp group: a filter he never sees.
And because neither side can see the reasons, both have learned to play the gap. Keyword-stuffed CVs meet keyword-hunting searches. Everyone is trying to please a judge nobody has met.
I've spent eight years on the third side of this desk, placing teachers in international schools, and the thing a good recruiter actually gave people was never the database. It was the explanation. "She's taught IGCSE Physics for six years in KL, her head of department will tell you she ran it for two of them, and she's free in January." And just as useful the other way: "Not that candidate for Shanghai, his passport won't get him a work permit there, but it will in Vietnam, and here's who's hiring." Not a gatekeeper. A translator. Someone who could tell you what the rules were and where you actually stood.
What I didn't expect when we started building software is that the explanation is the hardest part to keep and the easiest to lose. Building a filter is easy. Building one that shows it’s working is not.
So that's my test for any AI in recruitment now, including ours. Not "is it clever". They're all clever. Three questions:
Does the teacher see why she was shortlisted, in plain words? And when a school says no, does she hear why?
Does the school see the 'why' behind these shortlisted candidates, in the same plain words?
And when it's wrong (and it will be) can a person see that, say so, and have it count?
If the answer to any of those is no, you haven't automated recruitment. You've automated the silence.
Forty-one applications, four replies. The fix isn't a faster filter. It's one you can see.
If you're an international educator or school, keep an eye on Totally Teach.
We're building a new way to match international teachers and schools, based on what both sides actually need.
Copy the link below into your browser or scan the QR code to join the Early Access List and be among the first to find out what's coming before the official launch:
https://149305307.hs-sites-eu1.com/totally-teach-ttm-early-access-lp
