It's like online dating between teachers and schools, explained Tom Clark, VP of marketing for myEDmatch.
"There's a matching algorithm based on specific mission and core beliefs alignment to help find the right teacher for the right classroom," Clark elaborated.
Less than a year old, myEDmatch provides a service that helps reduce the burden of teacher turnover each year by assisting schools in finding and recruiting good-fit teachers.
And in that short time, the recruiting service has had phenomenal market traction. "We launched our website in March, and about a month ago we hit 15,000 teacher users and 200 schools users," Clark said.
Perhaps it's because Clark, and many others on the myEDmatch team, have backgrounds in education – Teach for America in specific –that they know how to build and market the product so well.
"Everyone on our team has been a teacher at some point," he said. "Everyone's been in a classroom, they understand the value and importance of being the right fit for a school."
And the research shows, Clark said, that it's a struggle many teachers go through.
For schools, too – even in our economy – it can often be difficult filling certain positions.
"When both Alicia (the founder) and I were working on staff, one of the things we heard a lot from schools and from districts who were looking to hire was that they just couldn't get people," Clark recalled. "They were constantly looking for good talent. And the funny thing is, we knew it was out there, but here was no place for it to come together."
Instead of schools using recruiters or principals using their contacts to seek out people, meEDmatch does all the work.
Teachers in need of jobs and schools in need of teachers can create profiles on the website and based on the qualities in their profile, myEDmatch matches them together. Teachers can also search for other job openings on the website and communicate with schools, even if they aren't matched to them.
In total, myEDmatch is a team of seven, having added four employees since the beginning of summer and showing a spurt of company growth.
Much of that, though, is due to the recent closing of a Series A funding of $2.6 million from FTL Capital in St. Louis.
"We don't have to worry about payroll for a while," Clark chuckled. But truly, receiving that kind of investment that quickly is tremendous for a young company.
Along with the cashflow came great mentorship from Tom Hillman, founder and managing partner of FTL, and his partners that's been integral in scaling the company, Clark explained.
And the plan now is to keep growing the product and improving it.
"We actually have a pretty big base of schools here in D.C. that have already signed on," Clark said. "Our teacher base is also pretty strong. But now we have this money that we can do some great things with. We're about to rebuild our database entirely. We're gonna rebuild what our teacher profiles look like, what our school profiles look like, refine the matching algorithm a little bit."
Less than a year in, meEDmatch has already made huge progress and growth. So it wouldn't be hard to imagine that, as it continues to solve a problem that the educational system dearly needs, it will bloom up to be a major player in matching teachers and schools together.
