The job you have dreamed of?

You will see below a job description for the post we have free at the moment.

If you read through it and think “Wow, that would be a great job and, with the right help, I think I could be great at it!” then please send us an application. If you are looking for a job and think this one looks ‘okay’, then please keep looking!

Customer Support & Training plus Marketing Development

This role will involve a mix of customer support, customer training processes and development of our marketing to increase the development of the business.

What we do

As you look around the site, you will see that we have developed a new way for children to learn to read and spell. You might be unaware of how many people find that extremely hard, but the raw reality is that one in every seven children goes through the whole of school unable to read what’s on the blackboard. Obviously a disaster for them. And now totally unnecessary.

The system we have developed works with the natural processes of the brain to teach reading like a skill. It is more like learning to walk, talk and catch a ball. Conventionally reading has been taught with rules. But then those rules don’t work.

We offer an unconditional guarantee and our refund rate is below 1%.

Where we are going

We deliver our reading system online. It takes about 15 minutes a day. And we train each parent or teacher how to support a child as they learn to read. The child always needs an adult to guide them.

Now that we have developed this new process, our focus is on growth. We are a small company, but we are aiming to double our activity every six months for the next three years. So it is going to be a period of intense commercial development, while aiming to maintain the standards that we live by now.

Your primary role

The core of what we do is teaching people to read. At the moment everyone in the company is directly involved in that, either by coaching parents and teachers or by developing new online materials. Anything else, we contract out.

You will be joining us initially as a parent and teacher coach. That means understanding how the system works and how to get the best results, so that you can guide the parents and teachers through the journey for each child. After six months here there will be nobody in the world who will know more about that than you (apart from the rest of us, of course!).

We support our customers over the telephone and an internal messaging system. So you will be interacting online and then chatting with parents and teachers through the day. You need to be very comfortable on a keyboard and navigating software. And, with the right training, you need to be very comfortable acting as a consultant to people expecting expertise from you.

Other stuff to be involved in

We are a small company, so most of us get involved in a mix of activities. We try to guide people towards what they enjoy (and are therefore good at). So the sort of areas that you can get stuck into alongside the core customer support are:

• Developing new learning materials and book publishing
• Developing our marketing processes and channels
• Administration of our business processes
• Direct coaching of teachers in local training sessions
• Attending events and business promotion opportunities etc…

This really encompasses a wide range of stuff! There is always more that we want to do than we can get done. And we try to automate the boring stuff.

Growth environment

In addition, if we hit out growth goals (and we are on track at the moment), there is all the management of change involved in that too. So if you want to be training people internally and managing a team, that can be an option too.

Growth comes with change and so you will need to be happy with that as well. In three to five years time the company will look very different to today.

70% of our sales already come from overseas. So we will be needing to develop overseas support hubs as well.

Social impact

We run as a business, but clearly we are very much driven by our social impact as well. Our aim is to change the experience of learning to read for every child on the planet. Right now we don’t have the scale or resources to achieve that, but that is the goal over the next ten years.

It is important to understand that we are not a charity. We will be needing finance from investors to achieve all our aims over the coming years and they will need a return on their money. But we believe that we can deliver our social aims while also generating a good business at the same time.

For the moment we are entirely financed by the income we receive from our customers. So we need to be focused on doing our job in a lean and intelligent way, to keep our costs and charges low.

But for me, it is a huge privilege to be able to walk in each day without any question in my mind about the value of the coming day’s work.

Salary, hours, holidays etc…

The job is based at our offices in Beaumont Street, Oxford.

We generally work roughly a 9-5 routine, but there is some flexibility to that.

You will initially be paid £18-24K per annum, depending on your current level of experience, unless you are bringing significant expertise in one of our key business processes such as marketing or software development, in which case we can discuss an adjustment to that.

We can discuss part-time work at a pro-rata rate as well.

We include 25 days of paid holiday (including the shutdown period over Christmas).

We are a small team and so you need to have a good track record of health and reliability.

This is not a Big Corp life, so you need to be comfortable in that small team environment and getting stuck in. We always aim to build a working environment that people are genuinely very happy in and a team that all get along. Indeed, if you aren’t happy, you should not be here. But we all need to be contributing to making that work. So you need to be coming with a “what can I do” attitude while accepting we cannot implement every idea we have, rather than a whining-at-the-coffee-machine mindset!

There is a 6-month trial period with two weeks notice, following which the notice in both directions is 4 weeks.

Application Process

If you think this is your dream job, then there are three parts to the application:

1. Do a 600-word review of what we do and how we compare to our main competitors.
2. Suggest a change to the customer presentation on the website that you think might be worth testing.
3. Include a CV, highlighting any elements that you think might be relevant to the job and what aspects of the potential role you are most interested in being involved in.

Please send us a message from our contact page, to say you want to apply. We will reply by email so that you can then send the attachments above.

We will do an initial short-list of applicants and chat to those over Skype. We will then invite in any strong contenders to the office, to start exploring things further. My own view is that successful recruitment is about getting the person-job fit right and when it is wrong there is no point in struggling with it. We do not keep people in jobs they are not suited to. So it is much better to be honest in both directions.

The recruitment process is open-ended. We will be searching until we find the right person, at which point it will be closed. So please send your application as soon as it is ready. There is no deadline.

Best wishes

David
David Morgan, CEO