Joanna McFarland Q&A On Recruiting & Onboarding Care Drivers

8 Sept 2024 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:25

In this Q&A, Joanna McFarland discusses how HopSkipDrive recruits and onboards Care Drivers, especially in partnership with substitute teacher agencies. The recruitment funnel blends self‑serve applications with a large human operations team and AI automation that scans documents (insurance, driver’s license) and speeds up verification without compromising safety. Applicants submit video introductions answering childcare‑related scenarios, allowing human reviewers to assess suitability. The process is highly hyper‑local: requirements such as fingerprinting order vary by market, and the team continuously runs A/B tests to tweak each step for optimal conversion. The conversation also explores the idea of allowing substitute teachers to both teach and drive, leveraging their existing pool for driver recruitment.

Dennis, do you want to come on?
Yeah. Joanna, thanks again. Super interesting, super impressive to hear what you've built. I've got sort of a question on the recruitment process. So for a little context, we actually partner with one of the largest substitute teacher agencies in, in the country. And so very familiar with the process in the districts. And, you know, we'd love to jam in, in the sort of maybe in a different form on like, is there a way that substitute teachers could also be HopSkipDrive drivers? Because they're looking for ways, like they want to get involved, they believe in, they have passion in the space, but unfortunately there's not as much money in that. So if you could pair on, like you teach for the day and then you give rides home at the end, thought that'd be interesting. Yeah. But wanted to hear a little bit more about your Recruitment process? Is it self-service? Is there a person in the loop? And what does that look like to become a driver?
We do have a lot of substitute teachers in our Care Driver network. So the recruitment process is a little bit of everything. It is self-serve, but there are humans. We have a very large Care Driver operations team that is managing things throughout the process. And then there's also a lot of AI in there as we're scanning. We used to have people scanning documents and looking at each thing to make sure that the insurance was up to date and the driver's license was valid. You know, you can also have machines do that and do that a lot faster. So we automate every part of the process that we can that doesn't impact, doesn't impact safety and doesn't impact our ability to evaluate whether this is the right kind of person for our platform. And then we have a team who is reviewing and meeting and talking, you know, and looking at every single driver. Care drivers are submitting videos of themselves. We ask them questions that are childcare related to see how they would respond to those. And so there are humans involved. We're constantly tinkering with the funnel, and the funnel looks very different in every single market. Another area where it's very hyperlocal because that's dependent on both the particular requirements of a market and also what's going to make the, you know, in some places fingerprinting comes first, in other places it comes last. So we're constantly A/B testing that and tweaking it and working with it to maximize opportunity to get through the funnel.