ITP - 152: AI, TrueFit Talent, and the Future of International School Hiring

Greg: Welcome to another episode of the International Teacher Podcast. I am Greg the single guy, or just Greg, I guess. I already have two wonderful hostesses with me. I’ve got Hannah. How are you doing, Hannah?
Hannah: Woo! I’m doing great today, Greg.
Greg: You’re in Iowa instead of Karachi right now, so hey, summer vacation, right?
Hannah: Yeah. In the cold basement.
JP: But she’s locked in the basement. I’m still in Mexico. Rainy season is here. It’s nice and cool. I’m wearing long sleeves. Yay.
Greg: We have an episode right now with our guest, and we’re going to be talking about AI in interviewing for schools. So, as teachers interviewing for schools, we’re talking about the future and the now of AI, I believe, but we’re going to wait to hear from Rich.
I’d like to introduce Rich Boerner, and he’s coming to us from Washington right now. How are you doing, Rich?
Rich Boerner: Doing wonderful. Thanks to you guys for having me on your podcast. I’m honored and excited to share some stories and get to know you better.
Greg: Well, we’re honored to have you on here too.
JP: We’re excited. Hannah’s excited as a fellow Brazilian TCK resident as well. I’m excited because, Rich, I’ve seen your name pop up over the years as Head of School at various schools. And Greg’s excited for the tech. So you’ve got three excited hosts to talk to you today.
Greg: No, I’m excited about Rich, not just the tech. I’m a teacher first and then tech later. Anyway, Rich, can you give us a nutshell, or maybe not too much of a nutshell, history of your journey in international education and education in general?
Rich Boerner: Sure. I started in 2005, twenty-one years ago. My wife and I, and our two young kids, went overseas for the first time, like many of us do from our home country. We landed in Seoul, South Korea, at a very young school.
Over the period of five years there, we grew up with the school, and I became the Head of School. In those five years, we grew from 400 students to 1,400. It was massive growth. I hired forty to fifty teachers a year. It was a massive undertaking, and that foreshadows the conversation for later.
It was an incredible, life-changing experience for our family. We took a two-year leave of absence from our public school back in Washington State. After year one, I called my dad and said, “I don’t think we’re coming home. This is pretty great.”
We loved the cultural experience for our children. We loved the learning and getting to stretch our edges. That turned into a twenty-year career overseas. It has been a year since I’ve been back home now.
We went to Bangladesh for five years as well. I was the Head at the American International School in Dhaka. Then we spent a decade in Brazil at Graded, The American School of São Paulo.
If you were to ask me what my favorite school was, I’d say, “Yes.” They were all great. They were all different, and all really impactful in my own development as an individual.
Greg: We won’t ask you that question.
JP: So primarily, it sounds like three schools in three countries.
Rich Boerner: Yeah, three schools in three very distinctly different parts of the world, which was fascinating from a cultural perspective. That will foreshadow TrueFit as well: what different contexts are, how to survive and thrive in different places around the world, and how to adapt to those new situations.
It’s a really exciting time, but also a challenge for people. All of that formative experience I went through — the successes, the failures, and the mistakes I made — really cemented for me how I understood the way we traverse this world as international educators, and how we can perhaps make those connections more impactful and longer-lasting.
JP: Tell us a little bit about that experience in Korea, that first experience you had. You said you had two little kids. Was your wife also a teacher? Was she a trailing spouse? Was she able to work remotely? Well, maybe not remotely back in the 2000s.
Rich Boerner: She was a teacher, a high school social studies teacher. Over her time at KIS, she became a librarian. When we first arrived, we were the first employees to have faculty children at the school.
When we were first sent our tickets to fly over to Seoul, they were only for Colleen and me. So I contacted the school and said, “The kids are five and eight. They’d like to come with us. Is that possible?”
I remember all of those things. We went to orientation, and I’m leading orientation because I’m the middle school and high school principal. There was no setup for the kids. They hadn’t thought about that. Those things weren’t part of the DNA of the school.
So we were cobbling together solutions while I was running orientation, and Colleen was involved in the learning happening during that orientation week. All of those formative experiences were fascinating as we started our journey overseas.
We laugh about all those stories now and, of course, embed those ideas into future school processes. But it was a wonderful, vulnerable moment for our young family.
So many of us, as families and as individuals, have made that journey and had that moment where you step off the plane and say, “Do I really want to do this?”
I remember waking up the next morning. We had gotten to our apartment and spent the night. I looked over at Colleen and said, “Should we just go home? I don’t think we can do this.” I meant that. I really thought I couldn’t do it.
We wandered outside our little neighborhood and found a Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m not really a Dunkin’ Donuts person, but it was something familiar. We walked in, got a donut, sat down, looked at each other and looked at the kids. Of course, the kids didn’t know any different. We said, “No, we can do this.”
And then twenty years later, the whole world had opened up to us.
Greg: What Dunkin’ Donuts brings together.
Rich Boerner: Exactly.
JP: It’s nice to hear that you had second thoughts. It happens. You start to think, “Did I make a big mistake?” It happened to me twenty years into this career when I landed in China. It was the next day after settling in, having a pretty okay sleep because you don’t sleep for three days before traveling. I stepped outside, saw that I was in China and everything that entailed, and I started to think, “Maybe this was not a great idea.” It’s nice to hear that others have that idea as well.
Rich Boerner: I think it’s the human condition. Every move we made was anxiety-producing, no matter what role I had or how many years of experience we had doing this. It was anxiety-producing for our children and for us.
Some of that is the culture and context of the school or country you’re moving to, but it’s also the school. We have a very distant relationship when we’re connecting and making a decision that we’re going to work in another country, at another school we’ve never met. The context is different, and so is the school.
Then you get there and hope all the things that happened in that very short dance are real and match your actual abilities. When it doesn’t work out — and we all know people where that fit didn’t happen — the impact is significant.
International educators are risk-takers. They are bold individuals. How many people give up their job before they get another one? That whole construct is completely foreign in the business world. It’s significant.
JP: Yeah, in any kind of world. Nobody ever gives up a job until they get the next job. But we do every time.
Rich Boerner: Every time.
Greg: It’s not for everybody. I was just mentioning this on another podcast episode. The shortest I’ve seen a teacher land in the country and leave was three days. She must not have found a Dunkin’ Donuts in Honduras.
Rich Boerner: I could have won the record. Dunkin’ Donuts saved me. I could have been the world record holder.
Hannah: I think I’ve had someone last one week. One week.
Greg: Those are the outliers, of course, for our listeners. That’s not normal at all. Those are examples we remember.
Rich Boerner: Of course. They aren’t normal, but it happens. And it happened to me. I thought I had the secret sauce for how to find that great person who would work perfectly and fit. More often than I ever want to admit, it didn’t work out.
One of the things I’ll say publicly is that Heads of School, me included, pat ourselves on the back when we get the hiring right and the person lasts forever. Then, when we don’t get it right, we blame the candidate and say, “Well, they didn’t fit in.”
It can’t be both ways.
When we think about the person who only lasts a week, what happened? What ownership do both sides have in that relationship not working? What can we do so that, in the future, that happens less and less? The impact on community, children, trust, and parents is real, and I think we minimize that too much.
Greg: I have a question for you. This is a broad average question. I was wondering if I had a discussion with somebody and said, “The biggest investment, in my opinion, for an international school is to hire an expat teacher to come into the country.” It’s a major investment, not just because of the position, but because of the insurance, the whole package, the loss, the reset, everything in between.
Can you put an average cost on what it costs a school to lose a teacher mid-contract?
Rich Boerner: About $25,000. That’s the all-in average cost. When you think about visa procedures, re-recruiting, housing, and if somebody leaves mid-term of a housing contract, you’ve got that contract with the landlord that has to be paid out. There are all those ancillary costs we don’t really think about.
There are substitutes if they’re leaving in the middle of the year, or you have to hire a replacement you didn’t budget for, extra flight costs, and repatriation. Some schools may not pay that to the individual, and maybe some do, but typically, in the schools where we worked, we factored it to be about $25,000.
That’s massive.
Greg: That matches what I’ve researched. My guess was about $25,000. I know it’s not just the dollar cost, but it’s interesting to think about it from a school perspective. When an individual takes on a contract and feels like, “I just need to leave,” it puts a lot on the school. It’s a runner, and it’s negative in every way.
JP: What we call doing a runner.
Rich Boerner: Absolutely. That relationship and bond of “I’m committing to you and you’re committing to me” is real. Both sides need to take that honestly and sincerely in that initial two-year commitment.
JP: Then you moved to Bangladesh. Tell us a little bit about how that recruitment happened. By that time, it sounded like you were a secondary principal. Were you handpicked? Was there networking involved? Or did you go through a fair or recruitment company?
Rich Boerner: After my third year at KIS, I was appointed Head of School. The Head left, and I was offered the headship. I did that for two years.
As I was looking for jobs, I was applying like everybody else, picking different schools around the world that I thought would be good for our family. That mattered more to me than the location, though the location was a factor.
Jim Ambrose, who was a long-serving Head of School and worked for Search Associates back in the day, and who has sadly passed on, contacted me and recommended the school because he had worked there in the 1980s. He said, “If you’re looking for a school, this is a real gem in a part of the world people often pass over. You should give it a look.”
My initial thought was, “No, I don’t know if that’s the right school for us.” But you go through the mentality we all do: “It doesn’t hurt to apply.” So I went through the application process, which was a traditional process, and then I was flown in for interviews.
It was at that moment that I fell in love with the community and the school’s ethos. The school was essentially there to serve all these mission and aid organizations and embassies that were trying to uplift a country that has had tremendous challenges since its inception. Our role was to help those children become powerful, impactful, empathic learners.
The former school leadership had done a tremendous job positioning the school. I felt it was a great opportunity, and the board at that time felt I was the right person. It was a magical place to raise children in an incredibly challenging environment. You learn so much.
Greg: The right fit.
JP: I’ve spoken to a couple of people who have lived and worked in Bangladesh, and every one of them speaks so positively of it. It’s funny because it’s not really on the radar of many people, but when they end up getting there, very few say they’re done. They stay. They want to commit to more time. Is that something you saw as well?
Rich Boerner: Absolutely. The tenure there was really interesting. If we could find the right candidate, and the candidate knew what they were getting into and understood it the best they could without having been there, they would stay a long time. We often had eight- and ten-year retention with individuals because of the specialness of the community.
That’s something important. When we recruit ourselves and look for jobs, there are so many international schools in the world. There is a certain series of schools that have a brand reputation. We all talk about them as the pinnacle places to work, and I have always bristled at that mentality.
There are wildly successful schools that many people haven’t heard of, or that aren’t on the same radar screens as others, with unbelievably talented educators doing remarkable work with children. They deserve every bit of attention and success that every other school does.
Yet there is this mentality in the recruitment process that we move people along from known school to known school. It has been historic. It’s not just the two decades I’ve been doing it, but three or four decades before that.
It gets talked about in leadership circles, but it doesn’t get dealt with in any significant way. I think there are schools trying to break that mold and look at a more diverse pool of individuals.
It’s true in any sector and industry. If you worked in the tech industry and you worked for one of the Magnificent Seven companies, the odds of you getting another job are ten to twenty times higher than someone who didn’t work for those companies.
But what if you’re the worst employee at that company? How would we know? You have Apple on your resume, so you must be good. That can’t be true for everybody. And if you’ve been at some company no one has ever heard of, but you’re absolutely crushing it, how will we get to know that?
I find that stuff really fascinating.
Greg: Good point.
JP: It’s true. In the line of work I do now, when I see one of those schools on a CV, I think, “Wow.” Then I go through the interview process with the client and say, “Yeah, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” or, “There are hidden skeletons in that particular closet.”
Greg: The foreshadowing is killing me because my next question would be how you’re planning on fixing that or changing that, but we can’t because JP still has one more country.
JP: We have one more country. Hannah, take it away. It’s your country.
Hannah: Let’s talk Brazil. I tell people I’m Brazilian by heart, even though my passport is American. I love the country. What led you to Brazil?
Rich Boerner: Another wonderful opportunity. What I fell in love with at Graded was one of the great taglines that had been there long before me: “An American school with a Brazilian heart.”
The energy and passion experienced in Brazil — I haven’t lived in every other country, so I can’t suggest that isn’t true elsewhere, but I know it’s true in Brazil. You could feel it. You walked that campus and it had a heartbeat.
What also impressed me about the school during the recruitment process was that it was about to embark on its next phase. The school was 95 years old when I arrived, and yet it had no interest in holding onto any part of its legacy that hindered it. It wanted to honor its history, for sure, as it should, but it wasn’t interested in resting on that.
It was asking, “What can we envision next?” When I arrived, I arrived with the opportunity to think creatively about the next iteration and phase of the institution’s history. How do we advance it and modernize it so it’s ready for the next hundred years?
Now, I would argue no one can do that in a world that’s advancing this quickly. Maybe you can prepare for the next five years or five weeks nowadays. But thinking that way matters. The permission to dream was palpable in a community that was alive to grow, evolve, and get better.
JP: When you think of a school that is 95 years old, it could be the complete opposite: “We do it this way. We’ve been doing it this way for 95 years. We’re not going to change.” It’s refreshing to hear they were willing to look internally, see what works, and see what might need to change.
Rich Boerner: Absolutely. I interviewed at schools that were like that.
In my life and in my dispositions, I’m a catalyst for change. I’m a change junkie. Not change for change’s sake, but really to advance the ball and move things forward.
If you lined up every teacher who was at Graded while I was there, some might say, “That was the best change we ever had,” and some might say, “I don’t know why he made those moves.” But nonetheless, we moved.
That’s important when you think about who you’re bringing into a school. If I weren’t a catalyst and they wanted me to catalyze, there would be a misfit. As I think about it, I don’t know that I knew all of that at the time. I think I hoped it. I think I saw it. Whether the board and community felt I was going to bring that change, I’m not so sure. But it worked out, and that fit was there.
To last a decade and be lucky enough to continue serving for that long meant there were some pretty positive times throughout that experience.
JP: Let’s dig into the Head of School thing. Is it a term of three years or four?
Rich Boerner: That’s evolving a bit. Typically, it’s about a three-year start. We’re now seeing schools trying to extend that, maybe with a four-year initial contract. Or it’s a three-year, and then if they find a good marriage, they might offer five years with some opt-out. I’ve even seen some Heads sign a ten-year secondary contract.
Greg: So they can follow through with their vision instead of starting it and handing it off to someone else.
Rich Boerner: Right. What’s interesting is that’s contrary to what’s happening. The average length of a Head of School tenure is decreasing radically since the pandemic. Boards are exercising decisions to move to a different Head of School at a much more rapid rate than ever before.
It’s taking on, I would argue, a more corporate approach. They’re looking at the Head and the need in the school and saying, “You can deliver that need for this period of time, and then I’m going to get somebody else who has a different need to do the next thing,” rather than saying, “This person can evolve into doing multiple things.”
That’s an interesting shift in international schools.
Greg: Man, that sounds corporate.
Hannah: Not to switch subjects, but a little bit. What year did you go to Brazil?
Rich Boerner: I joined in 2015 and was there until 2025.
Hannah: That was the same year my husband and I went to Rio to teach for two years.
Greg: I’m finishing up my tenth year here. I have one more week of school, and then July 31 is my tenth year. I’m one of those guys, and listeners will know this, who was doing the two-year contract, then another two, then maybe three. I was interested in seeing the world, being at great schools, signing a two-year contract, and finishing it. But it’s interesting to be somewhere for such a long time.
Rich Boerner: You really get to understand a community deeply. Ultimately, though, there is a time and place where new ideas and fresh perspectives are healthy.
I have a series of abilities and a series of deficits, just like everybody. Over time, I think I exhausted every bit of ability I could, and maybe the warts were showing more toward the end. I don’t know.
Now they have new leadership, and Jane McGee is there doing wonderful things to take it to the next level, change the things I couldn’t do, make those things better, and build on the things I perhaps was successful at.
That’s what happens in our schools. Anytime we move on, we proudly offer up the best version of what we offered to somebody and then let them take it to the next place.
Greg: Build to succeed and have some kind of legacy of improvement. Leave on a good note.
Rich Boerner: As best you can. We all are doing the best work we know how.
JP: And in all that time, your two little kids in Korea grew up in the system as TCKs.
Rich Boerner: Yeah. Our oldest graduated from Dhaka, and our youngest graduated from Graded. They had multiple school experiences. That has been very interesting as they’ve grown into young adults and how they see the world.
I often describe the U.S.-centric mindset as the U.S. being the center of the world, with everything revolving around it. That’s how we understand ourselves as Americans. Our kids really bristle at that construct because they’ve lived in so many places and seen people thrive and succeed with different means: more, less, and different.
Humans are humans. We can thrive and succeed in all kinds of political environments, socioeconomic environments, cultural environments, and religious contexts. Giving our children that exposure and understanding has fundamentally changed how they view the world. We’re really proud of that open mindset.
That was the ultimate reason we did the two-year leave of absence. We wanted to give them an experience. We realized two years might not be enough to really have that change process sink in.
Now, if you had them on the podcast, they would probably say all kinds of other things about their experience — good, bad, and indifferent. They’d say, “Dad’s just blowing smoke.”
Greg: “Let us tell you the real thing. Dad didn’t tell you the whole thing.”
JP: But it’s true. In the process, you and your wife also changed. We were just talking about this. We would not be the same without all these cultures and without living these experiences more deeply than travel or tourism. When you live in a country day in and day out, it affects you and changes your personality, your likes, and your dislikes.
Who would Rich have been without those twenty years if he had stayed in Tacoma, Washington?
Rich Boerner: I tell people all the time when they’re making decisions about this job or that job, and they ask, “Which one should I pick? What will happen to my life if I do this versus that?” The real answer is you don’t get to know because you only get to make one decision.
Then you embrace that decision with everything you have and grow as much as you can until you get pointed in a direction where you have to make another decision.
I don’t know what I would have been like. I certainly know I wouldn’t have had an understanding of the world the way I do, at least not the personal connection to that understanding.
I was raised in a family that valued diversity, valued equity, and educated and almost preached that into the fabric of us as kids. But I couldn’t understand it the same way I could by living in it, seeing it, appreciating it, and being frustrated by it because they weren’t my norms or my culture.
To think that we only embrace every part of everyone else’s culture is silly too. There are certain things that are just more naturally easy for me in the United States than in any other country I’ve lived in, and that’s comforting. But it also doesn’t stretch me in the same way.
Some days, I really love the ease I have today to walk into a grocery store and have everything work the way I want it to work.
JP: You can read all the labels and know what’s inside the cans.
Rich Boerner: I can do all of that stuff, and it’s easy. Yet I’m not stretching.
Greg: I’m changing my answer now. When people ask me why I teach overseas and what it’s like to teach overseas, I think your answer is amazing. It was a long answer, but I got the gist of it.
Not only did teaching overseas change your life for the better, but living overseas for so long changed your kids’ perspectives dramatically. It’s who you are today. I love that answer. I need to say that more when people ask me those questions.
Hannah: As the resident TCK, I think back on my own experience. I was twelve when my parents moved us to Rio. I’m grateful for those experiences. I’m fluent in Portuguese. I taught myself Spanish. I’m really grateful for that.
I ended up doing my senior year of high school in the U.S. because we ran into some visa issues. But I look back on my peers at school here and the differences between them and me, and I think, “Would I be in international education if I had just grown up here in the U.S.?” I don’t know if I would.
I knew the world a lot differently than they did because of that TCK experience. There were times in middle school and high school when I told my parents, “I don’t want to be here. Take me home.” But I’m so grateful now. And now I’m raising my own TCKs, and I know they’re going to have their days too, but it’s going to be worth it.
Rich Boerner: Being a kid is hard, let alone doing it in other locations. But I’m not so sure my kids wouldn’t have said the same thing at the local elementary school. They might have said, “I don’t want to be at this school either,” because they were having conflict with somebody or going through some challenge. It’s definitely compounded internationally, but that’s part of the growth of us as humans: going through challenging moments, persevering, becoming resilient, and overcoming.
Greg: On the flip side, Matt, one of our other co-hosts and founders, has four boys. Living here in Saudi, we’d go to the Maldives quite a bit. That’s not exactly a cheap place to go. One day the kids said, “Dad, can we just go back to our other home and stay there in the Maldives?” That was their thinking. They were all elementary kids, and that was their reality. There’s Wisconsin, there’s Maldives, let’s go here, let’s go back to Venezuela. It was really sweet. I love that anecdote and always stick with it.
We all know international education is the best-kept secret in the world, and it has intrinsic values for your kids too.
Rich Boerner: Well said.
JP: So can you tell us why you’re not in Brazil now? You’re in Tacoma, Washington. What are you doing now?
Rich Boerner: We made the decision to leave Graded for a multitude of reasons. Some were very personal. We had aging family members, both on my wife’s side and my side, who needed more attention. That was a pulling force.
Our kids were growing into adulthood, and we wanted to spend more time with them. They had been out of the nest for a while, and we had missed that. We knew there was a sunset period. We weren’t going to retire fully overseas, so there were callings pulling us back.
At the same time, I knew I was approaching a decade at Graded, and that was sunsetting as well. I was thinking, “What’s next? Do we go overseas again and do that? But that won’t provide for those family needs and desires. Or do we pivot and do something different?”
That’s where the combination of leaving the headship but still serving in education came together with my co-founder and me as we began to dream about how we could help in a different way.
That started a series of conversations during the pandemic. There was a group of seven Heads of School. We would meet every Saturday from all over the world. We shared stories about what we were doing, how we were surviving, what we were getting wrong, and stealing each other’s ideas. We were therapy for one another, helping each other get through a hard time.
We had different topics: tell about the worst moment, tell about the best moment, tell about something you got completely wrong, or your worst day as a Head. They were fascinating, raw, vulnerable moments.
For Paul Richards and me, who is my co-founder at TrueFit Talent, that began a side conversation that bubbled up a couple of years later. We started to explore recruitment through the lens of our own experiences.
We asked questions like: What was the best recruitment process you went through as a candidate? What was the worst? How many times had you been ghosted by schools in your career?
Teachers talk about this a lot because of the volume of candidates applying for specific jobs. I was at fault at Graded, doing hiring where you didn’t communicate back to candidates. But it happens at the Head level too, all the time, even though the volume isn’t as large.
That began a journey and a conversation about what we thought was broken, what hadn’t changed in decades in the experience for candidates and schools, and how we might be part of the solution.
JP: When did this launch? Did it launch after you left Graded or a little before? I thought there might have been some overlap.
Rich Boerner: A little before. It’s June 2026 now, so about two and a half years ago we began to really formulate the idea of TrueFit Talent.
Before we had a name, and before we had what you might call a product, we began to envision what was possible. For about six months, Paul and I spent nights and weekends meeting and talking remotely.
We began to solve a couple of things in different spaces. The first thing we tried to solve was: what causes people to be successful or fail at work? Just that simple question.
We studied it, read research, looked at industry, and looked at education. The findings were compelling. In education and outside education, the things that cause success and failure are the same. They are the human condition. They are the metacognitive abilities or inabilities we demonstrate in the workplace: our ability or inability to adapt to a new context, solve problems, resolve conflict, work on a team, demonstrate empathy, and show self-awareness.
None of those are about subject matter expertise. None of them. If you can’t do those things, it doesn’t matter what expertise you have in physics or literature. You can’t reach kids. You can’t work across teams.
So we listened to that research and said, “If that’s true, we have two new problems. How do you assess that? And in what way would you assess it?”
That’s when we realized we had an idea. We wanted to create a solution that would build the company forward. Then we began to tackle how we would measure these things.
Measuring somebody’s self-awareness is hard. Measuring somebody’s ability to resolve conflict may be a little bit easier. Measuring somebody’s empathy? Really challenging.
JP: When you say measuring, I hear scoring, and that feels virtually impossible. Out of ten? Out of a hundred? “This person has 68% empathy. That person has 32% ability to work with someone.” Are you talking more in silos or in a rubric sense, like categories that meet the expectation of empathy? How do you measure?
Rich Boerner: Think about it through the lens of competency. We want to measure somebody’s competence through their demonstrated actions in a moment in time, around how they have expressed empathy in a difficult situation they need to resolve.
When we think about learning with children, what we’re really looking for is evidence. We want evidence that they can demonstrate what we’ve taught them, use that information, and display it in a unique and novel way. That’s even better.
So you put someone in a situation, let them demonstrate their response, and you get a real view of how that person behaves in a situation.
That was the big breakthrough for us. One, we could figure out how to measure it with validity and reliability. The first person we hired onto our team was a research scientist who studied data analytics and performance. She went to work figuring out how to actually measure this and build a hardcore rubric of assessments.
We measure over sixty competencies across six talent areas for every applicant who uses the system to apply for a position or be hired into a position. We’re looking at a multitude of things demonstrated in the work they do.
Then the question was: if we can do it, and it’s statistically viable, how do we do it? What solution would we use?
This is where we differentiate. Let’s go back to the research. When we study what actually predicts success in jobs, we understand those talents are there: self-awareness, empathy, conflict resolution. But what doesn’t predict success are the things we all use.
The resume is not a predictor of success. It tells us what somebody has done. It tells us where they worked and what education they have. It doesn’t tell us how.
Greg: But it doesn’t tell us if we were the worst at Google.
Rich Boerner: It does not. In fact, it doesn’t tell us the ability to do anything. It tells us what I’ve done. It tells us the conferences I attended. My resume looks great because I’ve had a lot of leadership opportunities. At every school I’ve led, I’ve run a strategic plan.
Greg: Everyone looks good on paper. That’s what I heard from a school head.
Rich Boerner: Exactly. So then the question is, so what? Did the strategic plans I implemented actually move the needle? How did my leadership influence learning at that school? In what ways can I demonstrate that in a resume? I can’t.
If fifty people apply for a job and we look at resumes, we’re never really going to give all fifty people equal view. We don’t have the time. Nor can we equitably assess without bias.
The things that influence us in bias are things familiar to us. I know there are certain colleges in the United States that are more prestigious than others, so candidates who went to those schools are advantaged. Maybe some would say they should be advantaged. I would say, “Demonstrate that you’re a great teacher or great leader. Then if you went to that college, that might also add something.”
But we do the inverse. We look at the college first rather than the impact. We do this with schools people worked at too, which goes back to brand schools. If that school is on your resume, you have a better shot. But what if you weren’t successful at that school? We don’t know that.
The cover letter is even worse.
JP: I’m waiting for the cover letter to go the way of the dodo bird, like the reference letter. Honestly, now with AI, everyone’s writing cover letters that say the same thing.
Rich Boerner: Exactly. Not only that, but resumes are being written by AI too. In fact, I would suggest if you aren’t using AI to address your resume, you’re probably going to be behind.
I can take a resume and cover letter, which are still traditional in most schools and companies, and have AI tailor them to every part of the job description. I can even send my agent out to pull recent information from your website and refer to it, so it looks like I’m paying close attention to what is happening in your school right now.
When somebody reads it, they get excited by it. That’s theater. That’s not substance. It’s smart, but it doesn’t help you understand whether I’m good at the job I’m being hired to do. It may get me an interview.
Then we go through an interview process, which also doesn’t have a lot of correlation to job performance. Certainly, unstructured interviews don’t have a lot of correlation to job performance. We go through a dance, what I call performance theater.
I listen in and hear somebody say something incredibly eloquent or tell a story I’m familiar with, and I like it. At the end, the interview committee says, “Wasn’t she great? I really liked her. She’d fit in well.”
Those could be true statements, but they are likely filtered by bias we have for that person because of certain aspects that weren’t about the substance of their impact.
When we ask questions like, “Tell me about a time when…” I have an answer to all of those. I have rehearsed them and prepared them. And by the way, they are the best version of what ever happened. Of course they are. I’m in an interview. I’m not telling mistruths, but I am making all of my stories as impactful as possible because I want the opportunity.
So we shifted to asking: what if we put people in real simulated experiences, under real pressure, with real scenarios that are culturally and contextually designed for the school they’re applying to?
When we work with a school, they help us write role-play scenarios that fit their context: an African context in a large city, a more urban school in the United States, a school in Asia with a host-majority population, a school with declining enrollment and economic pressure, or whatever the things are that we want to measure.
Then we place those individuals in an experience where they have to defend and articulate where they are in time and place with this person and this AI persona. They move through this navigating experience, and every candidate goes through the same experience.
Greg: I’m sure you’re going to get to this. You figured out the what, based on evidence, and the how. My question is, when I go on there, is it text-based? Animated? Video? What does it look like from our point of view? What does that scenario look like? What’s the experience?
Rich Boerner: There are two experience pieces. The role-play simulation I was describing is currently text-based. When you enter the experience, first you get to practice. You get a little three-minute practice and get familiar with it.
Then the person introduces themselves. A series of text shows up, and you have a text box where you respond. You move back and forth in the cadence of conversation, just like you would with a real person.
We provide a scenario upfront, so you know exactly what you’re walking into. The experience is that you’re sitting in an office or classroom, face to face, talking with somebody.
We will be rolling out a voice version in the next several weeks, so it will be a much more interactive, voice-based conversation, which doesn’t disadvantage people from a typing perspective.
We are not moving aggressively toward video-based interaction because what we’ve heard, and what others in the industry, mostly in the business world, have received as feedback, is that people don’t want to talk to an AI avatar. They want as realistic a situation as they can have that replicates what they’re going to experience.
We find that text-based and voice-based are the most authentic ways to do that. We recognize it is not real. It is a simulation, just like an airplane pilot uses a simulation when going to a new airport.
Greg: A lot of people are used to chat-based conversation because we do it every day. A lot of us are heavily into it, and we’re educated readers. I’m much more at ease after hearing you say this because I had no idea. Is it a choice between voice and text, or is it a mixture?
Rich Boerner: Right now, it is only text, and it will become voice. For accommodation purposes, we will have flexibility for certain people. If they have a need to access it equitably in a certain way, we will provide that ability.
The simulation experience includes two different simulations every candidate goes through. Then we take individuals through what’s called a working style assessment.
You’re probably familiar with personality assessments like CliftonStrengths and others. We don’t subscribe to that solution. What we want to get at is how you show up at work. How do you do the work you do? How do you demonstrate that work as a member of a team so we can help the organization look at the kind of leader or teacher they need versus how the candidate demonstrates themselves?
We do this through binary assessments where both options are successfully positive opportunities. I can be A or B, and both are positive, but one is distinctly different from the other. They fall into four categories.
I talked about catalyzing earlier. One category we report on is whether you are more of a catalyzing individual or a stabilizing individual. Both are great, but they are not necessarily what you need at the moment you’re hiring.
Let’s say you’re hiring an elementary principal in a school that has had trauma. The previous principal left an unhealthy situation. Faculty feel a great sense of mistrust. The community is uneasy. Families are threatening to leave because they don’t feel connected or understood.
Would it be better to hire somebody who can stabilize a community or catalyze a community in that moment? Probably stabilize. It doesn’t mean we don’t want a catalyzer, but in that moment, we need to know.
If you hired me for that role, could I stabilize? I could. In my default mode every day, is that what I do? I don’t. So I could have easily been hired because maybe I was affable and interesting in an interview, with a fancy resume, and I’ve got talent. But I may have the wrong talent for what that school needs at that moment.
That’s what we’re trying to solve.
Greg: Wow.
JP: That means the school needs to know exactly what they’re looking for, much more than with a standard job description. Do you help with that analysis? What do you need right now in the social studies department or in a Grade 10 history class? Does it get down to that?
Greg: That’s why the school helps write the dialogues and situations.
Rich Boerner: We do. What schools tell us, especially as they start seeing the data and results from everybody, is that it changes so much about the look-fors.
Historically, a job opens up, we quickly dust off the job description, it looks very similar to the last one, and we get it out as fast as possible because the market is hiring. We celebrate when we get a lot of applicants and say, “We did a good job because we had sixty applicants.”
Then the resumes show up, and we don’t know what to do because we don’t really have discriminating information.
In this process, you have all this evidence. You’ve actually seen candidates demonstrate behaviors, and you have analysis of it. The interview you have with those individuals becomes a much deeper investigation into whether you can also see them demonstrate the same behaviors in the interview that they demonstrated in the simulation.
Now you have a triangulation of information you never had before. Instead of interviews being discovery, they become more investigative. That helps the confidence of both the candidate and the school moving forward.
Another thing we’re really proud of is that all minimally qualified candidates get assessed. If you have enough of the prerequisites to work in that environment, whatever the country conditions are, everybody gets a fair shot.
Right now, if there are fifty applicants, you throw them up on a sticky board and throw darts at a few of them. I’m taking a little liberty with that, but you hope. You put your resume out there and cross your fingers. You can’t interview fifty people. We can assess fifty people.
In fact, we’re working with an organization right now where we assessed 138 people. We told them, “Do not pare it down using the filters you historically used. We’ll assess them all.” We don’t charge by the assessment; we charge by the hiring position.
Now we have troves of data about how people perform and demonstrate their work. An emerging product we want to provide to the 137 who didn’t get hired is feedback. We want to give them information about how they did — not necessarily their performance, per se, but in these talent areas, how they could improve. We never get any information like that in hiring processes.
Greg: Longtime listener here. I’m fascinated by this, Rich. I don’t want to take away from what you just said because feedback is something we never get. You just hear nothing. It goes into the ether. I totally appreciate that.
My question is, once TrueFit narrows down that group of 150, are they giving a select few to the next level for the team or recruiter to look at? Is that correct?
Rich Boerner: The school logs into their own platform. It has all the analysis of the candidates who are applying and the status of their application, so there is a tracking system.
When results are released, they go into the results portal and can compare candidates to one another. They can look at all the varying individual data, and they get an individual report for every candidate. Then they pour through that data and make the decision about who from that pool they want to move forward into the interview process.
Greg: Got it. When I first heard about this, in just a few sentences, I immediately thought it was AI making the decision. But it’s not. I want to be clear about that for listeners and for myself. It’s not about AI making the decision. It’s through a human lens, but AI is assisting and making it higher quality and more equitable from the beginning, right?
Rich Boerner: Absolutely. That was the mission at the beginning. AI was not going to be in the driver’s seat. It would be part of our solution, but humans need to be at the wheel when we talk about who we’re going to put in our schools.
The data we get from this interaction is incredibly rich and powerful. Here’s what’s fascinating: applicants write to us, unrequested, every single time we have a search out there, and say, “That was the most humane experience I’ve ever been through in recruiting.”
Isn’t that interesting? We’re using AI, yet they feel seen. They feel they were able to demonstrate their abilities. They feel like they have a fair shot.
From a school perspective, think about the marketing and branding of saying, “We assess everybody. We give everybody a shot.” Underrepresented talent can get bypassed because they haven’t been at a notable school, don’t have a fancy degree, or come from a different ethnic or racial background that schools may have been hesitant to work with or hire, which is problematic on many levels.
All of that information is not available when we do our reporting. We mitigate those bias indices. Our system doesn’t know your gender, race, ethnicity, or where you’ve worked. It doesn’t know any of that. It assesses you on your demonstrated ability and lets everybody’s real opportunities shine.
If somebody then wants to say, “That person performed really well, but they look different from us, come from a different part of the world, or don’t have the prerequisite school experiences we always liked,” they have to reintroduce bias on their side.
That has really changed things. Many schools that work with us say the reason they chose us is because they wanted to challenge that concern: that they weren’t getting enough representation of diversity into the applicant pool at the final stage. Those bias filters are there. We’re human. It’s part of our existence.
JP: So using AI to level the playing field.
Rich Boerner: Oddly so, yes. People ask how we’re worried about AI and bias. Absolutely.
If you want to geek out a little bit, we have four different AI models assess every candidate every time. We have a whole confidence interval to look at to make sure there’s no wandering, introduced scoring algorithm, or misfit. All of that is assessed, and if there are anomalies, they’re flagged by a human.
Greg: I’m geeked out by that. I’m impressed. I’m in awe.
Rich Boerner: The team has done stuff that blows my mind, frankly, in terms of what we’re able to assess.
Greg: Can we talk for another two hours about this? I have a thousand questions. Can we have you back on again, Rich?
Rich Boerner: I’d love to be on again.
JP: Rich, we really appreciate you taking the time. We know there were time constraints today, and we don’t want to go over. We do want to have you come back when that new iteration with voice is available, and when you start to see the data and maybe new candidates coming out of the woodwork because now it’s not text-based.
Rich Boerner: Maybe we can try it live. Wouldn’t that be fun?
JP: Yes. We’re all in. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a rich hour. Pun intended, apparently. We will hold you to it. Please come back and give us your latest.
Rich Boerner: It’ll be my honor. Greg, JP, and Hannah, what a treat. I’ve loved every minute of the conversation. I can’t believe the time has flown this fast.
Greg: Before you go, we can’t let you go yet. Can you give a little pitch? How can a listener find out more about what you’re talking about?
Rich Boerner: You can do multiple things. You can follow us on LinkedIn at TrueFit Talent. We’re present there and sharing information and stories about the work we’re doing with schools around the world.
You can visit our website at TrueFitTalent.com. There you can find a wealth of information about the services we provide and how we do the work we do.
For you, Greg, in the geek-out world, check out TrueProof, which is the way we measure AI authenticity in the candidates’ application process to make sure they’re doing it ethically and fairly. Fascinating work.
We also work on the talent development side, so it isn’t just recruiting. We help teams and build analysis for teams to help them grow, evolve, and be more effective.
Or you can write to me at Rich@TrueFitTalent.com, and I’ll connect with you and set up a time to meet and talk. We love feedback. We love hearing about the experiences people are having with our solution.
For listeners, if you want to try it yourself, go to try.truefittalent.com and you can try a demo simulation.
Greg: That was my question.
JP: We’re going to hold you to that.
Rich Boerner: Try it yourself: try.truefittalent.com.
Greg: All those links will be included at the bottom, Rich. I’m so excited about that. When you come back next time, we’re going to get more into your teaching experience and leadership experience, as well as back into this AI, because we didn’t have enough time. They’re both important.
Rich Boerner: Fantastic. Absolutely they are. Critically. Thank you guys so much. What an honor.
JP: Thank you very much.
Rich Boerner: Thanks for having me on.
Greg: This is Greg the single guy, and I’m going to bring us to a close here. We would like to say a warm thank you to Rich Boerner. He is a very experienced Head of School, international educator, and educational leader, venturing off and trying to solve the idea of how schools can better recruit talent that makes the right fit. I said it.
Thank you, Rich, for being on our show.
Rich Boerner: Thanks so much. I appreciate it. It’s been an honor.
Greg: Thank you, JP Mint in Mexico, and Hannah, currently in Iowa. We’ll see you next episode.