Why We Built Tandem Recruit

Tandem was founded to solve coverage. Years into this work, we continued to hear the same thing from centers: coverage is one staffing problem. Hiring permanent teachers is another, and there was no tool built for it. This post explains why we built Tandem Recruit, what we learned that the rest of the market missed, and why subs alone were never going to be the answer to a problem this big.

Tandem was built to solve coverage.

That's what centers asked us for. That's what we offered first.

It turned out to be half the problem.

The hiring problem behind the coverage problem

Every center we talked to ran their hiring out of three places. An Indeed inbox. A spreadsheet. And a folder of paper resumes nobody had time to file.

The tools weren't connected. The candidates weren't qualified. The follow-up didn't happen.

Directors weren't failing at hiring. They were doing hiring with tools nobody had ever designed for them.

The way a new teacher's first day usually plays out is downstream of this. If the hiring process is broken, the onboarding starts behind. The first week pays for everything the platform couldn't do.

Subs solve one staffing problem. Not both.

We thought hard about whether sub coverage and permanent hiring were the same problem in different clothes.

They aren't.

Subs fill the gap. A familiar, pre-screened worker covers a classroom this morning. The center keeps ratios. The day goes on.

Permanent hiring fills the room. A teacher takes responsibility for the curriculum, the families, the development of every child in front of them. That's not coverage. That's the team.

The two feed each other. A center that can't hire leans harder on subs. A center that leans too hard on subs burns out the staff it has. But solving one doesn't solve the other.

The subs problem and the hiring problem need different tools.

What we kept hearing from directors

Three things came up in almost every conversation.

The first was credential verification. "A candidate told me they had their CDA and listed it on their resume, but couldn't product the actual document." That happened over and over.

The second was volume. "I posted on Indeed and got eighty resumes. Maybe four of them were actually interested and qualified. I don't have time to read eighty resumes."

The third was drop-off. "The candidate I liked stopped responding. I don't know what happened. I didn't have a system to follow up."

None of those problems are about director skill. They're about tooling. Every one of them gets solved by a platform that understands the job.

What "built for child care" actually means

When the tools you use don't speak your industry, you spend half your time translating.

A generic hiring platform can't tell a CDA from an associate's degree. It can't filter for infant-toddler experience.

Tandem Recruit was designed by people who know the difference between a Lead Teacher and a Floater is a completely different hiring decision.

That shows up in small ways and big ways. Job posts with age-group fields. Credential screening against your state's actual requirements. A candidate pool already verified for the work child care does, not the work corporate does.

Built for child care, not bolted on. That's the whole point.

Get started with Tandem Recruit

Tandem Recruit and Tandem Subs run on the same platform, so if you already have a Tandem account, you can activate Recruit with the click of a button.

Book a demo and we'll show you how it works. Or learn more and get started on the Tandem Recruit page.

🧸 Crib Notes

• Tandem was founded for coverage. Years of director conversations made clear that permanent hiring is a second, separate staffing problem.
• Subs and permanent hires solve different problems. Solving coverage well doesn't solve hiring, and over-relying on subs burns out the staff you have.
• Three pain points came up in almost every conversation: credential verification at the wrong time, candidate volume without quality, and drop-off mid-pipeline.
• The problem isn't director skill. It's tools that weren't designed for child care.
• Tandem Recruit was built from the ground up around how ECE centers actually hire. Not adapted from a generic platform. Built for the job.