RecruitEarth — for Canadian private schools recruiting families worldwide.
The part nobody hands a school: how to actually run the relationship.
Finding an agent is the easy half. The Playbook is the other half — a method, in the order a school works through it, from deciding who is worth contacting to the quarterly review that decides whether the relationship renews.
These are operational starting points, not legal advice. Have local counsel review agreements for your situation.
Agent agreements touch employment, consumer-protection and immigration law differently in every jurisdiction a school recruits from, and none of this material is written for yours specifically.
Stage 01
Before contact
Decide who is worth an email, and why. Most of the work is here, and most schools skip it.
Verify the licence before anything else
Licence status, disciplinary history, and what to do if a regulator flags a concern after you have signed. Every record in the directory links back to the register that issued its number, so this is a check you can finish rather than a question you carry.
Filter to the markets you actually recruit from
An agent that serves families from Vietnam is worth more to you than a larger agent that does not, and size is the wrong first filter. Narrow by source market, family focus and language before you look at anything else.
Decide the goal before the introduction
Two enquiries from Hanoi by March is a goal. "Building relationships in South-East Asia" is not, and it is what makes an agent relationship impossible to review later. Write the number down before you make contact.
Stage 02
First conversation
The first message sets what the relationship is. It is much harder to narrow later than to start narrow.
Outreach templates
A first approach that says who you are, which families you are looking for, and what you are asking — short enough to be read by someone who receives a dozen of these a week.
The school introduction
What an agent needs in order to judge whether your school is a fit for their families: curriculum, boarding or day, year groups with actual places, and the entry points that are open.
Scope, in writing, early
Territory, exclusivity, term, and how the relationship ends. A standard agent representation agreement and a referral agreement for licensed immigration consultants, both written as neutral starting points rather than as terms weighted toward the school.
Commission benchmarks
What schools in comparable markets pay, by region and enrolment volume, so the number comes from data rather than from whatever the first agent proposed.
Stage 03
After contact
Three fields, recorded the same day. This is the part that decides whether you have a channel or a contact list.
The next step
One concrete action, not "stay in touch". Send the prospectus, introduce the admissions lead, agree a fee schedule — whatever it is, it is a thing that can be marked done.
The owner
One named person at your school. A relationship owned by the admissions team is owned by nobody, and it is the reason most agent relationships go quiet in the second term rather than the first.
The follow-up date
A date, not an intention. It is also what makes the quarterly review below possible: without it there is nothing to review against.
Stage 04
Quarterly review
The meeting that decides renewals. Four things, in this order.
Licence status changes
Anything that moved since last quarter — a lapse, a suspension, an agent that stopped trading. This is the check that is easiest to skip and most expensive to have skipped.
Who replied, and who did not
Silence is information. An agent who has not answered two quarters running is not a channel, and keeping them on the list makes the list less useful.
Referrals received
Families an agent actually sent your way, against the goal you wrote down before you made contact.
Outcomes
Enquiries, applications, enrolments, attributed to the agent that produced them. This is what you show a board at renewal, and it only exists if the three fields above were filled in each time.
What comes with a subscription
Source market briefs — where families in a given market actually find agents, which channels dominate, and what to expect from a first approach — sit alongside the stages rather than inside one, because they inform the filtering and the first conversation equally.
The templates, benchmarks and checklists behind each step come with a subscription. The method above does not — it is the same either way.
See plans