by Interstride
How Ashley Woods, founder of the Spanish phonics-book company PrimerLibro, found her first employee on Interstride after LinkedIn, Handshake, and Indeed came up empty.
Ashley Woods spent more than a decade in marketing at Google and YouTube. She could email a VP at MasterCard about a partnership and get a “yes, let’s do it” the same afternoon. Then she left to start PrimerLibro, a line of phonics-based Spanish books that help kids ages three to six read on their own, and ran into a very different reality.
“With my own business, I’d send an email and never get a response,” she says. “At a conference with my Google badge, everyone wants to chat. At a conference under my own business, no one does. It’s definitely a wake-up call.”
Hiring her first team member turned out to be the hardest part. Not because she didn’t know what she wanted, but because almost every platform she tried put up a wall.
The Wall
Ashley had posted the role on LinkedIn, and the same day her account, one she’d had since university, was flagged and shut down for suspected fraud. “They don’t tell you why,” she says.
Handshake asked for an employer identification number, then rejected the one she gave. The free job boards that feed Google Jobs, plus Indeed, sent a trickle of unqualified leads.
“The leads weren’t great,” she says. “It was people who just needed a job and hadn’t read the description. I was looking for a very specific candidate.”
Finding the Right Pool
Interstride showed up, fittingly, in a simple search. “I was looking for places to post a job every single day, and Interstride came up in a Google Gemini search,” she says.
What made it different wasn’t a clever feature, but the pool. “Interstride was the only platform that had the audience I wanted, college students and recent grads, and didn’t care what country I was in,” she says.
Ashley knew exactly who she was after: a native Spanish speaker, ideally a future teacher, highly organized, and genuinely into the brand and mission. The role was an internship designed to give more back to the student than to the business: running PrimerLibro’s social media, building a real portfolio, and growing an on-the-ground network in the community.
She also wanted to reach international students.
“I actually preferred international students, because they’re hungrier,” she says. “I’ve lived in four countries on three continents. International students come in with something to prove, and they’re there to prove it. That drive is what I wanted.”
Fewer Applications, but More Targeted Candidates
Interstride didn’t flood her inbox. She got fewer applications and found her one perfect hire more quickly than she imagined.
The candidate, a recent NYU graduate from Colombia, had grown up going door to door with her mother, a children’s-book author, selling books to bookstores. She wanted to write her own someday.
“It was so aligned that I thought, ‘I don’t need any more applicants,'” Ashley says. “It wasn’t just a job for her. She felt tied to the vision and the brand because of her own experience back in Colombia.”
Along the way, Ashley also picked up something she hadn’t expected: an education. She’d never heard of OPT or CPT, the work-authorization pathways many international students use, until she took Interstride’s training. “I went through every page of the free resources,” she says. “It was genuinely helpful because it allowed me to understand the process for hiring an international student, which was more simple than I expected.”
What She Tells Other Founders
“I’ve told everybody about Interstride, literally everybody,” she says. “It was so much better than LinkedIn, Handshake, or Indeed. None of them gave me that experience. With Interstride, you post a job and people who are actually qualified respond. It’s exactly what you’d expect it to be. I recommend it to everybody.”
Hiring international students or recent grads? Interstride connects employers with a global talent pool that’s ready to work and easy to reach, no matter where your business is based. Sign up for free and post your first role.
