Last week I had a request through this website for a super star chemistry tutor from a parent of a high school student.

Typically, when you call or email No Excuses Tutoring, we’re ready with a qualified tutor whom we’ve worked with in the past, or at the very least already interviewed and vetted. And I thought I knew a few great Chemistry tutors as well.

But it turned out that none of the my Chemistry tutors were available. In cases like this, when I don’t already have a tutor to recommend, I like to promise that I’ll find you one, as soon as I can – which in this case had to be in about 48 hours due to an upcoming chemistry exam.

As you can imagine, I immediately deployed a craigslist ad, and started searching through my resume files. When at the end of the day, I still wasn’t satisfied with the quality of candidates, I decided to get more aggressive. I found a list of graduate students (and their email addresses) at CU-Denver’s Chemistry Department, and emailed ALL of them directly (about 20 emails), asking if they’d be interested in a tutoring gig. It worked. The best resumes I received and the person who eventually got the job all came from the more direct approach.

The next day, I interviewed a couple of candidates in person, and sent the best resume to the parent – who after the first tutoring session was thrilled that we were able to find such a high caliber tutor in such a short amount of time.