NHA Survey

Item	Total Score	Aggregate Rank
Communication Skills	57	1
Building Rapport	51	2
Event Planning and Execution	40	3
Strategic Thinking	36	4
CRM Utilization	31	5
Presentation Skills	27	6
Leadership	10	7

Latest values:

If the Admissions Rep can't fully communicate with parents, leads, and school leadership - everything will fail
It's important to problem solve, decision make, and leading through change.. all these take place as a role in the AR position often.
Building rapport is the foundation of everything we do, whether it with parents or school teams or across departments. It enables us to obtain buy-in from school team and build confidence with parents.
Being able to quickly gain confidence in our customers makes a notable difference in onboarding success. Also, being able to neutralize a negative situation or reputation is highly import. This also pertains to working with school staff and leadership. That collaboration is necessary to be successful in this position.
New AR's need to know how to effectively communicate to school leadership, parent and community partners which are all different audiences. For new people who lack those schools, there is always a great deal of miscommunication and conflict in the first few months.
The AR works with many groups who may have different needs and desired outcomes; their AM, school leadership, parents, community. They need to be able to understand those needs and move from one to another.
Effective communication skills are key for building a rapport with our customers (schools teams, parents, community partners). It can make or break the closing of the sale.
Given the complexity of the role and working between schools, home and various locations through the community, strong communication skills are essential in this role.
An AR needs to be able to communicate with diverse populations both at the school, prospective families (customers), their admissions team and other service center departments. Most importantly are our potential customers. ARs need to be able to sell their school.

Latest values:

Events are the advertisement for the school
This is a huge factor in the role as AR's event plan for onsite/offsite events all the time. It's important to understand the planning process and executing it to its fullest.This is a large part of the onboarding process for parents.
This is the second part of building rapport. It is so easy for parents to be confused with the process from applied to accepted to registered to enrolled. Then our systems can also confuse parents, especially those "at risk" demographics that may not be tech savvy. We have to break down these complex systems into user friendly bite-size bits of information. We also need to know how to communicate delicate topics in a sensitive way.
Good communication skills, including grammar and presentation, makes a positive impact on our customers and garners an strong reputation in the community. In my opinion, it is also directly related to Building Rapport.
For the same reasons as mentioned previously. Being able to build a rapport with the different audiences helps to get the buy in they need.
The AR position is unique to their school and in some cases their geographic area. Their "boss" isn't always able to provide guideance and strategy and they need to be able to understand what is going on in their communitites to be able to make strategic plans.
AR's will have a connection and understading to influence their community partners to refer their students to our schools; Parents will choose our school as their education choice for their child; Working with school teams will positive, easier to motivate and communication is more clear.
So much of this role relies on the ability to build and foster strong relationships amongst steakholders: school leadership, community members, team members, families, etc.
Building relationships with their department, stakeholders within the school and NHA as well as their customer pool.

Latest values:

Summer. We are so busy with events, community, and multiple things going on at once
Summer season-busy and fast pacing with on-site, off-site, large events, community grassroots, onboarding, communication with phone calls, texts, and tours. Most parents apply during this season, applications are at its highest peak.
Holistically, summer is generally the hardest time to onboard a new AR. For my region in particular, post-lottery to count day are the busiest times. We are busy onboarding families, hosting events to invite those families to, calling, texting, sending things in the mail... this time of year it is difficult to take time to explain our tools when we also need the ARs to plan and host events (and all that comes with that). It's also difficult for new ARs to understand the school culture and get to know the school staff during the summer when most of the staff is out for summer vacation.
For my areas its the beginning of summer, because it falls at the beginning of a heavy event season.
In the summer because it is busy with events and onboarding new families. New AR's need to be able to jump in with both feet and that's why communication skills are so important. Other things can be taught later down the line.
July - September. No matter what type of school (early, mixed, or late applying), summer is the busiest time when things have to be done immediately.
July-Vacation of school teams, Unable to showcase the school in action Beginning of August-Vacation of school teams, Unable to showcase the school in action, End of August-Execution of larger events for new and current students September-School Teams are in action and problem-solving. There is limited time for engagement.
Late summer/early fall: with all of the activities and moving parts surrounding app generation and erosion migitagion at the end of the summer and begining of the school year, it is a difficult time to bring someone new on.
Summer. It's our busy season as far as sealing the deal with potential families. Lots of events, activities and outreach on top of the challenges with school leadership vacation and an empty school building

Latest values:

CRM training
Onboarding them in the first few weeks with their schools, community partners, and getting them familiar with their area.
Depends on the AR - for some that are less tech savvy, it is super time consuming to explain all our systems, myNHA, CRM, Oracle, OneNote, Outlook, how to pull reports so they know who to contact, etc. For others it's teaching them to soft skills to interact with the school teams. They seem to understand "customer service" when interacting with parents but can be a different story when dealing with school teams who are reluctant to help or all too willing to provide input on how we should do our job.
Relationship building between the AR and their partners, including the school leadership and staff.
Community partner visits and off site events. They don't seem to know how to do that or are scared with being told no.
Because my direct reports are remote, I am often challenged to find the block of time to give them the support that I would like to. We have a lot of people who will provide pieces in this puzzle, but I feel as manager, I should be able to give them one-on-one-time. That said, things that take away from my time to do this--like navigating the NHA system to get resources and permissions for new hires--tend to also be a big drian.
checking all of the boxes for their start and check ins for their understanding.
Ensuring they have been provided and recieved all of the necessary training. It is difficult to follow the current process that is in place in addtion to ensuring they have time to be present at the school to meet and interact with the leadership, attend events and have the time needed to learn about the school.
The secretarial duties. We do a poor job of putting this on an appropriate timeline so trainings and onboarding are synced well and are appropriate in timing.

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Latest values:

We would gain the most effective candidates
With a driven approach maybe it would help talent acquisition to capture, select, and share candidates that are interested in the AR role and are qualified to do the job.
We've been working on this process for a number of years. I do think that hiring and onboarding have a big impact on employee retention. How that employee is onboarded and assimilated into the NHA culture within the first six months is a major factor in if the employee stays long term. But while the first six month is crucial to if they stay for the rest of the year, what happens after onboarding also impacts if an employee stays. We can put processes in place and hire great people, but it won't amount to longevity if there is little follow through. Our problem hasn't been coming up with processes, the problem is implementing and sticking with the plan created.
I believe it will help us attract candidates that are more viable for the positions and we will have to wade through fewer candidates to find the right one. We currently have a process for onboarding but it does need some adjusting to make the position more clearly defined for the new hire.
It will help find good people who are more sales minded or at least interested in sales.
We need to find a process that evens out the factors of when, who, where people are hired--reduce JD's hated "that depends" factor.
It would reduce my time with specific task.
To ensure that everyone is provided with the tools and foundation to be set up to be successful in their role.
We don't have a clearly defined path for onboarding. Each manager does it differently based on strength of the coordinator/onboarding point of contacts. From a new hire's perspective I am sure it looks unbalanced and messy. The manager is often doing damage control because trainings are out of order, trainings are omitted. The focus should be on selling the school and the secretarial trainings can come later.