Without a doubt, attracting the best candidates into your school is tricky. After all, you will be competing with all the other schools in your local area to bring in the best – and the best is what you want for the children within your school. Many teachers are leaving the profession and COVID-19 has taken its toll. We wanted to provide you with some tips on where to begin with attracting the best candidates in your recruitment process.
Firstly, you must think carefully about the teacher you want to bring into your school. This may be the ideal opportunity to consider whether you would like to bring in a direct replacement or to look at something new. Are there skills that you would like to bring into your school to enable you to focus on initiatives, think about your key priorities and the skills/qualifications that will help you to get there.
Where will you advertise the role? Wherever and however you do this, social media can play a huge part in getting your role publicised. Make sure your school story is already out there, who you are, where you are, what you are about. Using social media to promote your school’s initiatives, community work and teaching practices will help people to see that you are forward thinking and current. The more people you are connected with, the more potential candidates will see your vacancy.
Similarly, how is your website looking? Is it up to date, does it include the history of the school and tell its story? Is that coupled with exciting school news, recent testimonials and easy to use links to further information?
You will also need to review your vacancies page. Even if you don’t have any current vacancies, look to have a page on your website with stories from colleagues of what it is like to work within your school, is it a centre of excellence? Are there outstanding working practices within your team that will attract a teacher wanting to develop their own skills? Do you have any flexible working arrangement? Do you have an employee assistance programme? Any additional benefits? If so, ensure these are easy to find on your website and ensure your application form is easy to navigate.
You may be tied to School Teachers Pay and Conditions, but consider allowing portability of salary i.e., if a teacher is on UPS3 in their current school, will they come to you for main scale salary? Salary isn’t everything (but it helps)! Think about how you can harness the additional skills and experience of a UPS teacher into your school. Conversely, do you have a comprehensive support programme to mentor and develop an ECT to enable them to become an outstanding practitioner? If so, promote your professional and personal development opportunities.
It may sound obvious but spend the time to recruit the right person into your school. Getting it wrong can be costly, time consuming and can impact on the children and colleagues.
FACE-Ed provides the perfect platform for virtual recruitment for schools and trusts, improving the efficiency of the recruitment process. From the moment you build your application pack you can publish straight to your website, social media and chosen job boards. Applications are then compiled, employment gaps highlighted and shortlisting is made easy. From within the system you can invite to interview and send off for references. The software tracks the responses and highlights any vetting checks still required in order to complete your Safer Recruitment process. Interview packs can be downloaded in seconds and emails sent to successful and non-successful applicants. The software manages the whole process from vacancy advert to issuing the offer letter.
If you would like to know more about FACE-Ed, our Fusion Applicant Checking software for Education, follow this link to contact us to arrange a suitable time to see how it could help you with both your virtual recruitment and ongoing recruitment processes.
Finally, if you would like further information on how to attract the best candidates, click here to take a look at our recent webinar with FusionHR.
