The recruitment process for hiring teachers can be complex, and managing it with limited resources only makes it harder. And with teachers being in such short supply, recruitment is one of the biggest challenges schools in the UK are facing at the moment.
But the good news is, technology can help. Recruitment software has evolved so much in the last few years that there’s almost no stage of the hiring process that can’t be automated or streamlined in an impactful way. And if you’re not using this kind of software right now, you’ll almost certainly be losing great candidates to the schools that do.
Here are just some recruitment technology features that are designed to streamline your recruitment process so you reach and hire the best teachers first.
Creating job adverts for teaching roles can be hugely time-consuming – especially when you’re creating them from scratch. It takes time to create stand-out job adverts that great teachers will want to apply to.
If you’re using recruitment software that’s designed with the education sector in mind, job ad templates for teaching roles should come as part of the package. These will be SEO-friendly job ad templates that cover all the basics so you can focus on adding the specifics of the role and anything else you think will help your advert stand out to candidates.
Using job ad templates will save you so much time and effort that you’ll be able to publish multiple vacancies in one day instead of pouring all your energy into one ad.
When you’re advertising a new vacancy at your school, you’ll want to broadcast it as far and wide as possible to increase the likelihood of it reaching the screens of all the best candidates.
But posting job adverts across multiple job boards can be an arduous task. First you need to log into each job board, or social media account, individually and repeat the same process of crafting the perfect post on each platform. Even if you just want to re-post an existing job ad that hasn’t been filled yet, you still need to log in to each job board and repeat the process all over again. But there’s no reason to handle this process manually anymore.
With the right recruitment technology, you can easily perform this task en masse, saving you hours of manual work. Once you create a job advert within your recruitment tech, you can use the job board broadcasting feature to publish the advert to multiple job boards all at once. In just a few clicks, you can post your job add across all the relevant marketing channels without even leaving the portal.
>Online applications aren’t just about making it easier for candidates to apply to your roles (although, as we’re dealing with a teacher shortage, that’s a big part of it). Making your teacher job applications digital is also about making it easier for you and your school to manage the applications you receive too.
By filtering all applications through an online location, this keeps everything centralised so you can manage them all in one place. Whether a candidate applies on your school’s career site or through one of the many job boards you posted your advert on, the application will filter through to your Client Portal, where you can review and decide what to do next with that candidate.
If you’re not already familiar with the concept of talent pools, they’re digital ‘pools’ or databases of candidates you can easily tap into when a relevant vacancy comes up.
The idea is that you slowly and consistently build up a pool for different types of roles (maths teachers or classroom assistants, for example). Your school talent pool will contain a backlog of great candidates, some you’ve already been in touch with, but were never hired and others who have expressed an interested in working at your school. Perhaps they made it to the interview stage for another role but were unsuccessful, or they applied for a vacancy but were scooped up by another school before you got to them.
When a new vacancy comes up at your school, you can send out personalised communication to all those relevant candidates in your talent pool with just a few clicks. It’s not unusual for schools to pull together an entire interview shortlist using talent pools to tap into the passive candidate market – whilst their job advert attracts new and active talent.
As much as 75% of candidates say they never hear back from an employer after submitting an application for a role. But as we all know, when resources are tight, replying to every single candidate at every stage of the process is impossible.
With the right tech, you can use built-in best practice templates to send out to candidates when they reach a certain stage of the recruitment pipeline. Moving a candidate from ‘Applied’ to ‘Disqualified’? Create and save an email template to send to the candidate – you can even personalise it based on the information already on their profile.
Good references are a crucial part of hiring for any education role. But requesting, gathering and keeping track of references for multiple candidates at once takes a lot of time and coordination.
As School Recruiter's applicant tracking software is specifically designed to support education recruitment, automating the reference process is a primary feature. When you’re progressing a successful candidate to the next stage of your hiring process, requesting references from their previous employers is just a matter of a few clicks. Not only this but replies from references also feed straight into the candidate’s profile, so no documentation ever falls through the cracks.
Good communication is key to keeping your hiring process efficient. How many times have you lost out on a great candidate because an email got lost in someone’s inbox, or it took too long to confirm an interview slot that worked for everyone on the panel?
Most good recruitment technology will have collaborative hiring tools at the core of what they do. Anything that makes it easier for hiring teams – whether that’s within one school or across an entire Trust – to keep in touch and share information will streamline the hiring process so you can hire teachers before another school does.
You can share documents, leave comments on candidate profiles and schedule interviews with everyone invited, all from one place.
With all this in mind, it’s hard to think how any school can manage their hiring process without recruitment technology to support them. If you’d like to learn more about how School Recruiter can help you reach and hire the best education candidates with minimum effort, get in touch.