When your aim is to hire the best teachers in the country, timing is everything. Even if you spend time and care to create an engaging recruitment process for applicants, if it doesn’t move fast enough, you’ll lose candidates to schools that progress them quicker.
And if missing out on the best candidates isn’t enough to convince you, have you thought about what a slow hiring process will be doing to your school’s finances too? The longer your process drags on, the more money you’ll be draining on supply teachers and advertising roles that could be filled already.
There’s no denying that a school hiring process can be complex and often involves constraints that are unavoidable. But there are also things you can do to streamline your school’s recruitment to save money and hire the best teachers first - here are some ideas.
You might be thinking that job ads have little to do with speeding up the hiring process, but in practice, they can have a big impact. And the reason for this is that a good teacher job advert should work like a pre-screening tool for candidates. From reading your job description, candidates should be able to decide quickly if the role is right for them and self-disqualify from the process if they’re not a fit.
You might be tempted to keep your job descriptions a little generic to pull in as much interest to your roles as possible. This is a tactic a lot of employers use when recruiting during labour shortages; cast your net as wide as possible to increase the chances of the perfect catch.
But in reality, vague job descriptions massively slow the hiring process down. If you’re not giving job seekers clear and accurate information, you’ll end up with a lot of unsuitable applications to sift through and manually disqualify. This means you’ll take a lot longer to decide on your shortlist. By the time you do eventually ask them in for interview, it’s likely they’ve already been hired by a school with a faster hiring process.
Clear job descriptions lead to quality, right-fit candidates to progress through your hiring pipeline. They also mean fewer disappointed applicants who have spent time applying for a role they were never right for in the first place.
So while you should certainly continue promoting your jobs offline as well as online, pushing applicants towards your career site andoffering an online application formwill make the hiring process better for everyone involved. The sooner you can get your applications processed, the sooner you can decide on your shortlist and invite candidates to interview.
Digitising you school’s applications doesn’t just speed up the hiring process for your school either. It speeds up the application process for candidates too, resulting in a higher completion rate. Going digital also means you can support mobile applications and provide candidates with a ‘fast apply’ option that speeds up the process for everyone.
Sometimes, it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is slowing your hiring process down. But by tracking your recruitment metrics through education recruitment software, you’ll be able to easily identify where the bumps and bottlenecks are in the hiring journey so you can directly address them.
For example, can you see from your recruitment analytics that your live vacancies are getting thousands of views but few applications? In this case, you know the problem lies in your teacher job advert.
Or can you see that your offer-to-acceptance ratio is low? It’s likely you’re taking too long to make final decisions about successful candidates. In this case, are there too many stakeholders involved in the decision-making process? Or could accelerate feedback by reviewing candidates directly within your recruitment software rather than relying on meetings, emails or calls to make final decisions?
There are a whole load of different recruitment metrics that could help you save time and costs in your hiring process.
Recruiting from talent pools means reaching into your existing database of engaged candidates who have previously shown interest in working for your school.
This speeds up the hiring process substantially for a number of reasons. Some candidates in your talent pool will have already been interviewed before, meaning you can reduce the interview process to just video call. You might already have references for others. And if you have enough quality candidates in that particular talent pool, you might even be able to skip the stage of advertising your roles entirely, which will save a large chunk of the cost too.
Time and availability constraints can be a major barrier when you’re trying to schedule interviews with teachers. How do you find a time that suits everyone when all your best candidates are teaching classes during the times you want to hold interviews?
It also doesn’t help that some schools require a number of in-person interviews before making a final decision. While this might’ve worked for your school in the past, it’s just not sustainable in the current job market. You’ll be hard pushed to get any teachers to agree to (or have the time for) more than one in-person interview, so think about the impact your requirements might be having on your ability to hire the right people.
One in-person interview per hire should be more than adequate, and any additional interview stages should be held as a video call. It’s also worth considering if you can accommodate evening or weekend interviews, as this will mean you can get candidates in the interview chair faster.
When you’re hiring in a candidate-short education market, you need to think more like a recruiter than a teaching professional. Adopting these tactics will speed up your hiring process, saving you resources and helping you reach the best teachers before another school does.
To learn more about how School Recruiter's recruitment technology can support you in speeding up your hiring process, request a demo today.