Five Tips To Help Improve Your Recruitment Process

The recent teacher strikes organised by the National Education Union (NEU) and others have highlighted the struggle schools are currently facing with the widespread shortage of teachers and teaching staff, even with the brief surge in registrations for teacher training courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sadly it appears that this problem is not going to go away soon.

There are two main points for the issue, the first being that the Department for Education has struggled to meet the recruitment targets in secondary schools in most of the years since the 2011/12 academic year, and retention rates for teachers are low, with 22 per cent of teachers aged 50 and younger expressing a desire to leave the profession within the next five years.

This has led to the recruitment of teachers becoming very competitive, and in the current market, teachers will effectively have the pick of the best jobs. So how can you make your institution more attractive to teachers when recruiting?

While it may seem like an uphill struggle to recruit and train good teachers and teaching staff, it is not an impossibly Sisyphean task. When taking a look at your recruitment processes, there are some ways in which your school can improve its processes and find the best talent.

Let’s have a look at five top tips to help your recruitment process.

1. Effective marketing is vital

When it comes to recruitment, investing in marketing might not initially be the first thing to come to mind, as many schools and trusts do not consider themselves as a business first and foremost. But they provide a service, employ staff, and the students are their customers, so just like a ‘regular’ business, schools need to be able to effectively market themselves.

However, this does not necessarily mean you need to devise and launch a brand-new sparkling social media campaign on all the popular platforms, simply ensure that your website is up to date, and provides the ‘shop window’ where both prospective parents and potential future employees will look to check out your institution and find out more about you.

Talk to parents, existing staff, and students to determine what it is they love about your school, working at the school, or learning at the school, and utilise this information to highlight the key benefits across your website, social media channels, and promotional brochures.

Why not consider filming these interviews and conversations so they can be included as video testimonials, with friendly faces bringing authenticity? Revise the copy on your website, brochures, and job descriptions to make sure it includes inclusive language, and be honest and transparent about the school’s culture and working environment.

2. Clearly define the job roles and the expectations of candidates

When refreshing your school’s recruitment processes, one of the simplest improvements that you can make is to ensure that the job descriptions are concise and that it is transparent with candidates about the job description.

This means that in the ‘required skills’ sections of the job description, for example, only include the skills that are considered vital for the role. A long list of unnecessary, but desired requirements could inevitably deter some quite excellent candidates.

The job description should give a candidate a realistic view of what a typical teaching day in the role would be like, so try not to minimise or underplay the responsibilities, nor exaggerate any opportunities.

To help finesse and create a fair and accurate description, why not interview any outgoing teaching staff to better understand how their roles developed, how their teaching style worked with the school’s working culture, and what skills they gained during their time in the role?

3. Develop an attractive and comprehensive professional development programme

In any job, staff are looking for ways to learn and develop their roles, and teachers and teaching staff are no different. The key to talent retention in the recruitment process is to ensure you highlight opportunities for job development in vacancy adverts and interviews.

The provision of bursaries for courses will be seen as very attractive for candidates, as many teachers say that a lack of money is a key factor in taking a new job. If you can demonstrate to prospective new hires that there are opportunities and that they will be supported financially while developing new skills is a great way to stand above the competition and attract motivated talent.

A recent study into the effectiveness of the development of skills and team leadership in UK schools revealed that staff felt highly valued in organisations that strongly committed to professional development, and encouraged them to go the extra mile.

A professional development programme is attractive to prospective teachers as well as helping keep existing teachers and teaching staff engaged.

Ensure that these opportunities are communicated clearly and effectively in job adverts, and remember to highlight them all throughout the recruitment process.

4. Fairness and transparency

Poor salaries for teachers have been an issue for many years, and a major hurdle to overcome when seeking out new staff and retaining current teaching staff. Taking inflation into account, the average salary for teachers is approximately 8 per cent below the 2010/11 rate.

It is important to be transparent and honest about how much staff are paid. It is not required in the UK to be transparent about salary - when companies are open about how much team members and managers are paid - but it is an effective and impactful way to build trust with staff.

Transparency is an integral part of Diversity and Inclusion Statements (DEI), just as much as being honest about progress or points of weakness demonstrates you are doing more than a box-ticking exercise, and you do care about improving, and developing a more equal and healthy workplace.

As well as salary transparency. Make sure you are open to questions about your workplace demographics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and your commitment to DEI.

5. Communication and onboarding

Following marketing, job descriptions, and DEI initiatives, the last hurdle is setting up new employees with a clear and comprehensive onboarding approach. You need an effective onboarding process to help ease new teachers into their roles and ensure they feel supported and welcome.

Effective onboarding will help boost employee engagement, as studies have demonstrated that new hire retention is improved by 82 per cent and a 70 per cent improvement in productivity in schools with a considered and comprehensive onboarding process.

Onboarding should start well before the new hires’ first day, and in the weeks leading up to their start date, ensure they have all the information they need so that they can start feeling prepared for their first day.

Include regular information about what to expect, as well as information about any school events in their first few weeks that they may want to consider attending. There are also more practical steps that can be taken, such as ensuring they have all the equipment they will need.

Regularly communicate with new employees to inform them of what is expected within their first few months, how they will be assessed, and the support that will be available to them. If they are clear about what is expected, they will be much more likely to stay.

Improve your school’s recruitment processes with Glove

Significantly changing your school’s recruitment processes can be a huge task, so if you’re looking for help and solutions that fit like a Glove, come and talk to us today!