Schools need only change one thing to revolutionise their lost hours: a switch of mindset from reactive to proactive recruitment.
Attraction: it’s all about the sales funnel
Recruitment needs to start long before the candidate applies for the job; it needs to start before they even know they want a job.
Professional recruitment marketers like agencies and job boards use the model of a ‘sales funnel’ to understand what content a candidate wants, in order to make their next decision.
The idea is to attract new candidates into the top of a funnel, then actively encourage them down towards applying to your job advert.
If you consider the application journey from the candidate’s point of view, the decision to apply to a job comes very late in the process, (after Awareness, Interest and Decision) and marketing experts know a job-hunter won’t even travel down to that decision point unless they have been courted by us for a long time before that (three quarters of the process, in fact).
Attracting and recruiting at schools often sorely lacks any vital nurturing of the candidates who have made an initial enquiry (a visit or call, registration of interest or full application). An interested teacher might get in touch but instead of nourishing their interest with news about the school or updated timescales for the shortlisting, they are often asked to find a printer, print a form onto paper, spend two hours completing it, then send it by post to sit in a pile for three weeks until the advert life has expired. Purely in the interest of minimising any time resource at the school, applications are left until all of the completed forms are in.
It’s up to you to nurture and fuel interest
In recruitment, that gap is called “The black Hole”- where your form enters a pile, or even a basic online portal, but is ever heard from again, not even a message to say you haven’t made the cut. That uncertainty is one of the many reasons that the process of moving between schools is infamously morale-crushing.
As an industry, education is notoriously slow to get off the paper wagon and into electronic applications. This means that schools lack the opportunity to automate at least one or two communications out to a candidate to advise them that their application form has been received, is of value and will be responded to within the week. Schools can use an Application Tracking System (ATS) like School Recruiter to offer easier application (online) and automated responses, as well as plenty of other clever tools that cut enough of a school’s time to end up with net cost savings.
Artificial Intelligence
Naturally, there are some recruitment professional strategies which the average school can’t be expected to replicate, simply because of the cost of the specialist tools. In that situation, it’s time to call in the experts yourself and take advantage of our niche ability.
Artificial Intelligence, for example, is a real factor in the success of marketing which produces tangible results. To be able to respond to a job-seeker who is reading an NQT-specific blog article with more content and job vacancies specific to that user-type, we keep them engaged with our site for longer, and channel them to where we want them to act: the apply now button.
If you would like to take advantage of our niche reach, to draw in more of the teachers who see your recruitment adverts (but who don’t respond), we offer a free, no commitment ‘health check’ of your recruitment processes. We will let you know if you could benefit from an Eteach advertising licence, an ATS or a fully outsourced recruitment service with an onsite consultant of your own.