Inbound recruitment – get top teaching talent to come to you!
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of reaching out to top teaching talent, they came to you instead? This is exactly what inbound recruitment is; the technique involves using simple tools, including your school recruitment software, to boost your school’s brand recognition and candidate engagement.
Now, it’s worth noting, this approach doesn’t mean you can sit back and wait for those enquiries to roll in. It demands just as much work and effort as any other recruitment strategy – but the tweak to your acquisition methods could save you tens of thousands of pounds as you reduce your dependency on agencies and supply staff.
Get social
When identifying job-seekers, you are already competing with other schools. Yet, using social network sites could prove useful in seeking and approaching potential candidates.
Social media can be used to search keywords or #hashtags relating to the skills required for the roles you’re advertising. Post relevant hashtags to get your school on to the Twitter feeds of the people you’re trying to target.
Social media can also be useful for identifying specific people. For instance, if you identify a suitable candidate on LinkedIn, you could view their Facebook and Twitter profiles without having to contact them directly. This will give you an idea of whether they’d be interested in the role – if you think they’re a good fit, you could always get in touch via that social platform.
More generally, social media can be an incredibly powerful and effective tool in attracting, retaining and recruiting top teaching talent. In this blog we wrote last year, we discussed five unique ways schools can use social media.
Be where they search
Intelligent advertising is an effective way of engaging candidates before they get to you – even if they haven’t yet realised they want a new job!
Focusing on demographics will ensure your school or ads don’t get lost in all the noise. When you identify your target group, you can then use intelligent advertising to place your ads on sites where potential candidates are most likely to be.
Eteach, for instance, is the world’s top specialist education job board. It’s created by teachers, for teachers, with a whopping 1.8 million active and passive candidates signed up. So, in our humble opinion, intelligent advertising is advertising with Eteach!
Host a school open day
This is bound to attract candidates with a genuine interest in working for your school. After all, those who turn up have effectively self-selected themselves for candidacy.
Hosting a school open day will enable you to have informal conversations with possible candidates to see if they have what you’re looking for. Likewise, it’ll give them a chance to suss out your school and imagine working for you.
An open day gives you an opportunity to promote your school, show off all your great work and help build your school as an employer of choice. Use the opportunity to broadcast an informative invitation image or video on social media and invite people to contact you.
Get employees involved
Nowadays, we’re more likely to trust peer recommendations than we are company advertising. This is the same when it comes to jobs – a candidate may read how great your school is on your website, but they’re more likely to trust this statement if it comes from someone who works there.
So, naturally, getting employees to become advocates of your school and share job ads can be a great way of reaching new candidates. Consider that the average social media member has 800 connections. The ‘reach’ of the announcement or advert you’re posting can be enormous, if you can only harness your school community to share it.
Think of ways to inspire and maybe even incentivise staff for helping you to recruit. The best way of doing this, of course, is to create a positive and inclusive workplace culture in which your staff can thrive.
If you want to find out more about our job board or innovative recruitment software, we’d love to chat. Book a call back here.