Schools have been performing admirably against staffing and budget constraints for several years. With the teaching workforce failing to increase at the required rate – 9.9% of teachers left the profession last year, with just 10.1% entering – and spending per pupil being cut in real terms, schools need to address on an individual basis why their experienced and quality teachers are choosing to leave the profession, and the innovations they can embrace.
Eteach’s annual research, consistently yielding opinions from over 3,000 teachers and school leaders, provide a valuable insight into what it is schools can do to adopt a proactive, candidate-centric and modern approach to recruitment.
Stop making it difficult to apply!
Schools still need to bring down some of the barriers within the application process itself. 36% more teachers are now using their mobile phones to look for a job than in 2016 and 45% of Eteach jobseekers are visiting the site via mobile.
As a first step, schools need to allow teachers to search and apply via their phone.
57% of teachers cite long application forms as the most arduous part of the recruitment process. An application of over 5 questions leads to 15% fewer applications, over 30 questions lead to 50% fewer applications. Moving forward, you will be hard-pressed under GDPR to justify asking a great many of the questions on a standard 20-page school application form. An alternate solution is to offer a brief online ‘Expression of Interest’ job advert response then ask for sundries such as NI number after interview stage.
Establish and market your school’s ‘Employer Brand’
Creating a credible digital presence is vital and, as a minimum, schools should have a dedicated career site and an active social media presence to engage and grow an online community. 60% of job-seeking teachers said a dedicated school career site would make them more likely to apply for a role. The information teachers are looking for is evidence of professional development opportunities (53.6%) and a ‘fair workload’ policy (45.6%). Having a school careers site a chance for schools to show teachers exactly how they are aware of and meet their career wants and needs.
Build Talent Pools – for Permanent staff and Supply
Just imagine if, every time a vacancy arose, you had access to a pool of candidates all interested in working at your school? This is exactly what a Talent Pool offers; so much more than a powerful database of candidates, it allows you to build and engage with your own, bespoke community in a far more meaningful way.
If you advertise vacancies in your Talent Pool year-round, you can drive local, interested candidates to sign up with you and literally wait for your call. Every year, it becomes more valuable as the NQTs who might not suit you right now grow into Heads of department. It’s vital that you nurture these candidates as members of your community by communicating with them regularly, reinforcing your enviable brand as employer of choice.
The good news is that all of these tools are included as standard with Eteach, the most powerful and best value recruitment toolkit for schools.
To find out more about what Eteach can do for your recruitment this year, call now on 0845 226 1906 or request a call back.
About the author
Katie Newell
Katie Newell BA(Hons) PGCE is an ex-primary school teacher, Head of Maths, Head of Year five and languages specialist. Katie qualified in Psychology at Liverpool then specialised in Primary Languages for her PGCE at Reading. Katie feels passionately that teachers are the unsung heroes of society; that opening minds to creative timetabling could revolutionise keeping women in teaching, and that a total change to pupil feedback is the key to solving the work life balance issue for the best job in the world.