Recruiting great teachers for schools is never without its challenges. But as anyone who’s involved in hiring for schools will know, it’s harder now than it’s ever been.
The good news is, for almost every recruitment-related obstacle, there’s a way to overcome it. And, more often than not, there’s a recruitment technology feature out there that’s designed to help.
Here are a few of the most common recruitment challenges you’re likely to face as a school, and what you can do to overcome them.
1. Teacher shortages
For over a decade, schools across the UK have been tackling a severe shortage in qualified teachers. In 2022, the government reported that teacher recruitment was down by as much as a fifth. This is of course due to a whole number of reasons – many of which are outside of your control.
But where you can have an impact is increasing your school’s reach to bring in more applications. To pull in more teacher job applications during a talent shortage, you need to spread the message of your school’s vacancies as far and wide as possible.
This involves publishing your job ads across multiple different job boards and social media platforms. And if you’re worried about this taking too much time, a good recruitment software package will come with a job board multi-posting feature that allows you to post across multiple channels from one platform. This gives you maximum visibility with just a few clicks.
2. Too many applications from wrong-fit candidates
Attracting enough teachers to apply for your roles is one thing, but pulling in the right candidates is another. There’s no point in celebrating that you’ve pulled in a high number of applications to your vacancy if none of them are suitable for the role. All this does is create more work for you, as you need to wade through applications to find the candidates you actually want to progress to the next stage.
There are lots of things you can do to attract more of the right candidates to your teaching roles, though. And most of them revolve around creating the best job ads for teachers possible. You need to give candidates enough information about the job that empowers them to self-assess whether they are truly right for the role. If your job ads are too vague, you’ll be wasting their time as much as your own.
Try to always be very clear about your must-haves and nice-to-haves in your job description, and always include information on teacher pay grades too. A candidate might tick all the boxes, but if they’re progressed to interview stage only to find out they’re overqualified for the role, this will reflect badly on your process and prevent them from applying to your vacancies in future.
To ensure you have an application process that only brings in right-fit candidates, use job ad templates in your hiring software. These templates will remind you to include all the important details, so you give candidates the power to self-select.
3. Slow or ineffective hiring processes
A slow or ineffective hiring process can be crippling for schools. Every day that a vacancy remains open and you’re relying on supply teachers will be having a big impact on the school budget. The sooner you can hire permanent staff, the better.
Many schools think teacher shortages are the only thing getting in the way of them finding permanent staff, but this isn’t entirely true. Slow and ineffective recruitment processes have a big impact too. If your hiring process isn’t smooth, this will put many candidates off; if it’s too slow, you’ll more than likely lose the candidate entirely to a school with a better process.
There are all kinds of factors that can contribute to hiring process inefficiencies. Decentralised applications, having too many stages to your hiring process or slow communication between you and the candidate are just a few examples.
To tackle an unfit recruitment process, you first need to understand exactly where your problems lie. Use your recruitment software’s analytics to identify any bottlenecks. This will give you the recruitment metrics you need to learn how and where you can speed up the process.
4. Poor candidate experience
You might think you’re providing a perfectly good experience for your candidates, but unfortunately, the stats suggest a different story. A massive 60% of candidates say they’ve had a negative candidate experience when applying for a role.
There are several things you can do to improve your candidate experience, and they mostly concern improving communication throughout the recruitment process. For example, you should always set expectations from the start, letting the candidate know how and when they’ll hear from you at every stage in the process. If you’ve ever been in the candidate’s shoes, you’ll know just how frustrating it can be to wait around for a call with no indication of what to expect next.
Always try to provide feedback to every candidate who applies. Of course, providing detailed, one-to-one feedback just isn’t possible when you’re hiring with limited resources. But most recruitment software comes with automated email communication and feedback templates that you can send to unsuccessful candidates in your hiring pipeline with just a few clicks. With this sort of technology around, there’s really no excuse for bad candidate communication anymore.
5. Lack of recruitment resources
If you’re in the process of hiring for your school right now, it’s likely that a lack of recruitment resources – in staff and money – is something that’s holding you back.
But the good news is, recruitment technology has advanced so much in recent years that it can do so much of the manual work for you. Here are just a few things Eteach does to help you do more with less manpower:
- Provide job ad templates to speed up the creation process
- Digitise your applications so you can manage them from one place
- Broadcast your vacancies to multiple platforms with just a few clicks
- Automate your candidate communication
- Manage applications, interviews and review candidates all from one easy-view platform.
If you’d like to see how Eteach can handle all of the above processes for you so you can attract and hire great candidates with 70% less admin time, request a demo and a member of the team will be in touch.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.