When you’re recruiting in a teacher hiring crisis, timing is everything. Even if your school is a candidate’s first choice, if you’re taking too long to make them a job offer, they’ll be forced to go with the school that makes an offer in good time. This is why slow hiring cycles mean schools miss out on great teachers every day.
While you can't control teacher shortages, you absolutely can control how quickly you move through your recruitment process. Those employers who keep scooping up your best candidates before you can get them into the classroom aren’t necessarily better schools – they’re just better at moving quickly. And that's where a smart applicant tracking system (ATS) comes into play.
To hire the best teachers in this tough market, you need a streamlined hiring cycle that leverages ATS technology to automate as many of the manual processes that slow the recruitment process down. Shaw Education Trust recently reported that they’ve cut their time-to-hire from 9 weeks to just 22 days just by automating tasks that they were previously handling manually.
Here are five game-changing ways an ATS like Eteach can turn your recruitment process from a months-long marathon into a speedy, well-oiled machine so you never lose a candidate to a slow process again.
1. Automated job broadcasting
If you’re still manually posting your job adverts every time a new vacancy comes up, you’re wasting hours of time that competing schools and trusts are saving through automation.
Manually posting jobs like this is also mind-numbing work. You're logging into education job boards, then your local authority site, then your school website, copying and pasting the same job description over and over. By the time you've finished, you've lost half a day and probably developed RSI from all that clicking.
With the right ATS, you can automatically broadcast your job openings across education job boards, social media media platforms and your careers site in just a few clicks.
This multichannel approach to attracting teachers is essential to school recruitment nowadays for a few reasons. It massively reduces manual work, cuts hours of time out of the attraction stage of the hiring process and ensures you’re always reaching the best possible candidates by advertising your roles across as many different platforms and channels as possible.
By spreading your net wide, you also increase your chances of reaching candidates that no one else is finding – including passive candidates who aren’t actively looking for a new job.
2. Streamlined application process
It’s mindblowing that some schools still continue to make candidates fill out downloadable application forms when applying to teaching roles. Not only does this frustrate candidates and massively slow down the recruitment process – it also makes your organisation look like it’s stuck in the dark ages.
A digitised job application process that’s linked up seamlessly with your ATS can completely transform how (and how quickly) your school recruits teachers virtually overnight.
Suddenly, candidates can fill out job applications in minutes instead of days through Fast Apply features, and recruiters don’t have to waste time sifting through applications and chasing up missing DBS certificates. All job applications and accompanying documentation (qualifications, DBS, references) are fed automatically into the ATS, with no need for chaotic email threads looking for missing information.
And with a system that automatically sends out application acknowledgments and status updates to candidates along the way, this keeps teachers engaged and informed about their progress so they don’t lose interest thinking your recruitment process has come to a standstill.
3. Data-driven talent matching
By centralising all your candidate data in one place, this makes your ATS and candidate database a goldmine for sourcing candidates. Rather than spend time and resources hunting down brand new candidates, what about the excellent, qualified candidates already in your database?
These candidates are in your database for a reason: Maybe they previously applied to one of your roles but missed out on the final interview round, or were referred by a member of staff at a time when you had no open vacancies. Whatever the reason, these candidates are gold dust because they’re already warm – they know your brand and they’ve already shown an interest in working for you.
With a good education-focused ATS, you’ll be able to really capitalise on the candidate data you already hold through tailored talent matching. When you have a new job on, you can create a job-specific talent pool that will use the key information in the job description to scan your candidate database and highlight the best-fit candidates for you to reach out to directly.
And because these candidates already know you, and you already hold candidate profiles containing valuable data on them, you can blitz through the first few stages of the hiring process and get to interview and decision-making stages in record time, cutting weeks off your time-to-hire.
4. Automated reference and compliance checks
Of course, reference and compliance checks are a crucial part of every school recruitment process, but there’s no denying that they do tend to suck up hours of manual admin time.
How often has the process of onboarding a new teacher been delayed because of compliance? You've found your perfect candidate, but now you're waiting three weeks for references from their previous school, their DBS is "in progress," and you're not entirely sure if you have all their safeguarding documentation.
When you have a modern education ATS to support you, you literally never have to think about references or compliance – everything is handled automatically, meaning it always gets done and there’s no room for human error.
DBS tracking keeps you in the loop and reference requests go out automatically with built-in reminder systems for slow responders. Thanks to your ATS, a process that used to add weeks onto your hiring timeline can run automatically in parallel with your interview process so it’s covered early on instead of waiting to start them after you've made an offer.
5. Identify bottlenecks
Every organisation is different, and schools will have different challenges along the way that are slowing their hiring process down.
The beauty of using an ATS to centralise your recruitment process is that you have full visibility on what’s working and what’s not in real time. By tracking your key recruitment metrics and generating reports, you’ll be able to see clearly where there are any potential issues.
For example, if your application and candidate quality numbers are good but your interview acceptance rate is low, this suggests you’re taking too long to review applications and send call-outs for first interviews.
Essentially, it’s about using the data you hold on your recruitment process to learn what isn’t working and iron out any issues so you can speed up time-to-hire over time.
Timing is everything – and speed wins
The best teachers on the market right now have a lot of options. So while you're taking six weeks to move through your hiring process, the school along the road is making offers in two weeks and securing the candidates you were banking on.
Reducing your time-to-hire metric using your ATS has a three-fold impact: It improves the candidate experience, eradicates manual work for hiring teams and ensures you snap up the best candidates on the market before competing schools do.
Schools using modern recruitment technology like SchoolRecruiter and Eteach are consistently beating their competitors to the best candidates because they're offering a better, faster experience.
Get in touch today to see how SchoolRecruiter can transform your hiring process and slash time-to-hire by weeks, not days.
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.
