With teacher shortages all across the country and recruitment costs rising every year, UK schools and MATs are constantly under pressure to show they’re getting good return on investment (ROI) at every stage of the recruitment process.
“Which recruitment channels deliver the highest quality candidates at the lowest cost per hire?”
“This job board is generating the most applications, but how many of them are actually converting into long-term hires?”
“Would it be more cost effective to use a specialist education recruitment agency to find us a Head of Science or leave the position vacant for an extra month?”
If you wouldn’t know where to start with answering these questions, you wouldn’t be the only one. A recent study suggests that just 32% of UK businesses actually use their people data to make evidence-based hiring decisions.
But if you’re using an applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage teacher hiring, you’re sitting on a goldmine of people data that puts you at a serious advantage. Proving ROI of your hiring strategy isn’t just for securing budget approval – it also gives you unique insights that help you understand which tactics and platforms are actually getting teachers into classrooms and which ones are draining your resources.
Here are four ways you can use your ATS to clearly prove ROI of your recruitment strategy.
How to use your ATS to prove hiring ROI
1. Enhanced reporting
Modern education ATS platforms like SchoolRecruiter come with a comprehensive data dashboard that automatically calculates and visualises your key recruitment metrics in real time.
By centralising all your recruitment activities (e.g. your job ad broadcasting, applications, interviews and hires) onto one platform, this gives you instant access to reliable data instead of manually compiling numbers from multiple sources (that are often full of errors and inconsistencies) and spending hours adding the data into messy spreadsheets.
Your ATS’s reporting feature can provide insights in a few different ways:
- Automated ROI calculations that factor in all recruitment costs against successful placements. For example, SchoolRecruiter's reporting suite can show you that while some premium job boards might cost more upfront, they deliver candidates who stay in their roles longer – ultimately providing better ROI than cheaper alternatives with higher turnover rates.
- Comparative reporting and hiring trend analysis that benchmark your results against previous periods and against past vacancies. That way, you can see if a role is taking longer to fill or costing more to reach quality applicants, so you can use this information to inform future hiring.
- Custom reporting tailored to your specific needs. Every school or MAT will have different goals and strategies, meaning different metrics will be important to them. Custom reporting allows you to tailor your dashboard and create visual reports purely on the data you want to see so you can dig down into what’s important, fast.
2. Shared visibility of data
Often, resistance from budget holders and decision-makers about spending money on recruitment comes down to lack of visibility. If they can’t see for themselves exactly where resources are being spent and what the return is, why would they be happy to increase your recruitment budget?
It’s a tough market out there, so you need those in charge of releasing funds to understand your challenges and what you need to overcome them.
Through your ATS, you should be able to give decision-makers different levels of visibility access to your hiring data so they have full transparency on the hiring process, progress and results.
Breaking down data silos ensures everyone involved in recruitment can make informed decisions:
- Senior leadership can gain visibility into recruitment performance without asking hiring teams to provide time-consuming reports.
- Budget holders get clear evidence of where recruitment investments are paying off
- Recruiters and hiring managers can see which platforms and tactics are providing the best hires for their departments so they can optimise their strategy based on data.
This shared visibility is particularly helpful if you’re a multi-academy trust hiring for multiple schools at once. Rather than spending time reporting back to hiring departments at schools and building a story around where they need to invest in their recruitment strategy, giving them access to real-time data via the ATS gives them all the visibility they need, whenever they need it.
3. Real-time hiring insights
Traditional recruitment reporting often relies on historical data that's weeks or even months old. Because let’s face it – who has the time to gather hiring data and keep the spreadsheet jungle up to date? Modern ATS platforms like SchoolRecruiter provide real-time insights that enable hiring teams to make proactive decisions about hiring.
For example:
- Live pipeline tracking shows exactly where candidates are in your process and identifies bottlenecks before they impact hiring timelines
- Instant cost-tracking provides up-to-date cost-per-hire calculations as campaigns run. That way, you don’t need to wait a month to realise you’re not getting quality candidates from an expensive job board – you can cut off supply as soon as you see it’s not working out
- Predictive analytics help forecast hiring needs and budget requirements based on historic trends.
Real-time data is particularly valuable for schools facing urgent staffing needs or trusts coordinating recruitment across multiple locations. You can’t afford to wait months to find out a channel you’ve invested your time and energy into isn’t bringing you any return – you need instant insights that allow you to pivot quickly to new strategies based on solid proof.
4. Best-performing sourcing channels
The area where you can make the biggest and fastest impact on your hiring strategy ROI is in monitoring your spend and return on candidate sourcing channels.
A multichannel recruitment strategy – where you proactively source candidates across multiple platforms and channels – is essential to engaging with quality teachers when talent pools are squeezed. But the worst thing you can do is throw your budget blindly at channels while in the dark about which ones are actually bringing results.
By managing all job ad broadcasting and sourcing from within your education recruitment software, your ATS data will clearly tell you which recruitment channels deliver the best results and even help you tailor and optimise your multichannel strategy for particular teaching roles.
With clear data on which channels are bringing candidates that convert to hires, you can use this information to direct more budget toward high-performing sources and reduce spend on underperforming ones. For example, you might discover that your social media ads are generating a good number of applications but few hires, whereas local university partnerships bring less applications but ones that your data tells you almost always convert to interview stage candidates.
Our ATS' enhanced reporting feature can provide all the intelligent data insights mentioned in this article – and more. Get in touch to find out how our market-leading ATS will support you to transform your teacher recruitment with data.
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.
