The single change you need to make to take control of your recruitment for the new academic year, is to approach it with a proactive strategy.
A college that often resorts to costly ‘fire-fighting’ recruitment needs to spend time now (not money) updating their methods.
If you can apply your lower cost options such as online advertising more effectively to cast your net wider, you can get more response out of less advertising spend whilst dramatically cutting your need to fall back on headhunter fees.
So what behaviours can colleges adopt now?
1. Groundwork
Firstly, back up your ‘employer brand’ with a career site. Our candidates tell us that applying for a teaching job often takes an incredible 2 hours. As a result, they will now research colleges and training providers thoroughly before choosing whom to apply to. Adverts must be backed up with information about you elsewhere. Start by creating a career site, separate from your college’s student facing website, dedicated entirely to positioning you as the employer of choice. Our members benefit from a bespoke career site build in our annual licence.
2. Next, establish a social media presence
This is about being visible farther and reminding teachers you’re there. Professional marketers know that recruitment needs to start long before the candidate applies for the job; it needs to start before they even know they want a job, so we nurture the passive candidates. On a monthly basis, around one third of 500,000 further education professionals become ‘active’ and, because we’ve kept in touch, our No.1 Job Board is their first port of call. Celebrate achievements and grow community with your social media profile. Our customers get exposure to our niche following of 7,000 lecturers.
3. The next step is using cheap or free resources to reach out further
A typical advert on our online job board gets seen by around 350 lecturers, yet with social media enhancement, that normally increases to over 800! Firstly, have every member of staff in the college share that vacancy. Gone are the days when you should be ashamed of having vacancies.
4. Start as talent pool
Large employers build a community of people who have already thought ‘I could work there’. Why not use Talent Pooling software or simply create your own manual methods to retain and organise candidate details to consider them for future vacancies? That means previous job adverts double their return: providing you with a free pond of brand advocates from which to fish an already receptive candidate. Candidates can register on your career site year-round.
5. Finally. investigate suppliers who give you more bang for your buck
Using a further education-only job board for your advertising will give you a large but specific audience across the UK. Look for a job board annual licence that gives high value for money – ours includes a bespoke career site for your college and also gives unlimited advertising that includes leadership vacancies.