Hiring great teachers is no easy feat. A good hiring process in education takes time, money and resources to do it justice – all of which are precious. And sometimes, no matter how much work you put in, you still can’t seem to attract the right people to your roles.
If you’re in a situation right now where you’re struggling to find the teachers you need, it’s almost always going to be down to problems within your hiring process. But the good news is, if you spend some time identifying and fixing these issues, you could see a real positive impact on your hiring results.
Here are a few common problems that occur in the education recruitment process, and most importantly - what you can do to fix them.
1. Your job adverts don’t sell the job effectively
The entire education sector is amid a teacher shortage right now, and this means job boards are overflowing with vacancies. What are you doing to ensure your job adverts stand out and appeal to the people you’re looking to recruit?
Finding a job ad formula that attracts the right people to your roles takes more consideration than you might think. One of the most common mistakes colleges make when creating job ads is that they focus too much on what they’re looking for and not what’s in it for the candidate.
In a candidate-short market, your job ads should be something of a sales pitch, highlighting all the benefits that come with teaching at your college rather than focusing on the qualifications you’re looking for in your next hire.
Using too much internal jargon is also an easy trap to fall into and this creates a situation where you alienate perfectly qualified candidates as they will struggle to visualise themselves in the job.
To ensure you’re always creating job ads that are going to attract and engage the right candidates, use a pre-defined job ad template that guides you to tick all the right boxes.
2. Your job requirements are too rigid
A common misconception in hiring is that being more rigid with your job requirements will make the recruitment process more efficient. The idea is, if you’re more specific about essential qualifications and skills in your job descriptions, this will make the candidate selection process less time-consuming because you’ll only hear from the most qualified applicants.
But in practice, narrowing your candidate pool too heavily only results in more work. You lose out on perfectly qualified teachers who won’t complete the application because they don’t tick each and every box. And the result? You spend time and money all over again to promote your job adverts more widely to find the candidates you need.
So, take a close look at your job adverts: could you perhaps be confusing some must-have requirements with good-to-haves in your job descriptions? Allowing your talent pools to widen a little will work to your benefit in the current job market.
3. Your job application is too long
You might believe your job application process is easy and straightforward, but do teachers agree?
Research has shown that while 70% of employers believe their job applications should take less than an hour to complete, candidates say it’s more like 3-4 hours. And if it looks like a job application is going to take too long, 73% of candidates will abandon the task within 15 minutes.
If you’re seeing lots of views of your job adverts but few conversions, it’s likely the length or complexity of your application is losing you valuable teacher talent.
For example, are you asking for too much information at this initial stage of the process? Is there anything you could realistically leave out until the interview stage? And are you working with an education job board that offers a ‘Fast Apply’ option to candidates?
Fast Apply is a job board feature that’s crucial to maximising your conversions as it means candidates only need to apply to jobs once through the job board and all information is filtered straight through to your candidates’ CRM.
If a candidate has to fill in their details on a job board registration form only to be asked to fill them out all over again on your career site, this will naturally result in unnecessary drop-offs.
There are two ways of identifying if you have issues with your application process, and it’s a good idea to test both for every job you advertise. First, take a look at your recruitment analytics to see if there’s a notable drop-off at application stage and secondly, apply to your own jobs. It’s amazing what can arise when you put yourself in teachers’ shoes to see what the candidate experience is really like.
4. Your applications aren’t mobile friendly
Perhaps you think applying for a teaching job on a mobile phone would be lazy or unprofessional. But it may surprise you to hear that mobile job applications overtook desktop applications back in 2020 – this is just reality nowadays!
Mobile job applications aren’t just for young candidates either. Research has shown that applying for jobs on smartphones is most popular amongst the 35-44 years age bracket.
So, if your job application process isn’t entirely mobile-optimized, you’ll be losing great candidates. There’s nothing more frustrating for a candidate than spending time filling out an application only to find the ‘submit’ button isn’t clickable because the page isn’t optimized for smartphone screens.
So again, take the time to test out your job ads by clicking through on a mobile device. And if the job board you’re advertising your roles on isn’t mobile optimized, find one that is.
5. Your hiring process is too slow
The UK has some of the slowest hiring processes in the world, and for public sector roles, hiring can take even longer (up to 54 days). And now consider the fact that the best candidates are off the market within 10 days.
While any recruitment process that involves hiring teachers will naturally take time and requires additional checks along the way, a slower-than-average hiring process will be losing you great talent.
To tackle this, the best approach would be to map out all the stages of your hiring process and consider if there are any you could realistically do without. For example, could you reduce the number of interviews from 3 to 2? Holding virtual interviews instead of in person can also speed up the hiring process substantially as online interviews are much more flexible for candidates juggling busy teaching schedules.
The good news is, there’s lots of recruitment technology out there that’s built to create clarity within your hiring process so you can streamline hiring wherever possible. A good ATS (applicant tracking system) will give you full transparency on every stage of your process, where your candidates are within it, and help you identify any potential bottlenecks in the process. Any efforts to reduce time-to-hire will have a huge impact on your candidate conversion rates.
6. Your communication isn’t up to scratch
Naturally, we all have blind spots when it comes to assessing our own communication. But this is always a point worth self-assessing because it can have such a big impact on whether or not you’re able to keep candidates engaged with your process.
If you’re not keeping in touch with candidates frequently, you will quickly lose them to another college – and the hardest part is, you won’t even notice until it’s too late. But recruiting teachers involves spinning a lot of plates, and you’re only human!
Keeping in touch with candidates regularly is another area that your recruitment technology should be able to support you with. For example, every time a candidate application comes through, this triggers an automated email response through your ATS, which you can tailor for each vacancy if appropriate. That way, the candidate gets confirmation that you received their application without you having to do a thing.
Communicating with teachers after interviews shouldn’t have to involve creating individual emails to every candidate either - take advantage of pre-written email templates to reduce graft.
7. You don't keep rejected candidates warm
If you move 6 candidates through to interview stage for a position, what do you do with the 5 other teachers that you didn’t offer the job to?
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make when recruiting is that they drop rejected candidates like a hat. It’s important to remember that today’s rejected candidate could be tomorrow’s hire - and this is especially relevant when there’s such a shortage of teachers on the job market.
This is where your talent pools will become extremely valuable. Those 5 teachers you didn’t hire were clearly strong candidates – otherwise they wouldn’t have made it to final interview stage. So, create a talent pool specifically for candidates who were strong enough to reach interview stage and do what you can to keep them warm.
Do this by sending them job alerts, or even reach out to them personally next time you have a vacancy before you go public with the role. Even if the candidate isn’t available for interview this time round, the personal approach will create a lasting impression that could work in your favour in future.
Hiring teachers in the current landscape is never going to be without its challenges. But taking the time to assess your hiring process, identifying bumps in the road and making the necessary changes to smooth them out will make recruitment easier for everyone involved.
If you’d like to learn more about how FEjobs’s recruitment software can streamline your hiring process so you hire better teachers, faster - request a call back here.
Originally published on Eteach.
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.